Bits: 2024 election spoilers; Christian nationalist law & order; Menendez

Things that could throw the 2024 election to Trump seem likely to crop up. Maybe prosecution of Trump or a court finding that he is disqualified to run under the 14th Amendment could derail him. At this point, it seems that the election will be close, so it might not take much to tip the outcome one way or the other. 

Wild cards include how effective authoritarian Republican laws to suppress non-Republican votes and to rig state elections will be. A related wild card is the effectiveness of vicious radical right lies and slander propaganda to poison Biden and Democrats generally. 

Another tactic the radical right is using is funding groups that pretend to be something other than Republican, but designed to siphon votes from Biden or dampen enthusiasm for Democratic voters. The AP writes about one such group, No Labels:

A third party signed up 15,000 voters in Arizona 

Democrats worry that’s enough for a Biden spoiler

More than 15,000 people in Arizona have registered to join a new political party floating a possible bipartisan “unity ticket” against Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

While that’s less than the population of each of the state’s 40 largest cities, it’s still a number big enough to tip the presidential election in a critical swing state. And that is alarming people trying to stop Trump from winning the White House again.

The very existence of the No Labels group is fanning Democratic anxiety about Trump’s chances against an incumbent president facing questions about his age and record. While it hasn’t committed to running candidates for president and vice president, No Labels has already secured ballot access in Arizona and 10 other states. Its organizers say they are on track to reach 20 states by the end of this year and all 50 states by Election Day.  

“If they have someone on the ballot who is designed to bring the country together, that clearly draws votes away from Joe Biden and does not draw votes away from Donald Trump,” said Rodd McLeod, a Democratic strategist in Arizona.  

No Labels leaders say they’ll decide after the Super Tuesday primaries in March whether to run a candidate, who would be nominated at a convention in Dallas in April.  

No Labels leaders vehemently deny that they’ll be a spoiler for Trump and say they’ll only proceed if their candidate has a path to victory. But it’s unclear how certain that path will have to be.

Despite the No Labels vehement denial that it would be a spoiler, they have no way to know that and are just making that up. It is ludicrous to think that their candidate would have any path to victory. Money flowing into No Labels comes mostly from Republican donors.

Also a possible spoiler is the Green Party, which siphons more votes from Democrats than the radical right Libertarian Party takes from Republicans. Cornel West is running for the People's Party and he would drain votes from Biden.

Like it or not, there definitely be Republican election subversion laws in effect and probably at least one or two other spoilers in the mix. It's not yet clear how all of that will affect the election.

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The Guardian writes:

Jessica Burgess, a Nebraska mother accused of helping her teenage daughter use pills to end her pregnancy, was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison.

Burgess and her daughter, Celeste Burgess, stand accused of working together to end Celeste Burgess’s pregnancy in April 2022.  

Court documents in the case revealed that Facebook’s parent company Meta supplied police with the private Facebook messages that Celeste and Jessica Burgess had sent one another. 

LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! 

Go Republican Party & Christian nationalism!

Thank you Mark Zuckerberg for maintaining law & order!

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Everybody is reporting about Bob Menendez and his stashes of cash and gold bars. The WaPo wrote in one article:

Menendez on Friday cited having beat a previous indictment, in 2018, and accused prosecutors of having “misrepresented the normal work of a congressional office.”

“On top of that, not content with making false claims against me, they have attacked my wife for the long-standing friendships she had before she and I even met,” Menendez added.  

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) is already calling for Menendez’s resignation, as is the state Democratic Party chairman.

In the near term, Democratic Party rules mean he’ll have to at least temporarily relinquish his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations committee. 

Given how slowly corruption cases move through the courts — Menendez’s last one started more than two years after his indictment — it would seem unlikely this one would be resolved before the state’s June 4 primary and possibly even the November 2024 general election.  

“The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent,” he said, adding: “They wrote these charges as they wanted; the facts are not as presented. Prosecutors did that the last time and look what a trial demonstrates. People should remember that before accepting the prosecutor’s version.”

Once again, as usual, the accused accuses the accusers. The usual list of accusations is in play, e.g., bad motives, no evidence, witch hunt, legal business as usual, lying about the facts and/or whatever else fees right at the moment. That's the norm for modern politicians. Unfortunately the norm also includes the crooks getting off. 

