The simplest answer is they were influenced by Trump. Certainly a tiny percentage of these people already believed in conspiracy theories, but the vast majority who came to embrace them are people who followed him and once they decided he was good, honest, heroic, brilliant, and so on, they were tied to their decision.
To be clear, Trump promoted numerous conspiracy theories, was hesitant to denounced groups that embrace conspiracy theories, which to them is a signal of support, and poorly handled numerous opportunities to distance himself, like when people marched in Charlottesville and said “Jews will not replace us!” over and over and over as a chant and Trump said there were fine people on both sides and when he told the Fascist anti-Semitic Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” they took it as an acknowledgement and positive message. The Proud Boys have T Shirts that give the message that “six million was not enough” meaning they wish more Jews were murdered in the holocaust, most people would denounce them more firmly.
He also has lied and pretended to not know who David Duke was despite having denounced Duke years ago at length on an interview and was unwilling to denounce the Q Anon conspiracy theory as he said those people like me.
Trump was very complimentary regarding conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. This signaled millions of people that Trump is on their side as Alex Jones champions the most absurd and outlandish conspiracy theories routinely.
Very often we have a tremendous amount of difficulty in admitting we are wrong. It's very hard to realize that you personally have been fooled and lied to. I was in Scientology for twenty five years and it took years and years and years of being lied to and treated poorly for me to even consider the possibility that I was wrong to support Scientology and Scientology nearly cost me my family and took years away from my life which I could have spent getting an education and career. It takes nearly everything from you and it still is extremely difficult to be aware it might be a bad decision.
Lots of people support either democrats or republicans and never see anything wrong with the people they support, no matter what they do. It is easier to act like you are supporting an all good side against an all evil enemy and this childlike over simplified distortion of reality is the view tens of millions of people hold. When you sit there and spend your whole life thinking that you are all good, your party is all good and you have never done anything wrong it is easy to stick with those beliefs and extremely hard to challenge them.
To be clear, both democrats and republicans as politicians in Congress and the Senate and as governors and presidents have been dishonest. Both parties are part of a fundamentally corrupt and dishonest system that they have very few members who wholeheartedly oppose and expose. The fact that numerous people from both parties accept bribes via lobbying then ignore the well-being of the voters and the desires of the voters and the empty promises they often make and the oaths of office they take is unfortunately not a problem limited exclusively to either party.
You can look at their donor lists and their votes to see who they really serve. The system is rigged so that most of the 435 members of Congress and 100 members of the Senate and many, many judges, especially appellate judges and certainly the president are on the side of Wall Street and large corporations and they never forget that priority. It has been that way at least since the election of Reagan and is unlikely to change, unless something very unusual occurs.
So, the reason that people could fall for the lies of Trump and embrace conspiracy theories is simple - they already fell for the many lies of politicians before him or in some cases religious leaders or conspiracy theorists and when those people encouraged them to believe in Trump or it seemed to fit their past beliefs or political affiliation they just kept going on the same path that they were already on, a path full of lies and empty promises.
To really dig into this topic I give my highest recommendation to the book The Cult of Trump by cult expert Steven Hassan. He describes cults for anyone and digs deep into what smaller groups support Trump and what qualities of a cult leader Trump himself embodies. An excellent resource.
Here is a collection of posts on Trump and his supporters.
- The Cult of Trump part 1 What's a Cult, Really ?
- The Cult of Trump Part 2 Who Owes Whom What ?
- The Cult of Trump Part 3 Thought Reform
- The Cult of Trump 4 Reason and Resistance
- The Cult of Trump 5 Most Likely Scenario
- The Cult of Trump part 6 The Con
- The Cult of Trump part 7 Godwin's Flaw
- The Cult of Trump part 8 Godwin's Flaw 2
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.