America is in big trouble. America is headed for a fall. As I type his 124,000 Americans have died as a result of CoronaVirus and 37,000 additional people have been diagnosed today. The rate of infection spread is increasing and growing and it doesn’t look like there’s the political will to shut things down and prevent it growing exponentially. It easy to see that before this is all over another 100k-200k people will die. That’s more than any US War except the Civil War.
But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is why.
Too many Americans won’t listen. Too many Americans are anti-Science, anti-Fact and anti-Reality. They live in an alternate dimension of conspiracy and conjecture. They are deeply, seriously, dangerously deluded.
And they're bringing us all down.
All they have to do is wear a damn mask!
I’ve long believed that before someone can change, they may have to hit rock bottom. Addicts won’t give up their drugs because you tell them too, they have to come to the realization that they need to change on their own. After they’ve gone down as far as they can go. Stubborn people won’t change their mind just from having a little talk, they have to be shown, they have to experience the truth for themselves before they will learn. Sometimes not even then.
We’ve seen recently with the horrible tragedy that is the death of George Floyd how this can function. Watching that man slowly have his life snuffed on a cell phone video changed things. He didn’t fight back. He didn’t struggle. He wasn’t like Trayvon who fought back after he was grabbed. He wasn’t like Tamir or Johnathon Crawford and was carrying a toy gun. He wasn’t like Walter Scott who fought and ran away. He was just laying there, pleading for his dead mother and for his life.
George Floyd was an inflection point. He changed things. The House has just passed a police reform bill in his name, and the Senate is working their way through a couple versions of that bill on their own. They may not be ultimately signed, but there is a least progress and movement whereas before there had only been angry recriminations.
But when it comes to the pandemic, we’ve got a long way to go before we reach that inflection point. Particularly with these people.
Bemoaning uneven individual and state compliance with public health recommendations, top U.S. COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci recently blamed the country’s ineffective pandemic response on an American “anti-science bias.” He called this bias “inconceivable,” because “science is truth.” Fauci compared those discounting the importance of masks and social distancing to “anti-vaxxers” in their “amazing” refusal to listen to science.
[...]
Americans increasingly exist in highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own information universes.
Within segments of the political blogosphere, global warming is dismissed as either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, the science of vaccine safety, fluoridated drinking water and genetically modified foods is distorted or ignored. There is a marked gap in expressed concern over the coronavirus depending on political party affiliation, apparently based in part on partisan disagreements over factual issues like the effectiveness of social distancing or the actual COVID-19 death rate.
It’s not a matter of intelligence or smarts, or simply not being informed. It’s more than that. These people are informed, but they don’t listen.
The interdisciplinary study of this phenomenon has made one thing clear: The failure of various groups to acknowledge the truth about, say, climate change, is not explained by a lack of information about the scientific consensus on the subject.
A 2015 metastudy showed that ideological polarization over the reality of climate change actually increases with respondents’ knowledge of politics, science and/or energy policy. The chances that a conservative is a climate science denier is significantly higher if he or she is college educated. Conservatives scoring highest on tests for cognitive sophistication or quantitative reasoning skills are most susceptible to motivated reasoning about climate science.
Denialism is not just a problem for conservatives. Studies have found liberals are less likely to accept a hypothetical expert consensus on the possibility of safe storage of nuclear waste, or on the effects of concealed-carry gun laws.
It’s not what you know, it’s what you already believe and what confirms that belief.
A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens the worldview of groups with which they identify. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence – that is, we engage in “confirmation bias,” giving credit to expert testimony we like while finding reasons to reject the rest.
Unwelcome information can also threaten in other ways. “System justification” theorists like psychologist John Jost have shown how situations that represent a perceived threat to established systems trigger inflexible thinking. For example, populations experiencing economic distress or an external threat have often turned to authoritarian leaders who promise security and stability.
All of that is how you get people like this:
People like this don’t just show up suddenly, this is the result of a long term determined disinformation campaign. it’s deliberate, It’s planned.
It’s right-wing media.
Although some GOP governors have joined their Democratic counterparts in aggressively promoting social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic — including Maryland’s Larry Hogan and Massachusetts’ Charlie Baker — President Donald Trump and much of the right-wing media, from Fox News to AM talk radio, have failed to take the crisis seriously. And according to Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham, some recent studies offer a damning indictment of right-wing media coverage of the pandemic.
“In recent weeks,” Ingraham explains, “three studies have focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus. Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others. The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’ Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences.”
One of those studies was published by the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, whose chief editor, Irene Pasquetto, told the Times, “We are receiving an incredible number of studies and solid data showing that consuming far-right media and social media content was strongly associated with low concern about the virus at the onset of the pandemic.”
The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review published a study conducted by Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Ingraham says that Albarracin and Jamieson “found that people who got most of their information from mainstream print and broadcast outlets tended to have an accurate assessment of the severity of the pandemic and their risks of infection. But those who relied on conservative sources, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors — such as the belief that taking Vitamin C could prevent infection, that the Chinese government had created the virus, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was exaggerating the pandemic’s threat ‘to damage the Trump presidency.’”
As I said, we’re not talking people out of this. They’re not listening. But very soon they’re going to discover that they’ve been systematically lied to by the media outlets they currently trust. Texas Governor Abbott seems to have reversed course and begun to put the breaks on his re-open plan, Florida Governor DeSantis remains a holdout and refuses to issue a state-wide mask order. At this point, I think most of what they might try to do is going to be too little and too late.
The reconning reckoning is coming. Very soon.