Q: Is it fair to consider an accused politician to be a criminal even if he is acquitted in court or in an impeachment if there is sufficient evidence to reasonably believe that? 

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The AP reports about how radical right Republican politicians in Georgia plan to keep Trump out of court and out of jail:

A judge expressed skepticism Friday at demands to freeze a new Georgia law creating a commission to discipline and remove state prosecutors.

Some Republicans want the new commission to discipline or remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for winning indictments of former President Donald Trump and 18 others.

That’s in part a way to evade demands from some Republicans that lawmakers call themselves into special session to attack Willis. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has rejected both a special session and the notion that Willis has done anything that merits sanctions from the new commission, although he supported the law, saying when he signed it that it would curb “far-left prosecutors” who are “making our communities less safe.” 

A lawyer for the state argued Georgia lawmakers noted the state constitution expressly says lawmakers can pass laws to discipline or remove district attorneys, and said lawmakers can also define a prosecutor’s duties.

Georgia’s law is one in a series of attempts nationwide by Republicans to impose controls on prosecutors they don’t like. Republicans have inveighed against progressive prosecutors after some have brought fewer drug possession cases and sought shorter prison sentences, arguing Democrats are coddling criminals.

Q: Who coddles criminals more, Dems, Repubs, or are both about the same but in different ways (Dems coddle low level criminals and Repubs coddle Republican elites)? In view of their track record of constant, blatant mendacidty, how credible are radical right Repubs to criticize the Dems of anything without a lot of rock solid evidence to back it up?

Regarding the radicalization of the GOP: The John Birch Society

The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandists initiative. -- Joseph Goebbels

If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

CONTEXT

As some people here probably know I was banned from 9 right wing politics sites for speaking inconvenient truth in ~2015-2017 and one in Feb. 2023. Back in the days before the GOP radicalized, I used to have respectful, rational discussions with old-fashioned conservatives who still believed in democracy and that an inconvenient fact was still a fact, not a lie. I thought that ended in ~2005-2006. The old-fashioned conservatives seem to have just melted away. Maybe most were RINO hunted out and banned like me. Maybe some were scared into silence and/or radicalized somehow. I'm not sure what happened, but something did happen. The rise of the JBS makes a lot of sense. 

One observer commented that what I was referring to was the rise of the John Birch Society (JBS) in the GOP. The the JBS took over and hijacked Republican Party elites and leadership, with few Republicans having even a clue about what had happened. It's all the same agenda and talking points from a few very wealthy people. They took over the GOP to use as vehicle for their own authoritarian right wing extremism views. All the that the extremists had to do to pull it off was change their name to the Tea-party and start up a propaganda mill promoted as "think tank" to convince people they're right and a news channel to promote radical authoritarian JBS propaganda.

Joseph Coors and the Koch Brothers father were founders along with heir to Brach candy. Early financial supporters of JBS included Rupert Murdoch and Fred Trump.

The JBS scheme to take power is very clever and effective. Joseph Coors founds the Heritage Foundation to be propaganda mill for JBS agenda's under guise of being a "think tank." The intent was to influence public opinion to accept JBS agenda as truth. Murdoch's Faux News presented and promoted the propaganda as legit and praises Heritage Foundation as something people can trust. Republican politicians who says they supports JBS propaganda gets a campaign donation from the Koch brothers. Maybe the JBS/Tea Party figured they could influence a Presidential race and promote their own candidate. If so, there's the son of Fred Trump, Donald, the JBS could give a platform to and support. 

Eisenhower[1] and even Orwell warned of the dangers of the JBS fascist extremism. It's a political movement by the elites solely to serve the elites at the expense of democracy and the public interest generally. And here we are today with tens of millions of deceived people, arguably unreasonably gullible, helping them destroy democracy and civil liberties.

Vox wrote this in March, 2023:

The fringe group that broke the GOP’s brain — and helped the party win elections

As the historian Matthew Dallek documents in his new book, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the Far Right, the group would go on to grow from a small club of far-right businessmen into a sprawling, nationwide organization that claimed up to 100,000 members across hundreds of state and local chapters. Over time, the John Birch Society would leave its imprint on the Republican Party, pushing it to embrace more hardline positions on anti-communism, white supremacy, isolationism, and nativism.

