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There's blame to go around. First, certain people, predominantly conservative, realized they could monetize stupidity. That saying outrageous lies would create great wealth for them, and they gleefully jumped in. Look how wealthy Rush Limbaugh became, or how Michael Flynn, an advisor to the president, was involved in pushing Pizzagate, a theory that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from a pizza shop [0]. This man was briefly our national security advisor. Six days before the election, for instance, Mr. Flynn posted on Twitter a
fake news story that claimed the police and prosecutors in New York had
found evidence linking Mrs. Clinton and much of her senior campaign staff to
pedophilia, money laundering, perjury and other felonies.
I also blame the institutions themselves.The Catholic church turns out to have been, if not an organized rape group, then certainly one that openly tolerated such. The church went to extraordinary lengths to (1) preserve access to victims for priests, and (2) hide from culpability. See eg hiding records and witnesses in Rome, or a priest in WI who raped 200 deaf students [1] while Cardinal Ratzinger -- who became Pope -- personally shielded him from consequences. An excerpt from [1]: Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was
sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to
criminal or civil authorities.
Or remember when George Bush promised there were WMD in Iraq, and fired Larry Lindsey for saying the costs of the Iraq war might reach $100B [2], and fired General Shinseki for correctly estimating how many troops would be required [3]? Right before we proceeded to kill a half million Iraqis and 5k+ Americans for what?Remember when we were assured by all and sundry that there certainly was no real-estate bubble circa 2007? That real estate was an investment that only went up? Remember Katrina, when George Bush decided to hang out and watch 1800 Americans die on our own soil, while his pet horse judge mismanaged the federal disaster relief agency? Or Enron, or Bernie Madoff, or law school is a good investment, or ... Our institutions themselves have given us myriad reasons to distrust them. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flyn... [1] http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/26/wisconsin-prie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey [3] http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-ira... |
One quibble: are those people really "conservative"? Even if so, is that the attribute that is most relevant to this discussion?
Flynn is a perfect example: he's ostensibly "conservative" but he's also a pretty twisted combination of a gullible rube, a liar, and a batshit-crazy whack job.
I don't quite have a word for that combinational trait, but I think that's the key attribute.
There are quite a few people who self-identify as "conservative" but don't fall into this additional category of truth-impervious objective-reality-deniers.