A recent article in The Conversation, theconversation.com/… points out the ways Trump supporter arguments parallel the methods used by cultists and conspiracy theory followers. Basically, you start with a theory, and instead of trying to falsify it, as you would in a science experiment, you “truthify” it by surrounding it with one-off data points, confirming memes and gaudy, intentionally-distorted, media-like presentations until it becomes a ”false, fake fact” that is mistaken for a fact—so perhaps we can call it a ”fakt”—which could be pronounced like a false fact, a fawkt.
Here, according to are the ways Trump supporters start with opinions and ideas that support their world view, and then, in an act of public ”truthification,” bend the evidence to pretend their arguments are true and produce fakts...and it’s the same way anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, 6000-year-old Earth and flat earthers do.
1. Believing in conspiracy theories;
2. Relying on cherry-picked evidence;
3. Relying on fake experts (and dismissal of actual experts);
4. Committing logical errors;
5. Setting impossible standards for what science should be able to deliver.
I’d add three more expansions of these ideas:
6. Using a single contradictory data point to refute a huge body of evidence. EX., It was cold in Montana in October, therefore global warming can’t exist.
In a statistically significant study, there will be data points that would support a different conclusion. A .05 p study will have around 1 in 20 data points that point toward the opposite conclusion. And even a .001 study would still include 1 out of 1000 data points that could be trotted out to claim that the study’s results were invalid.
7. Referring only to paid media, (can you say Sinclair and Fox News?), that is extensively funded by like-minded churches and institutions, universities with an inherent ideological bias, like George Mason and Liberty, self-serving billionaires and the Russians to crank out distorted media so their arguments have the appearance of being based in fact and reason. And all-the-while:
8. Responding to evidence that refutes your positions as fake news...which allows believers to not have to consider that there might be contradictory data in the real world.