Sounds a little…crazy

Last week, a video featuring the newly elected Chair of the 1st District GOP, Kandiss Taylor, made its rounds on Twitter. It’s a clip from Ms. Taylor’s podcast in which she discusses her interest in the flat-earth “theory” and her concern that the existence of globes is a plot to brainwash children.

This morning, GOP insiders were treated to the email announcement that former Vice President Mike Pence would no longer be able to attend the upcoming state GOP convention, due to his own upcoming announcement about electoral plans. His slot will be filled by Kari Lake, a former TV news reporter who lost last year’s gubernatorial election in Arizona but does not accept those results, despite losing every court case and legal challenge she brought against them. 

Contesting election results, even if the dispute has been found to be completely baseless, doesn’t seem like it should have much to do with denying very basic physical facts like the shape of the earth. But they’re more connected than one might think. Both require dedication to only accepting information that supports one’s worldview, and the ability to ignore or actively deny anything that might oppose it.

Conspiracy theorists often think of themselves as skeptics for rejecting “mainstream” information and ideas. But in fact, they’re aggressively gullible. They replace widely sourced and verified information with that coming from sources that tell them what they want to hear, even when what they hear is contrary to basic observed evidence. These alternative sources are the only “true” knowledge, and conventional sources are all just part of a plot to hide this true knowledge from the people. (For those who are religious, there are strong parallels with the Gnostic heresies of early Christianity.)

Holding these beliefs isn’t necessarily harmful in most cases, although you probably won’t get very far in a career at NASA or as a science teacher if you think the world is flat. The problem is that an ecosystem of “alternative” theories and beliefs has taken root in the GOP, of which Mses. Taylor and Lake are but two of many examples. Election denial, while by no means limited to the right, is supported by a number of online and social media sources on the right. An ecosystem has grown up around these sources – they tend to have the same sponsors, link to each other, and support each other’s “alternative facts”.

In short, the more one gets drawn into believing in any given conspiracy theory, the more likely one is to eventually believe all of them. When small YouTube channels and Twitter accounts with pictures of cartoon frogs become more trusted sources than the American legal system and basic physics, we no longer have a common reference frame of reality in which to discuss candidates, issues, and policies.

To be clear, disagreeing with a mainstream point of view is not the same thing as believing in a conspiracy theory. There’s a difference between, say, waiting for further research on efficacy before choosing to take a certain vaccine, and believing that said vaccine contains 5G chips to track and brainwash everyone. But too many people who are considered leaders in the GOP have fully crossed that line, either because they’ve been drawn into those beliefs themselves, or because they’re willing to cynically exploit credulous followers for profit or political power.

It’s time to actively reject such “leaders”, and demand that our elected officials and party officers tell the truth, even if it’s a truth (like losing a close election) that we may not want to hear. The alternative is getting left in the electoral dust by Democrats who are merely (very) wrong on policy, while we debate whether the true threat is the lizard people or the Illuminati hiding under the Denver airport.