The other day, Frank Vyan Walton wrote a terrific diary called, “Everything the GOP believes in is a conspiracy theory.”
- The Obama administration is creating a plot to take everyone’s guns away so that it can impose martial law.
- President Obama has spent the last seven years deliberately weakening the nation, was born in Kenya, does not love America, is a Muslim/terrorist sympathizer, and is the most divisive president in history.
- America has lost its international standing and respect because of Obama.
- Mexicans are pouring across our borders, and most of them are criminals and rapists.
- Climate change is a hoax created by scientists because they want grant money.
And, yada yada yada, I’m really tired today.
I like to refer to these statements as normative beliefs (or, collectively, as Republican fan fiction) rather than “conspiracy theories,” although there is a conspiratorial element which I’ll get to shortly. For starters, these normative beliefs are grounded not in fact or reason but in wishful thinking. They are a starting point for understanding the world and for processing new information, not conclusions reached as a result of observation and study of empirical reality.
The “conspiracy,” then, is reality itself. To those who harbor them, these normative beliefs are unassailable; they are indisputably and self-evidently true. When you want and/or need to believe something badly enough, everything you see, hear and read “proves” it. But more than that, any fact or information that undermines, refutes or challenges such beliefs must and can only be wrong, incomplete, or a deliberate deception. The “conspiracy” is not the beliefs themselves; it’s a conspiracy among “liberals,” “the Left,” the “mainstream media,” the “Democrat party,” whomever, to deceive people into believing that these things aren’t true, that Republican fan fiction is naught but that.
This is not new, but it has intensified and become more explicit and deliberate in recent years.
On April 8, 2011, Republican Senator John Kyl of Arizona famously said, on the floor of the Senate, that abortion is “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” Confronted with the fact that that’s demonstrably false, a grotesque exaggeration of the truth, Senator Kyl’s office defended the remark by saying, even more famously, that it “was not intended to be a factual statement[.]”
Of course, if you have to lie and exaggerate like that to make your point — in this case, that Planned Parenthood does receive federal funding and does perform abortions and you don’t think it should be doing either one — then you really have no point. But the explicit assertion that this was “not intended to be a factual statement,” and therefore was perfectly OK for Kyl to say it as if it were true, may have been a first. It was the beginning of a trend that I think is becoming more and more overt as observable, measurable reality continues to undermine the prejudices and rhetoric of the GOP and its color-war team (to whom I’ll refer hereinafter, for the sake of brevity, as “conservatives”).
It’s obvious why Senator Kyl would say something that he knew was false in order to make a political point: because making that political point is more important than getting the facts right. After all, conservatives “know” that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization, slaughtering babies on our dime and selling baby parts for profit (on video, no less). It stands to “reason,” then, that abortion would make up “well over 90%” of its business.
The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t. Not only that, the fact that it doesn’t undermines all of those things that conservatives “know.” What Kyl was basically saying in making that excuse for himself was that the facts don’t matter, as long as the idea is basically correct and effective. You can’t blame conservatives for believing that abortion is “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does,” because Planned Parenthood does do abortion, and abortion is wrong and must be stopped no matter what percentage it is. You can’t blame conservatives for believing that there’s a video showing Planned Parenthood harvesting baby parts for profit, because that sounds like something Planned Parenthood — at least, the conservative comic-book version — would be doing, video or no video.
This rhetorical tactic, that it’s OK to lie, distort or exaggerate, to substitute wishful thinking for facts in service of a larger narrative, has never been hard to figure out, but more and more lately I’m seeing, reading and hearing conservatives coming right out and saying that that’s exactly what they’re doing.
My new favorite conservative blog, ironically titled “Conservative Reason,” turned me on to this a few months ago, with a post about Kim Davis that purported to answer “liberals’” questions about her and about the conservative position and arguments against gay marriage. The gist of the piece was, essentially, that “liberals” should “give conservatives a break” for saying and believing things about law, public policy and jurisprudence that aren’t true. The author invoked the blog’s “unofficial motto” to excuse a specific misperception:
[S]mall minds discuss facts. Great minds discuss ideas. It’s the idea of SCOTUS’ overreach that’s important here.
Meaning, the Court did not in fact overreach in deciding the Obergefell case, and conservatives probably know that, but they nevertheless are not wrong, cannot be blamed, and should certainly not be criticized, for believing or saying that it did. The idea that it did is more important than the fact that it didn’t.
This came up again in a later post defending and excusing Dr. Ben Carson’s false claims about Chinese forces in Syria. The piece as a whole is perhaps the most stunningly hagiographic defense of dishonesty, ignorance and wishful thinking I’ve ever read, and provides us with this:
For every thing that Ben Carson has gotten wrong, the story isn’t that he got it wrong. The story should be why he thinks what he thinks, and why it will make him a great president.
