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2 Big Things
1) As of Thursday morning, Mar 23, former president Donald J. Trump has not been indicted for failing to disclose a hush money campaign expense to porn star Stormy Daniels. Regardless of if or when that happens, as Charlie Sykes mentioned in his Morning Shots on Monday, the worst is yet to come. Worst because over the weekend, and even this week, Donald Trump has been trying to stir up violence against Manhattan DA Bragg and anyone involved with the indictment. Trump even goes so far as to suggest that the NYPD should not protect prosecutors because they are corrupt. Trump's sole reason for calling DA Bragg corrupt is that Bragg is likely to indict Trump on corruption charges.
Beyond this, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy promises political retaliation against DA Bragg. McCarthy claims this is all a politically motivated hit job.
While all this is going on, pundits and politicians are claiming that a potential indictment should not happen because it is either 1) a political hack job or 2) going to cause more violence than it solves. The argument for 2 suggests that Jan 6 could happen again. Which has the ring of a mob shakedown to it, "What nice country you have, be a shame if something were to happen to it."
And I cannot help but think that none of this had to happen. If Republican leaders, like Kevin McCarthy, had stuck to their guns after the Jan 6 insurrection and impeached Trump, we wouldn't be in this position. If Mitch McConnell had, as he hinted he might in the immediate aftermath of Jan 6, encouraged Senate Republicans to vote to remove Trump from office, Trump would be ineligible to run again. None of this needed to happen, and yet, because big players in the GOP have selective morality, here we are.
2) In brighter news, social psychologist Sander van der Linden of the University of Cambridge gave an interview with Scientific American to discuss his findings of a psychological "vaccine" against misinformation. Van der Linden talks about how misinformation should be viewed like a virus because it can hijack our cognitive biases like viruses hijack cells. To combat misinformation, we need a double treatment of what van der Linden calls prebunking and a weakened version of the misinformation, like a vaccine. Prebunking involves telling people that someone is about to try to misinform them. This heightens our awareness and encourages us to be more skeptical of the claims we hear. Then you give someone a small dose of the misinformation and a tip on refuting it.
When done together, this combination can help us withstand misinformation, even when we hear the same misinformation quoted repeatedly, a tactic used to make a false claim seem trustworthy. Van der Linden also suggests that introducing people to commonly used tactics like false dichotomies is useful when hoping to inoculate people to misinformation.
Given these findings, keep these things in mind:
1) Simply introducing people to facts that disprove their ideas does not generally work by itself.
2) Building relationships and caring for people first is still an effective way to pull someone out of a misinformation or conspiracy trap.
3) Van der Linden's work demonstrates that pre-bunking and misinformation awareness are additional tools in our fight against the spread of misinformation.
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