But according to Dallek, who studies the history of American conservatism at George Washington University, the story of the Birchers’ role in the radicalization of the GOP is a bit more complicated.

“What I’ve tried to do is to draw not too straight a line from the 1950s to today, and to show — as historians try to do — that the radicalization of the GOP was contingent,” Dallek told me when I spoke with him recently. The Birchers’ ideas “were not really ripe in 1970 or [the] ’80s or ’90s, but they became ripe in the past 15 years. They were there for the taking, and as we know, people took them up and ran with them in very powerful ways.”

They didn’t like democracy, and they believed the only way to save the country was through a kind of shock education — through controlling the kinds of texts that kids and college students and other Americans were exposed to — and through direct action: setting up front groups and committees that could attack what they saw as the weak points in the communist line.  

On some issues, the fringe and the Republican establishment aligned, especially on culture war issues. But most of the time, the Birchers and their successors were very frustrated. They loathed Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and some Birchers even said that Ronald Reagan was never to be trusted. On immigration reform, on internationalism, on military interventions, on free trade agreements, on conspiracy theories, and on the degree of explicit racism versus more coded or implicit racism, there were significant fissures.

So even though the fringe was part of the Republican coalition — especially during campaigns — we don’t want to oversell their power historically. The MAGA phenomenon is a more recent development, and I try to explain how our contemporary far right essentially adopted the Birchers’ ideological legacy as an alternative political tradition and eventually took over the Republican Party.  

The Birchers had a slogan that said, “We’re a republic, not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way.” That meant different things to different people, but they were quite opposed to the idea of multiracial democracy. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent comments and tweets about getting a “national divorce” and eviscerating the federal government — that does hark back to this Bircher idea that, “Hey, we’re a republic.”  

So I think that liberals forgot about the far-right opponents of democracy and of civil rights and voting rights. They were a more powerful presence than a lot of people acknowledged for many, many years — but now they’re easier to see.

That puts the timeline for BJS influence taking hold in ~2008. That must have been the radicalization I experienced in what I thought happened in ~2005-2006. Maybe my recollection of the time is off and maybe it was more like 2008-2009. 

It now makes sense why Trump and the other radical right authoritarian elites constantly refer to Democrats and liberals as communist tyrants, and why they dislike and attack democracy. That rhetoric and belief reflects core JBS dogma. It is inherently anti-democracy and civil liberties and pro-plutocracy-autocracy-kleptocracy, probably also significantly pro-Christian theocracy.

Q: Is it a real conspiracy or a crackpot conspiracy theory to think that JBS dogma and its conspiratorial mindset has had, and still has, a significant influence in radicalizing the GOP and in attacking and damaging democracy and civil liberties?

Footnote: 

1. The Financial Times writes:

You do not have to agree with Dallek’s thesis to find his book worth reading. The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, who having retired from his candy-making family business set about saving America from a red takeover. It was named after an American missionary, John Birch, who had been murdered by Chinese communists. Welch had the conspiratorial mindset of all such movement leaders. He thought Dwight Eisenhower, the then Republican president, was a communist agent, attributed the death of the alcoholic Joe McCarthy to foul play, and believed America was run by a cabal at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Intellectual consistency was never the Birchers’ hallmark. Their glue was belief in the hidden hand of plots, cabals and conspiracies against America. Birchers reviled John F Kennedy as another avatar of anti-American “one-worldism”. After JFK was killed in 1963, however, they saw the Warren-appointed inquiry as a cover-up for an alleged communist assassination. 

As is often the case, Welch combined an almost infinitely childish imagination with a ferocious organizing zeal. Bircher chapters were limited to 20 members apiece to ensure secrecy. Meetings were usually held in private homes. In that sense, Welch aped Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik methods. 

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Much of the Birchers’ story is instantly recognizable today. Welch urged members to build from the ground up by taking over school boards. One rallying cry was to give parents the right to veto immoral teaching, including sex education. Parents in Florida, whose governor, Ron DeSantis, has passed the “Don’t Say Gay” law that potentially criminalizes teachers, would find this familiar. Another goal was to abolish civilian oversight of police forces.

