Stories Are Not Evidence

Posted on 18 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the right “creates stories” to support their worldview (i.e. they’re all about motivated reasoning);
  • Paul Krugman on Trump, tariffs, Stalin, and Lysenko;
  • Items about DeSantis cheating and which party is the party of violence;
  • Items about a brain fever brought on by voting for Democrats; Satanic interdimensional invasions; and how Republicans think anyone unlike them is suspect, perhaps subhuman.
  • Trying to recall Bright Eyes, or Conor Oberst

Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 16 Sep 2024: MAGA runs wild with random poster’s “ABC whistleblower” claims, subtitled “How the right works to “create stories'”

A wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster about an “ABC whistleblower” who purportedly claims that the network rigged the September 10 presidential debate went viral in MAGA spaces over the last several days, with Donald Trump and his allies floating congressional investigations and potential regulatory retribution against ABC News in response.

The right-wing pundits and Republican politicians pushing the story don’t actually know who the “ABC whistleblower” is, if their claims are credible, or even if the person actually exists — but the purported document supposedly supports their preferred narrative that ABC News’ moderators were biased, so they’re running with it.

The saga, while laughable, shows the right’s ongoing tendency to embrace and elevate anything that confirms their worldview.

(This is called motivated reasoning.)

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) laid out that strategy in a Sunday interview on CNN, admitting that he pushed a debunked, racist, and demagogic claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets because he wants to “create stories” that drive news coverage of immigration.

The articles goes on about that ABC whistleblower claims. And ends:

In the past, Bartiromo’s willingness to run with extraordinary but evidence-free claims that happened to bolster her preexisting views helped secure a massive defamation settlement from her employer.

Apparently that wasn’t enough to change her approach. But her behavior, while deplorable, is not anomalous — this total rejection of evidentiary standards in order to “create stories” is a hallmark of the conspiratorial right, from lies about election fraud to Haitians eating pets.

Last sentence: “a hallmark of the conspiratorial right.”

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Paul Krugman, NY Times, 17 Sep 2024: Trumpism, Stalinism and the Tariff Debate [gift link]

Key issue: how is it one political party pursues policies that defy all the evidence?

Do tariffs — taxes on imports — raise prices for U.S. consumers? There’s really no debate on the subject.

I don’t mean that everyone agrees. Rather, there are two distinct groups that aren’t talking to each other, each of which is more or less unified in its views. Almost all economists agree that taxes on imports are, in fact, passed on to consumers. Why? Because that’s what the evidence says, and it’s very hard to come up with an alternative story.

On the other hand, Trump loyalists — which these days means almost the entire Republican Party — insist as a group that foreigners, not American consumers, pay taxes on imports. Why? Because Donald Trump says so. And they don’t even try to engage with economists who disagree.

As I see it, the latter position is the more interesting of the two, not because it has a shred of validity — it doesn’t — but precisely because it doesn’t. How did we get to a state in which a whole political party supports a claim that experts unanimously reject? As I see it, the best way to understand what’s going on is to look at other countries’ histories — specifically the strange history of Lysenkoism in Joseph Stalin’s Russia.

And, again with that famous Upton Sinclair quote:

[A]s I see it, is that it’s easy to understand why zombie ideas like climate change denial and tax-cut mysticism persist: They serve wealthy interest groups. Fossil fuel companies keep climate skepticism shambling along because any attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would hurt their profits. Billionaires support think tanks and politicians who claim that great things will happen if we cut the taxes that billionaires pay.

As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The Lysenko angle is famous in the history of science: he was a Russian scientist who claimed to have debunked traditional genetics in favor of “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” an idea that appealed to Stalin. So Stalin put his ideas into practice, “despite leading to multiple agricultural disasters.”

Dissenters were condemned as Western agents, and in some cases died in prison camps.

And now Trump is threatening the same with those who challenges his tariff policies.

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The crazies.

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I saw a row of CDs by Bright Eyes, and Conor Oberst, down in the CD rack in my garage, and picked them up. Haven’t listened to them in 20 years. Why did I buy so many? I seem to remember there was some particularly catchy Conor Oberst song that caused me to buy his album, or his Bright Eyes album, but now, sampling these various CDs, I can’t find it. There are some nice songs, e.g. “First Day of My Life,” but there’s an itch in my memory for some other song sung by Conor Oberst, with his charmingly shaky voice.

I just played this entire album, and it’s quite nice. But that song I think I remember isn’t there.

Conor Oberst

Bright Eyes

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