There is some unintentional irony here, in that “why he thinks what he thinks” very much should be “the story,” but not for the reasons the author infers. At its core is the unassailable and unshakable belief that conservative “ideas” and instincts are inherently, and invariably, correct, and that’s what “the media” should be talking about, not this insignificant, “small mind[ed]” issue of whether or not anything Carson says (or “thinks”) is actually true.
As a result of all this, conservatives — and, yes, many liberals as well — when confronted with facts that don’t validate their normative beliefs, dispute or deny the validity of the former instead of re-examining the latter, and feel entirely justified in doing so. To cite my favorite conservative blog again, this post about Hillary Clinton’s 11-hour Benghazi grilling and this post about the recent minimum-wage increase in Emeryville, CA, are good examples of this phenomenon. In each, the author cannot fathom how the known facts could fail to validate the respective narratives, and concludes that there must be more, hidden, unreported, yet-to-be-discovered information that eventually will. It never occurs to him or her that the absence of facts validating the normative belief might indicate that the normative belief is invalid.
Now, there’s nothing wrong per se with being skeptical of new information that challenges one’s normative beliefs; information that seems, at first blush, to be incorrect, incomplete, distorted, or deceptive. And it never hurts to do a little research, look at the information more closely, find out as much as you can before deciding that it’s the information, not the belief, that’s faulty. But if the facts keep failing to validate the belief, if the “proof” that will do so is always under the next rock around the next corner, then it’s the belief, not the facts, that must be re-examined. You have to be willing and able to do that.
You also have to be able to make connections between facts and what those facts supposedly prove, something I find most people are very, very bad at. Which brings us back to the “conspiracy” element. Frank’s diary touched on this, noting this response from a conservative on the topic of gun control:
Nobody is suggesting that Obama will declare martial law. But we are suggesting, based on Obama’s own words, that he would love to use the power of government to disarm the population[.]
(italics in original; bold emphasis added). “We know it’s not true, but you can’t blame us for believing it, because of Obama’s own words.” As to exactly what “words” the President has used that indicate that he “would love to” do such a thing, I would assume the original writer was silent. I myself have never heard the President say anything that would suggest to any reasonable person that he “would love to” do that. I would be willing to bet that whatever “words” the writer was referring to or thinking of, don’t. In my experience, having conversations like this, the purported evidence never actually matches the conclusion. (On that, it seems, I’m hardly alone...)
Recently a friend on Facebook posted that ubiquitous meme image comparing President Obama’s economic record favorably to that of President Bush. To which a mutual friend, a hard-core right-winger, replied, “The numbers from the left are carefully spun to make them look good, when they are actually NOT.” What the “Obama regime” does, see, is “present negatives as positives” by “taking out the downsides and only presenting the positive portions of the facts.”
As proof of this nefarious conspiracy, our friend introduced this graph from the Kaiser Family Foundation as evidence that, contrary to the aforementioned “spin,” the “uninsured rate of nonelderly adults has actually RISEN.” If you look at the graph, you’ll see the subject rate holding generally steady from 1997-2007, then rising a bit during the Great Recession, then declining from 2010 (when the ACA was passed) to 2012, which was four years ago, and two years before its key provisions (insurance exchanges, Medicaid expansion) went into effect. It also appears that the rate in 2012 — the last year covered by the chart — was the same or slightly lower than it was in 2009, when President Obama took office.
So, while the rate was slightly higher in 2012 than it was in 1997, that graph in no way demonstrates that the “uninsured rate of nonelderly adults has actually RISEN” during Obama’s presidency, let alone as a result thereof; in fact it shows the opposite. Moreover, a more recent graph from KFF shows that the uninsured rate continued to decline from 2012 through the first quarter of 2015, when it fell to 13%.
What, then, is the basis for our friend’s assertion that the “uninsured rate of nonelderly adults has actually RISEN”? So far he has not answered, and I expect he won’t. But why would he assert something that (a.) isn’t true, and (b.) isn’t supported by the evidence he himself presented? Did he not read the first graph carefully enough to assess what it showed (and didn’t show)? Was his reading of the graph compromised by the normative belief, and the importance thereof? Did he not consider doing any further research to find, inter alia, the post-2012 statistics? Did someone give him that assertion and the graph to “back it up” and he just repeated it without bothering to look and find out if the assertion was actually backed up by the graph? Did he assume everyone else would just accept it and not bother to examine it? Or is he just not good at connecting evidence to conclusions, or vice-versa?
I doubt he even knows the answers to these questions. What he knows is that the “numbers from the left are carefully spun to make them look good, when they are actually NOT,” that the “Obama regime” and everyone else “presents negatives as positives” by “taking out the downsides and only presenting the positive portions of the facts.” That reality itself is a conspiracy to make President Obama look good when he is actually very, very bad; to deceive the world into believing that he’s had a successful presidency when he’s actually been the Worst President Ever.
And you can’t blame conservatives for believing that, after all, because Obama something something and The Left something something and The Media something something and political correctness something something.