Bits: Media bias 1 and 2; Anti-GOP authoritarianism attack ad

Jim Hightower writes about media bias:

Here’s a story about media bias. Not the flagrant, pure propaganda that defines partisan outfits like Fox News, but the daily drip, drip, drip of slanted perspectives and loaded words that lard so many of the reports put out by establishment media outlets.

In particular, when these sources of supposedly “straight journalism” cover labor issues, environmental conflicts, consumer rights, tenant battles and such, they regularly slant their reports with corporate terminology, assumptions and viewpoints. For example, when auto workers launched their momentous national strike last week, so many mainline news stories were subtly-but-surely twisted to cast rich executives and shareholders as voices of reason victimized by union bosses.

Consider the Wall Street Journal’s Friday morning article announcing the UAW’s walkout. The story quickly plunged into an assertion by Ford’s CEO that the union’s leaders “refused to engage in a responsible manner.” In case readers missed this industry talking point, the Journal quoted another Big Three honcho four lines later, mouthing the exact same line. But… was the UAW really irresponsible, and—hello—could it be that the auto CEOs were the irresponsible players? The Journal didn’t inquire about these basic facts.

Then, the WSJ quoted a General Motors PR claim that it had “made an unprecedented offer to the union.” How grand! But “unprecedented” doesn’t mean good or fair. Was it? The paper offers no insight, though it does declare on its own that “a sharp increase in labor costs would come at a bad time.” Really? When would auto bosses and Journal editors consider it to be a good time for workers to get a pay increase? No follow-up to that obvious question.

The Journal also resorted demonizing UAW president Shawn Fain, gratuitously labeling him a “firebrand,” which the dictionary defines as “a person who kindles strife—a troublemaker.” A more honest depiction is that Fain—and the feisty UAW membership—are gutsy champions of economic fairness battling plutocratic greed. The actual troublemakers in this story are the auto chiefs and profiteers, along with their media protectors, who now assert that the autoworkers’ demands are “unsustainable.” The obvious question, as taught in beginning journalism classes, is unsustainable for whom?

Interestingly, while the Journal’s report portrays the autoworkers’ demand for a 40 percent pay hike over the next four years as an irresponsible ask, the paper doesn’t even whisper that the CEOs of this three trillion-dollar industry have recently pocketed 40 percent hikes in their take-home, now amounting to $21 million a year for Ford’s chief, $25 million for Stellantis’ boss, and $29 million for GM’s CEO.

This disparity is not secret information. Our little four-person Hightower Substack uncovered it with just a little digging. Media empires like the Wall Street Journal know the truth of it, too, but they’re in service to the existing hierarchies of power, even willing to abandon basic journalistic ethics to distort an inspiring news story of everyday people striving for a little more economic justice in our world.

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FWIW, a while ago I posted a bit about the Hunter Biden lawsuit that prosecutes him for illegally owning a gun for 18 days. The WSJ reported on it and failed to mention that the gun law was rarely enforced. This violation is so common that it is called "lie and try." Lie and try is when people lie about their illegal drug use when applying for a gun and hope they can get the weapon they want. In 2017-2018 12 people out of at least 13,000 lie and try violators were referred for criminal prosecution of that law, i.e., less than 1 in 1,000. An attorney commenting on this said that Biden would very likely not have been prosecuted if his last name was not Biden.

That is another example of what Hightower was arguing. Rupert Murdoch corrupted and subverted the WSJ, especially the opinion page which now operates as a fulminating authoritarian radical right Republican Party propaganda monstrosity. And that is why my WSJ subscription got dropped a few years after he bought it in 2007. 

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This is what the GOP has degenerated into.

Bits: DJT is a fibber; DJT getting jittery about time in jail; Racist USSC can undermine voting rights

Salon writes about what all of us already know, i.e., DJT is a chronic liar to tells whoppers all the time. The gigantic lie he is spewing now is that he is a "moderate" when it comes to abortion, despite him being the one responsible for getting rid of nationwide abortion rights:   

Trump is lying about his "moderate" abortion stance — he will ban it nationwide

Trump lies constantly, and history shows he and the GOP will repay evangelicals with a national abortion ban

This should be obvious, and yet, somehow, many in the press are being fooled by Trump's latest public posture about abortion, even though it's transparently dishonest. During his recent NBC News interview with Kristen Welker, Trump tried to strike a "moderate" pose on abortion. Referring to what the press misleadingly calls a "six-week" ban (it's really a two-week ban) on abortion in Florida, Trump said it was "a terrible mistake" for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to sign the draconian legislation.  

