Even If It's 'Bonkers,' Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon, Other Conspiracy Theories

It seems like the poll was just a few thousand people [1]. If we look at some specific poll questions:

> Moreover, fewer than half (47%) are able to correctly

> identify that this statement is false: “A group of

> Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are

> trying to control our politics and media.” Thirty-seven

> percent are unsure whether this theory backed by QAnon is

> true or false, and 17% believe it to be true.

47% identify the statement as false, 17% identify it as true and I assume the rest are unsure. This sounds about right for most unproven things.

I would suggest that given the long list of powerful contacts Epstein is confirmed to have had, his seemingly random rise to wealth, the idea that he wasn't a lone wolf isn't insane.

Also you have to consider that something like "Satan-worshipping" is loaded, as to a religious person anybody conducting such acts could be said to be following the path of Satan. Given the large number of Christians in the US, it's not unreasonable to believe this could have been misinterpreted.

> Nearly half (47%) believe the majority of protests this

> summer were violent, while just 38% correctly indicated

> that this is a false statement.

I am open to be corrected, but by all accounts there was at least some form of arrests at most large protests and many of those were violence related. I personally watched about 20 random live streams on Twitch and each time there was somebody who got into a fight. I imagine they are conflating violent protests with riots (where you have a significant number of agitators)?

I remember watching some news reporter state that the protests had been largely peaceful as a building burned down behind him. I don't think it could be argued that most large news outlets have become political in nature - historically the press and politicians would work hand in hand.

> More than one in three Americans believe in the existence

> of a so-called “deep state;”

My understanding is that the "deep state" is essentially the permanent state - groups such as the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc, that hold enormous amounts of power and act on scales longer than most presidencies and without democratic oversight.

I think that some of what this poll considers to be "fact" is simply from one of these "fact checker" services, which are based on existing evidence and general consensus rather than any kind of real investigation past a Google search by one random person.

[1] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/npr-misinformation-12...

Considering how many people believe "critical race theory", "intersectionality", and other crackpot conspiracy theories, this doesn't surprise me.

"Increasingly, people are willing to say and believe stuff that fits in with their view of how the world should be, even if it doesn't have any basis in reality or fact,"

That's leftism in a nutshell.

You're cherry-picking a few specific examples on the Democratic side, and comparing it to a party that literally ran - and had elected - a QAnon senator [1].

This whataboutism and false equivalency is extremely toxic.

Are dems perfect? Lord no. Does the MSM make mistakes? Absolutely. Is one side actively engaged in a war on truth? Yeah, kinda.

> However I don't think mistrust in the MSM is "ideology" associated with one party. Fox News is the MSM for many people and they've given us many reasons to distrust them.

I watch an awful lot of Fox, and let me assure you, they positioned themselves very much outside the mainstream media. They railed against the MSM non-stop for 4+ years by name. Unfortunately, they were hoisted by their own petard when they called Arizona for Biden. I was watching it live, and I nearly spat out my whiskey. They got hucked into the MSM bin by Trump supporters and left for dead on November 3, 2020, around 6PM PST.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/us/politics/qanon-candida...

> Five people went to prison.

- 34 indicted.

- 7 pled guilty.

- 5 went to prison. So far.

If this was a witch hunt, we found us a coven.

[1] https://time.com/5556331/mueller-investigation-indictments-g...

Yeah. Up until recently, the ability to immediately communicate information to hundreds of thousands of people at once was guarded. Editors economically metered inches of print, networks (the original 4) were ruthlessly inoffensive to avoid pushing people away, radio stations religiously avoided dead air, etc. To build a fringe movement in the past, one could reach up to dozens of people directly or through pamphlets. Using the model of viral spread, the viral load from a pamphlet or from a conspiracy theorist's mouth was too low to infect most people, so the conspiracy would fizzle. If enough susceptible people were blasted with a high enough load of false information, those people could become infected and start spreading the false information themselves, triggering exponential spread, but in the past there weren't good ways to identify susceptible people. Modern platforms, optimizing for engagement/watch time, leveraged the immense amount of data they generate from user behavior to identify clusters of user behavior patterns, predict the cluster a user is most similar to, and feed that user content that activates other users in that cluster. In short, modern platforms make it far easier to both find people susceptible to a false narrative (or ensemble of false narratives), and to spread the false narrative.

Humanity has never faced this phenomena until recently, where anyone can infect hundreds of millions of people with false ideas like "the earth is flat", or "a deadly virus, and strategies to prevent it's spread, should be ignored", or "democracy is a lie and it is not a mechanism for peacefully removing people from power". If we don't demand a solution, we're going to continue to see massive death and destruction from uninformed or even perverse response to disease, climate change, and a myriad of other issues.