Thread by @mattsheffield

1/x: Polls keep showing that Republicans believe objectively false ideas, but have conservatives really lost their grasp on reality or have they decided to just lie about it to pollsters?

Join me for this summary thread or click through to my essay here: flux.community/matthew-sheffi…

American conservatism is based on a modern Christian fundamentalism which believes the Bible is literally and completely true.

This is something everyone, including them, knows to be nonsense. But this realization has psychically damaged conservatives flux.community/matthew-sheffi…

As a result, the far-right is in "epistemic collapse," they know that their arguments are unprovable but they still want to believe.

Michael Flynn's Covid election conspiracy below is a great illustration. He refers to "my truth," not the truth

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1395767976595427333

Donald Trump seems to have accelerated the long-term conservative intellectual collapse. His congenital lying meshed perfectly w/fundamentalists' will to believe.

New #polisciresearch is finding that Trump supporters will lie about their opinions, if they think it helps him

One study found that when shown pics of Obama's first inauguration and Trump's, GOP supporters would correctly say that Obama's crowd was bigger.

But when the photos were labeled, Trump fans would say his crowd was bigger.

Similarly, polling has found that Republican respondents shifted their views about the state of the economy by 50 POINTS once Joe Biden took over from Donald Trump.

Now, even though all signs are pointing to a booming economy, the vast majority of GOPers say it's getting worse

The jury is still out on all the reasons why Republican voters claim to believe lies, but it does raise the question that perhaps if financial pressure could be put on GOP elites to tell the truth, their tribe might follow suit.

Given how Trump has lied so convincingly to his supporters and that he continues to command their adulation, other right-wing elites will have to be forced to tell the truth. But the success of the Smartmatic and Dominion litigation suggests that there are ways this can happen.

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Some worthwhile additional points in this @drvolts thread

https://twitter.com/drvolts/status/1396219144459022336