"We're going to agree to a number of weeks or months or however you want to define it," he said, boldly claiming, "Both sides will come together. And for the first time in 52 years, you'll have an issue that we can put behind us."  

The pomposity of that statement should have been a reminder that Trump should be assumed to be lying about his abortion position, just as he lies about most things. And yet, much of the press took his statements at face value, even going so far as to report that he had angered anti-choice activists, which of course, only helps bolster Trump's false claims of moderation.

Once again, the cluelessness and/or subversion-complicity of most of the MSM is on display. The MSM is betraying us to deeply corrupt radical right authoritarianism. At least this reporter for Salon, Amanda Marcotte, sees and speaks actual truth.

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Rolling Stone reporting suggests that DJT is getting a bit nervous about a possible taxpayer paid vacation in prison:

IN THE PAST several months, Donald Trump has had a burning question for some of his confidants and attorneys: Would the authorities make him wear “one of those jumpsuits” in prison?

As the criminal cases against him have piled up, the former president and 2024 GOP frontrunner has wondered aloud in recent months about what life would be like if he’s convicted, and if appeals fail. While Trump publicly professes confidence [lying to the public, as usual], privately, three sources familiar with his comments say, he’s been asking lawyers and other people close to him what a prison sentence would look like for a former American president.  

Would he be sent to a “club fed” style prison — a place that’s relatively comfortable, as far these things go — or a “bad” prison? Would he serve out a sentence in a plush home confinement?

One can only hope for a “bad” prison, all appeals failed and no pardon.

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Radical right authoritarian Republican USSC 

continues attacks on voting rights and free and fair elections 

The USSC (US Supreme Court) is going to hear for the 2nd time a lawsuit about an illegal districting map in Alabama. The state lost in federal courts, including the USSC, and was ordered for the 2nd time to draw a 2nd voting district that would give black voters a chance to elect a black politician. The state legislature redrew the map, but it still contained only one district where a black could be elected. The case is now back to the USSC for a second hearing on the 2nd map.

Slate describes how the authoritarian radical right Republican USSC can now sanctify and bless the Alabama map with just one black district:

In last June’s Allen v. Milligan, the court explicitly upheld a lower court ruling ordering that a second such district be created. Alabama—led by Republicans in the statehouse—spent the last few months declining the court’s explicit instructions. The new maps were drawn with a single majority-Black district. The district court issued a furious rebuke. Now Alabama has come back to the Supreme Court in an emergency posture requesting a green light to use their still-illegal maps, claiming that the decision in Milligan didn’t in fact mean what it said it meant.

Why? Because in his concurrence in Milligan, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the determinative fifth vote in the case, signaled to the lawmakers that he’d be open to deciding the matter in their favor on a different theory that was neither briefed nor argued: Things might come out differently, he wrote, winkingly, if they came back armed with the argument that “even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting” under the Voting Rights Act “for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” (He called the Voting Rights Act a form of “race-conscious redistricting” because it forbids states from diluting the votes of racial minorities, and measuring dilution requires consideration of race.) Alabama legislators reasonably think Kavanaugh’s in the bag based on “intelligence” that’s either an inside source or a straightforward reading of his Milligan concurrence. So they refused to follow the directives of the court in the hopes that in this go-round, they win.

Like with the climate deniers saying, “it's not climate change, it's just the weather” radical right Republican racists can say things like “it's not racism, it's just legal, rough and tumble politics.” 

I cannot understate how inimical and effective this USSC is and has been in gutting voting rights and free and fair elections. This is clear racist authoritarianism. Democracy with civil liberties, including voting rights, and a meaningful rule of law are high priority targets to be obliterated. People who cannot see the seriousness and urgency of the threat are far beyond sorely mistaken. Words fail me here.

The decision in this emergency filing should come fairly soon, maybe in the next month or two. For the 2024 elections, Alabama needs time to implement whatever map the radical authoritarians consider legal.

