Thread by @soychicka

One other bit that is helping - reporting the percentage of Republican support for Trump, civic violence, etc, without mentioning the actual proportion of Americans, overnormalizes the opinions that will drive democracy into the grave.

https://twitter.com/markjacob16/status/1442587942933909507

The proportion of Americans identifying as Republican # has dropped 5-10% since 2005, to an avg ~26% in 2021 (same trend for Dems).

OMG 80% of Republicans believe…

Is really

20% of adult Americans.

Not reporting THAT alongside every partisan percentage is malpractice.

Reporting trends absent that context hyperinflates the power of that fraction of society, both normalizing and enhancing fear and stasis, fomenting distrust and increasing our isolation from our neighbors.

Truth is, 80% of Americans aren’t willing to die for Trump.

But because we’re accustomed to narrow election margins, we assume that nearly half the voting age population is cool with civil war.

Hell, 30-40% don’t even care enough to vote.

If they think that 40% of Americans are cool with driving civil unrest, that shapes their perception of the underlying issues.

But if it’s only 1/5 (and 1/10 who are actually young and able enough to take to the streets), that sufficiently reduces the need to treat both sides =

(As equal forces/equivalent in civic power)

1/10 who are willing to die for Trumpism means 9/10 aren’t.

(It’s also close to the predicted # of sex offenders in the population, btw).

Start exploring those numbers, and stop hyperinflating the importance of a radical fringe in public opinion to the point where it normalizes violence, drives fear, & diminishes the will of citizens to speak out against those willing to engage in rhetorical + stochastic terrorism.

In fact, a failure to do so actually is it’s own form of stochastic terrorism.

Make it clear those opinions are aberrations, and you decrease the probability regular citizens will be triggered to action.