Joe Rogan, Vaccine Misinformation, and the Collapse of Shared Reality
Our inability to figure out what’s real is an important social problem. We are being driven crazy by our technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5QuO_wKPhk
Tag: truth
How a major DOE report hides the whole truth on climate change
“a detailed examination by POLITICO’s E&E News found that the report obscures key facts about climate change. It relies on outdated studies and cites analyses that were not peer reviewed. It cherry-picks mainstream research and omits context. It revives debunked arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on long-term warming trends.
The result is a report that promotes ideas starkly at odds with the vast majority of scientific evidence. That prompted a remarkable response from the National Academies last week that stated, “Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases and resulting climate change harm the health of people in the United States.””
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2025/chris-wright-doe-climate-change-report/
Trump Official Terrified To Answer Simple Question
When asked basic questions about the administration’s use of Signal, to avoid basic transparency and oversight of their actions, administration officials attack the questioner or Democrats on tangential issues rather than honestly answer the questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yu0vd7ZT7E
‘This is the point you resign’: Former U.S. National Security Advisor calls on Marco Rubio to resign
Lindsey Graham, along with many Republicans, have turned over all integrity and honesty for Trump. Trump’s power over the Republican Party, and over Republican Senators who used to have strong independent opinions, is amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBhR99pdHps
America’s looming election crisis, explained in 3 charts
Trump supporters thrive in falsity and anti-democratic attitudes.
“If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll.”
“among Republicans, Trump proved by far the most trusted source of information about election results, well above local and national news outlets. In an Associated Press/NORC/USAFacts poll from earlier this month, more than 60 percent of Republicans said they believe Trump himself is the best place to get the facts about results.”
“Trump’s long-running insistence that he won in 2020 appears to be having an effect over time, with several surveys measuring greater buy-in of his lies about the election from voters today than in the past. A December Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 36 percent of US adults did not believe Biden was legitimately elected, compared to 29 percent two years prior. And in a Pew Research poll conducted earlier this month, 27 percent of US adults said that Trump did nothing wrong in trying to overturn the election results, up from 23 percent in April.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/372863/2024-election-lies-trump-overturn-harris
J.D. Vance Says It Does Not Matter Whether ‘Rumors’ of Pet-Eating Migrants Are True
“It seems clear that neither Trump nor Vance is interested in a rational conversation. “With this rhetoric,” Bettina Makalintal noted on Eater last week, “the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering.” The idea that “immigrants ‘eat pets,'” she wrote, “is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority, ” which “then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration.”
For politicians “perpetuating this false narrative,” Makalintal observed, “the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not ‘like us’ and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives.” Trump and Vance, she said, are implicitly drawing a contrast between “white ‘Americans’ with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family” and dark-skinned immigrants who are “trouncing on that which is held dear.”
Implicit racism aside, Vance is proving to be just as impervious to reality as the man he once condemned as a “total fraud” who was shockingly xenophobic, “reprehensible,” “a moral disaster,” and even possibly “America’s Hitler.””
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“All of this is reminiscent of Trump’s attitude toward claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he was eager to accept no matter how outlandish and unsubstantiated they were. During the notorious telephone conversation in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in that state, for example, Trump mentioned a rumor that election officials had “supposedly shredded…3,000 pounds of ballots.” That report, he conceded, “may or may not be true.” Yet within a few sentences, Trump had persuaded himself that the allegations were reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation” crying out for correction.
Where does Vance stand on Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen through systematic fraud? He recently argued that Trump had raised concerns that were valid and troubling enough to justify “a big debate” about whether electoral votes for Biden from battleground states should have been officially recognized, although “that doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different.” Alluding to “the problems that existed in 2020,” Vance said that if he had been vice president at the time, “I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”
Just as he refuses to definitively say whether he believes Hatians actually have been eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Vance has declined to explicitly endorse or reject Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. In both cases, he seems to think the fact that someone made a wild allegation is enough to justify “a big debate” about whether it might be true, even when there is no evidence to support it.
You can either live in the real world or be Donald Trump’s running mate. Vance has made his choice.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/15/j-d-vance-says-it-does-not-matter-whether-rumors-of-pet-eating-migrants-are-true/
Marty Baron on truth, democracy, and the press in an age of distrust
https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/2021/8/9/22605855/vox-conversations-martin-baron-washington-post-media-democracy
Who Gets To Decide the Truth?
Obama: The internet is “the single biggest threat to our democracy”
“you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring…I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories.”
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“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.”
How “truth decay” is harming America’s coronavirus recovery
“Truth decay encompasses four trends, each of which is relevant to what we’re experiencing now.
The first is increasing disagreement about facts and data. An example in this context would be the disagreement about the safety of vaccines and whether people will take them once they’re made and distributed.
The second trend is the increased blurring of the line between fact and opinion. This is caused a lot by commentary in cable news or social media, places where facts and opinion are mixed together and make it really hard to determine what’s real and what’s someone’s opinion or analysis.
The third trend is the increasing volume of opinion compared to fact. You’re just seeing a lot more opinion out there. If you’re looking for facts, you have to work pretty hard to dig through all that commentary before you can actually find the raw facts you might be looking for.
Finally, declining trust in key institutions that provide information. We’re experiencing this now with the government and the media.
Put together, people are not sure what’s true what’s not, and they don’t even really know where to turn to find factual information they’re looking for.”
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“Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example, seems to be the guy providing the media and the public with the necessary facts about the coronavirus right now. But because the president undercuts him and disagrees with a lot of what he says, he’s become somewhat of a polarizing figure. If you’re a Trump fan, you might not be a Fauci fan, and vice versa.
At such a crucial time, how is the expertise of someone like Fauci or other public health experts not innately trusted?”
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“people like to confirm their own beliefs. They don’t necessarily want to hear information that disagrees with their views, and it leads people to reject information from experts that doesn’t fit their narrative.”
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“I’m skeptical this moment will lead to only facts coming from the top and an extra effort from the bottom to seek facts. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, millions have fallen ill, and yet there doesn’t seem to be a change. The US isn’t rising to the moment.”
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“this is a national failure because it prevents us from making progress on the big issues that our country needs to confront if we want to continue being a prosperous nation and maintain the position we have in the world.”