Trumplandia legal sagas: Attorneys suing attorneys

It's getting ugly out there ladies and germs. Rudi's attorneys are suing him for failure to pay his $1,360,196.10 bill. Naughty Rudi the Tooti Frutti. Here's some of the 8 page filing.

The summons

The heart of the matter

The signature page

It won't be long before we are all familiar with lawsuit filings. FYI, this case was filed in a New York Supreme Court. In New York, the Supreme Court is the lowest court. Trial courts include the Supreme Courts (unlike in the federal system), the Appellate Divisions of the Supreme Court, and the Court of Appeals, which is the court of last resort (similar to the Supreme Court in the federal system). That's ass backwards, but whatever.

Jeez, talk about a cheap law school with a crappy professor.

On the Meaning of the Post-Truth Concept and Its Effects

I originally posted this in April 2021, but the deafening clamor for it to be reposted has forced my hand. 😮

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A 2019 research paper, The Upsurge of Irrationality; Post-truth politics for a polarized world, discusses how researchers see the recent descent of political discourse into the mess it is today for tens of millions of Americans. It nicely describes what concepts such as post-truth mean and how they can influence thinking and political and social policy. The following are some quotes from the paper.

Truthiness

.... the term “truthiness”, coined in 2005 by the comedian Stephen Colbert and defined as “the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.” So, truthiness is not necessarily falsehood or propaganda: it can be mere ignorance shaped by emotion, “gut feeling” and overreliance on intuitive thinking. Nevertheless, while truthiness was used primarily for political satire .... post-truth is not a joke any more.

Post-truth

Current social polarization has led to an upsurge of collective irrationality in which formerly underground unwarranted beliefs and radical discourses have become mainstream. .... controverted shared values have been replaced by alternative epistemologies shaped by identity-related empirical misconceptions that are at the core of current cases of “culture war.” This state of affairs has recently been called “post-truth.”

There are several interconnected concepts considered as major forms of collective irrationalism, such as pseudoscience, science denialism, fact  resistance, and alternative facts. Post-truth has emerged as a higher-order concept that describes the current sociological state of affairs in which all these forms of irrationality thrive. This recent term is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

The meaning of post-truth goes beyond being a fool or a liar — “in its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd's reaction actually does change the facts about the lie (...) what seem to be new in the post-truth era is a challenge not just to the idea of knowing reality but to the existence of reality itself.” In this regard, although political lies have always existed, “post-truth relationship to facts occurs only when we are seeking to assert something that is more important to us than truth itself. Thus, post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not.” So, while truthiness locates the responsibility for lying, post-truth is more vague and collectivist in this regard, providing no clear way to define who is responsible, when, and to what extent. Hence, post-truth gives rise to “a world in which politicians can challenge the facts and pay no political price whatsoever.” 

Comments

The paper’s author points out that there is reliable evidence to believe that unfounded beliefs in post-truth rhetoric is not just innocuous folklore. Adverse effects on political campaigns and regressive cultural backlashes have been documented, but the full ramifications are still playing out and thus unknowable. Counterproductive effects of motivated reasoning and false public opinion significantly adversely affect attitudes toward vaccination and climate change. Solid evidence also indicates that conspiracy theories containing post-truth content are also damaging.[1]

The paper’s concluding comments include these: “Post-truth is not an urban legend: it is a harmful collection of alternative epistemologies with a postmodern background that arises from the kind of intergroup struggles that shape the current polarized socio-political landscape. So, post-truth can be interpreted as a result of self-defensive cognition regarding social identity — a process that is fostered by social networks, perceived moral superiority, and partisan media that generate affective [emotion-based] feedback loops, strong perceived threats, and boost against ethical dissonance.” 

Footnote: 

1. The author writes: “The amount of negative social attitudes and outcomes associated with conspiracy theories is overwhelming. For example, they are associated with less pro-social behavior, science denial and misunderstanding, collective narcissism, moral absolutism, partisanship, Machiavellianism and personal willingness to conspire, political cynicism, unhealthy behaviors — such as the use of alternative medicine, anti-vaccination and unsafe sex —, prejudices, political extremism, and reduced intentions to decrease carbon footprint.” (citations removed)

Belief in false conspiracy theories can be downright dangerous to one’s health and to the health of democracy.