How To Respond To Friends Posting False Conspiracy Theories?

Since the 2016 presidential election I have observed many otherwise sensible and decent people - many wealthy Republican women - re-posting and sharing some of the most insane and untrue things on Facebook and other social media platforms.  During the 2016 campaign many of these falsehoods ultimately were traced back to Russian sources working to cause hate and division among Americans and to aid Donald Trump.  For some, no conspiracy seems too far fetched.   In some cases I unfriended individuals since I simply did not have the patience to see the endless parade of batshit crazy stuff they posted and in another recent case I stopped following  the individual.  Now, with the coronavirus pandemic there has been an upsurge in false conspiracy theories being backed by groups ranging to far right billionaires to white supremacy groups to foreign disinformation sources.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at how one should deal with friends who continue to post false materials.  The BBC also has a piece on stopping false "news" some online friends should read. The advice in The Atlantic suggests more patience than I can at times muster perhaps since I work in a profession where facts and logic matter.  Here are article excepts:

[P]olitical scientists Joseph E. Uscinski and Adam M. Enders observed that the coronavirus has created an environment dangerously conducive to conspiracy theories. “We have a global pandemic, a crashing economy, social isolation, and restrictive government policies,” they wrote. “All of these can cause feelings of extreme anxiety, powerlessness, and stress, which in turn encourage conspiracy beliefs.”

This past week, a widely discredited video—a 26-minute clip from a slickly produced documentary called Plandemic—circulated online. It promotes a number of harmful and false ideas, including that wearing a protective mask can make people sick and that the novel coronavirus most likely emerged from a laboratory. (Facebook, YouTube, and other companies are trying to scrub it from their platforms.)

If someone you care about sends you a link to this video—or any piece of media that pushes a conspiracy theory about the pandemic—how should you respond? I put that question to experts on conspiracy thinking, public-health risk communication, and psychology, and their responses converged on some basic guidelines.

Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami and a co-author of American Conspiracy Theories, made an important preliminary distinction: Some people are sharing links to videos like Plandemic because they are curious and uncertain about the claims being made, but others are doing so because they’re already deeply convinced. If you know someone is a “true believer,” to use Uscinski’s term, you probably can’t do much to sway them. You’ll have a better chance of getting through to the curious and the uncertain.

Whatever camp someone falls in, though, the general principles are the same. “It’s always important to respond in a way that doesn’t suggest that the other [person] is foolish, naive, or gullible, as much as you think they may be,” said Joshua Coleman, a psychologist with an expertise in family relationships.

After setting an empathetic tone, Coleman suggested continuing with something like this:
That video might be right, but I've been reading a lot these days that goes counter to that. Do you mind if I send you an article or video about that? It would be good for us to look at both and see what we think.

“First validate” the fears people might have about the pandemic “and then pivot,” Rachael Piltch-Loeb, a fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, recommended. Along those lines, she suggested something like “I’m glad you brought this up. Those are some scary claims in that documentary. I am skeptical, though, because a lot of the things mentioned don't jibe with what I have been reading. Here’s an article that I found to be more helpful at explaining these issues, and I feel more comfortable with the science behind it.” John Banas, a communication professor at the University of Oklahoma, advised avoiding the implication that the other person’s faith in the video is “a personal failing.” You could instead point out the flaws in the current information ecosystem, he said, maybe with a reminder like “During this pandemic, there are people who want to take advantage of people's fears and all of the uncertainty surrounding the situation.” You might also try, when having conversations with other friends and family members, to preempt any curiosity they may have about Plandemic or its ilk by warning them about the existence of COVID-19 conspiracy theories. “People need to be prepared to resist harmful persuasion,” Banas said, “just like our bodies need to be prepared to resist harmful viruses.”

Malignant forces are behind these conspiracy theories.  I wish more "conservatives" would stop taking the bait and allowing themselves to be played for fools to further the agenda of others, be they members of the Trump regime or other bad actors.

