So much cognitive pollution

A useful article.  From The Democrats’ Insanity Defense by Park MacDougald.  The subheading is 

Republican activists say they have to water down the reality of their opponents’ agenda in focus groups. ‘They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.‘

The core issue is that the Democrats are promulgating known untruths as the basis for their policies.  It is settled that Russia Collusion of 2016 was a hoax paid for by the Clinton campaign and amplified over three years by the party and by the legacy media.  A story thoroughly debunked at the time and now officially debunked by the Federal government.  

It is at least clear that virtually every public health initiative in the US under the auspices of Fauci was undertaken without the epidemiological evidence necessary to support it.  And indeed, most, if not virtually all the arguments made by the CDC were known to be wrong at the time and have now been proven to be wrong.  

It goes on and on.  Climate change.  Global warming and storms.  Defunding the police will lower crime.  Printing money won't cause inflation.  

Some of these are disputed at the margin, but the core knowledge is reasonably known and stable.  And denied by the activists in government.

In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must have dismissed it out of hand. “She did things that nobody would ever think of,” Trump said, while rattling off a list of some of the vice president’s most radical past positions. “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”

The idea that the vice president “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” seemed so patently absurd that The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser cited it in a column posted the next morning as an example of Trump’s lunacy: “What the hell was he talking about?” Glasser wrote of the trans operation lines. “No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’ point.”

That reaction was understandable—the idea of the operations was, as Trump himself said, a “thing nobody would ever think of.” The problem was that it is true. As CNN had reported that week, Harris, when running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, had written in an ACLU questionnaire that she supported publicly funded “gender-affirming care,” including transition surgeries, for federal prison inmates and detained illegal immigrants. Follow-up reporting from The Washington Free Beacon revealed that while serving as California attorney general, Harris had in fact implemented a statewide policy of taxpayer funding for prisoners’ sex changes, born out of a settlement in which she agreed to pay for the transition of a man convicted of kidnapping a father of three and then murdering him as he begged for his life. Harris later bragged, on camera, about this policy as evidence of her commitment to the progressive “movement”—in a clip that has since become a staple of Trump campaign ads.

Many Americans still have trouble accepting these facts, because the underlying predicate—that Barack Obama purposefully sought to ally the United States with a terror-sponsoring, America-hating theocracy—seemed too insane to credit.

The sequence of events neatly encapsulated a pattern that has played out countless times since Trump entered American political life. Trump says something seemingly insane, to many people’s outrage and disbelief, only to have his supposed “lie” revealed to be wholly or at least significantly true. Often the specific truth revealed—that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite another example—is in fact “crazier” than Trump’s exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was.

The mystery to me is just how complete can be the ignorance.  I have long put heavy reliance on closed epistemic networks as an explanation for why Democrats often make bold statements with complete conviction which are completely untrue and are well documented as being untrue.

A few weeks ago a single roundtable participant on some legacy media news show alluded to the Ferguson Effect (crime rises when policing declines).  Also now known as the George Floyd Effect.  

In 2014, when the Ferguson riots occurred, there was good reason to believe that reduced policing is associated with increased crime.  Since 2014, multiple studies, including post 2020 Floyd Riots, have repeatedly found that reduced policing leads to rising crime.  

In that news roundtable, the participant alluded to the Ferguson Effect as common and well-established knowledge.  The other seven members of the discussion affirmed that they had never heard of the Ferguson Effect and denied that it could be true.  

Monumental epistemic network closure.  

Or is it simply propaganda?  They are saying what needs to be said to support their policies regardless of how loosely it may be associated with the truth?  Or completely divorced from it.

MacDougald is arguing that Democrats get away with it because the arguments put forward by Democrats are so crazy as to not be credible.  People don't believe the claim that Harris has supported taxpayer sex-change operations for imprisoned illegal aliens because that is just crazy talk.  And it is crazy talk.  And it is also really her past position.  The transcripts and videos are right there.

But I suspect there is a somewhat related dynamic.  It probably goes something like this.

The other side makes an argument about my side's position that is patently absurd and therefore I reject it (MacDougald)

The other side makes an argument that is patently absurd and I don't have the time to investigate.

I trust my team and not the other.

When I investigate, the evidence I find that supports their argument, I dismiss as edited, deep faked, or some other deus ex machina logic.

We all want to belong to our tribe.  We all want to take epistemic shortcuts.  We all emulate the embedded assumptions of our tribe.  

Ecch.