If you’ll be around relatives or friends — physically or virtually — who are still clinging to conspiracies about the election, Andrew Romano and I have an article that can be a resource for you. (We also did a video and written piece on the tell-tale signs of real conspiracies versus conspiracy theories, which you can read or watch here.)
The first section of this piece on election conspiracies — which discusses the way that bad actors have persuaded many people that there must be fire because they have blown so much smoke — is most important to understanding the mindset of people who have a hard time accepting established facts about the election, or COVID-19, or anything else.
As British journalist Matthew D’Ancona wrote in his 2017 book, “Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back,” the election conspiracists are borrowing from a strategy used by big tobacco companies in the 1950’s, when they created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee with the goal to create confusion. They commissioned studies and elevated so-called experts to question whether smoking really did cause lung disease. They didn’t need to win the argument. They just needed to muddy the waters.
“Their purpose is invariably to sow doubt rather than to triumph … The point is simply to keep the argument going, to ensure that it never reaches a conclusion,” D’Ancona writes.
It leaves the average person paralyzed, unsure of what to think or believe, often…