Virginia's Wake-Up Call to the Morally Decent Republicans

Ed Gillespie and extremist Corey Stewart

Having grown up in the Republican Party and then having been an activist, I know that for many it is easy to push out of mind the fact that what they knew Republican Party to be in the past simply no longer exists.  Yes, Republican Women's club still have their functions and locally in Virginia Beach, they still hold the Star Spangled Ball (the last one was in April, 2017, at the Hilton Virginia Beach Oceanfront) to raise funds for Republican candidates.  The truth is, however, that many of these long time Republican women have no more in common with much of the party's base today that the man in the moon.  Most are educated, polite, relatively well informed even if Fox News viewers, and are neither white supremacists or religious fanatics.  As the recent Virginia Republican gubernatorial primary results underscored, that cannot be said for much of the GOP base be it in Virginia or elsewhere. The issue thus becomes this: when will these people - and this applies to a number of our neighbors and friends at the yacht club - cease closing their eyes and voting Republican because it is what they know and are used to doing for decades?  I witnessed the beginning of the take over of the party base by the Christofascists.  Now, the racists and white supremacists have joined them in hijacking the GOP.  As a piece in The Atlantic argues, it is time for a wake up call for both morally decent Republicans (some do exist) and the party establishment that has utterly lost control.  Here are article highlights:

Ever since Donald Trump became president, wary Republican elites have believed he was an anomaly—a unique candidate who owed his success to celebrity appeal and weak opposition, despite some noxious views and behavior. Take away Trump the person, they believed, and there would be no Trump phenomenon.

That viewpoint got a rude wake-up call this week, in a Virginia Republican primary that wasn’t supposed to be a contest at all. And while the GOP establishment’s preferred candidate still won, the surprise result showed there’s still a substantial appetite in the party’s base for the populist impulses Trump represents.

[T]his year, it was Democrats whose primary looked like a pitched battle. Two well-credentialed progressives—one the sitting lieutenant governor, the other a former congressman and Obama administration official—were locked in a battle for the party’s soul. But despite polling showing a tight race, the Democratic establishment candidate, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, pulled out an easy win, defeating Tom Perriello by a 12-point margin. On the Republican side, meanwhile, Ed Gillespie expected to coast to an easy victory over his main challenger, Corey Stewart, a Trump acolyte who highlighted his hard line on immigration and support for Confederate monuments. It doesn’t get much more “establishment” than Gillespie, a former D.C. lobbyist and chairman of the Republican National Committee. Polls had shown Gillespie up by 20 points over Stewart, a local county board chairman. Gillespie had all the major endorsements and many times as much money as Stewart. Gillespie and Stewart’s vote totals hovered within a point of each other for hours after the polls closed. Gillespie was finally declared the winner by just over 1 percentage point, drawing 43.7 percent of the vote to Stewart’s 42.5 percent.

I spent the weekend before Tuesday’s vote following Stewart and Gillespie, on the theory that their primary was an early test of the Trump era’s most pressing political question: whether the unorthodox new president represents a long-term political realignment or just a weird one-off. Had Gillespie walked away with the primary as expected, it might have been evidence that the Republican fever had broken, and that the GOP was looking to return to business as usual with sensible, practical candidates rather than race-baiting firebrands.

Virginia isn’t exactly Trump country: The state went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Trump won the state’s primary by a narrow margin over Marco Rubio. Despite its Southern geography, Virginia today is an urban, transient, diverse, highly educated state, where many local Republican activists are wealthy consultants and lobbyists like Gillespie.

Gillespie’s campaign was premised on the notion that Virginia Republicans were looking for a candidate who, while not openly repudiating Trump, was the polar opposite of Trump in temperament and orientation, emphasizing tax cuts and economic growth over culture-war controversies.

Stewart’s theory was the opposite: that Trump changed everything and showed what the GOP base was really looking for. Serving as the Trump campaign’s Virginia state chairman last October, he led activists in a march on the RNC headquarters, where he charged that the “establishment pukes” were undermining Trump’s campaign.

The Stewart supporters I spoke to, at a campaign rally in a diner in Fredericksburg, were galvanized by his nationalist message. There were numerous Confederate flag bumper stickers in the parking lot, and one woman wore a stars-and-bars hat with the word “REBEL.” They told me they were disgusted with Republican leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan, and put all their faith in Trump.

On Tuesday, there turned out to be a lot more of these types of Republican voters than Ed Gillespie expected. . . . . Democrats were clearly energized: More than 540,000 turned out to vote in the Democratic primary, compared to 370,000 in the Republican primary.

Stewart, of course, believed he was going to win, and he didn’t. But in coming as close as he did, he gave the Republican establishment a scare—and showed that a sizable portion of the GOP base doesn’t want to go back to business as usual. Far from being weary of the controversial and unorthodox president, a lot of Republicans want more candidates like Trump. 

Trump’s Support Among Republican Women Is Falling

Since leaving the Republican Party I have often wondered how women - at least those who aren't Christofascists or supporters of white supremacy - could continue to vote Republican given the party's war on women and women's rights ranging from equal pay to heath care and reproductive rights.  Now, Donald Trump seemingly has made more and more Republican women rethink their support for the GOP.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Trump's alienation of Republican women.  Here are excerpts:

Of all the tribulations facing Donald J. Trump, perhaps none is stirring as much anxiety inside his campaign as the precipitous decline of support from Republican women, an electoral cornerstone for the party’s past nominees that is starting to crumble.

In a striking series of defections, high-profile Republican women are abandoning decades of party loyalty and vowing to oppose Mr. Trump, calling him emotionally unfit for the presidency and a menace to national security.

But even more powerfully, his support from regular Republican women is falling after Mr. Trump’s provocative remarks about everything from the silence of the mother of a slain Muslim soldier to how women should respond to sexual harassment in the workplace.

“For people like me, who are Republican but reasonable and still have our brains attached, it’s hard to see Trump as a reasonable, sane Republican,” said Dina Vela, a project manager in San Antonio who said she had always voted Republican and remained wary of Hillary Clinton. But to her own surprise, she has started visiting Mrs. Clinton’s campaign website and plans to vote for her.

Since the two parties held their nominating conventions, Mr. Trump’s lead over Mrs. Clinton with Republican women voters has declined by 13 percentage points, according to polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News.

In late July, 72 percent of Republican women said they would vote for Mr. Trump, a healthy majority, but far below the level won by the past three Republican presidential nominees.

In politically moderate swing states like Pennsylvania, which aides to Mr. Trump say are crucial to his victory, Mr. Trump’s standing with women over all is perilously low among registered voters: Just 27 percent of women back him, compared with 58 percent for Mrs. Clinton, according to a poll by Franklin & Marshall College.

Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said that Mr. Trump’s divisive and combative tactics, which seem to have intensified since he secured the Republican nomination, were amplified in the eyes and ears of the nation’s female voters. . . . “That kind of rhetoric is inflammatory, and I think we are seeing that women in particular have a real problem with it,” Ms. Walsh said.

Alarm over Mr. Trump’s temperament crosses demographic lines. But decades of social science research about gender and politics suggests that women have a unique perspective on government and its leaders that frequently diverges from men’s . . . . This dynamic, she said, is reflected in the number of women who vote. Four years ago, about 10 million more women voted than men, the Rutgers center found.

For Mrs. Clinton, the alienation of Republican women from Mr. Trump creates a rare opportunity to capture a coveted demographic. But it poses a dilemma as well. . . . Skeptical liberals are already looking for signs of betrayal from Mrs. Clinton, making it dangerous for her to make overt or ideological appeals to Republican women. Instead, she is making her case to them by emphasizing kitchen-table issues like job creation and by raising doubts about Mr. Trump’s temperament.

But not all those fleeing Mr. Trump are ready to embrace Mrs. Clinton. In interviews, several Republican women, and those who lean Republican, sounded anguished by their choice: frightened by Mr. Trump, but still uncomfortable with Mrs. Clinton.

Republican pollsters have long relied on a simple benchmark for their presidential candidates: They must win at least 90 percent of Republicans to capture the White House. But with some polls showing Mr. Trump struggling to attract even 75 percent of Republican women, that could prove an impossible task.

Mr. Trump draws his deepest support from white men, especially those without a college degree. But he has alienated a growing number of white women, especially those with college degrees, surveys have found. Mrs. Clinton is now leading in that demographic.

The danger for Mr. Trump is that the erosion could accelerate as leading Republican women publicly break with him, making an argument that the national interest must supersede party loyalty.

In what has turned into a steady drip, prominent Republican women from the worlds of business and politics have been publicly renouncing Mr. Trump over the past few weeks.  . . . . the policy disagreements we have are far outweighed by the danger that Donald Trump poses to America,” said Jennifer Pierotti Lim, a lifelong Republican and an executive at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who has pledged her support to Mrs. Clinton and spoke at the Democratic National Convention.