Ask A Genius 971: The Landscape of Bullshitting
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/25
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How has the landscape of bullshitting evolved in the early 21st century? It’s been about a quarter century. How has it changed?
Rick Rosner: In general, in American culture, the main change in bullshitting is that about a quarter of American adults have been broken. It’s no secret. For political reasons and reasons of being on the conservative Trump team, tens of millions of Americans are willing to pretend at least to believe all sorts of bullshit. Whenever some new lousy stuff comes out about Trump, his defenders often manufacture some crazy B.S. to cover it up, explain away the bullshit, or deny it and say that Biden is even worse. The blatant lying as part of American life is on a new and horrible scale, a corrosive thing that makes people despair of America ever functioning the way it did before Trump. This is not to say that Trump is the entire problem or that these problems didn’t exist before he ran for president. This shit has been growing more and more. It took a massive leap with Trump. If you look at social media, you can get a sense of how believing in bullshit comes in several flavours.
People who aren’t completely stupid say they believe the bullshit because fuck you. There’s a certain segment of Trump supporters who know he’s terrible and will be bad for the country, but they still like it because it hurts the feelings of their political opponents. So, there are the cynics pretending to believe. Then there are the morons who believe whatever they’re fed from their favourite news outlets like One America News Network, Newsmax, Fox News, Alex Jones, andTucker Carlson. They’re gullible. Maybe they’re older, in their late 70s, and their critical faculties have eroded.
The third flavour consists of people who don’t know jack shit. They know they like Trump, but they don’t pay enough attention. For every show, Fox News has aboutt three million people watching, which is only 1% of the population. OANN and Newsmax have tiny fractions of that. So, there aren’t that many; it’s not a high percentage of Americans who regularly consume the bullshit. That leaves a big chunk of Americans who support Trump because he’s Republican, they’re Republican, they think he’s conservative, he doesn’t take any shit, and he says what he thinks. But they haven’t been paying enough attention to what he says and does and what the conservative media says to justify and explain his horribleness away. It’s not that they believe the bullshit; they aren’t paying enough attention to notice too much of it. Who knows what would happen if they were forced to listen to the bullshit?
Also, the bullshit is abetted by Russia, which is the primary state actor that likes to destabilize Western democracies via propaganda, largely over social media. It’s very effective and very cheap. Russia spends only $30 million a year on social media propaganda. If you do the math, as we’ve talked about before, when you count the number of people who suck up the bullshit uncritically across the Western democracies, it only costs like a buck a brain to mess up people’s minds if they’re lazy in that direction. Questions? Comments?
Jacobsen: What about the counters to those? You always talk about the negative effects of right-wing propaganda and the impact on people who may have had their critical faculties hurt in some way. What about counters to that? There are a lot of public education campaigns. What about critical thinking classes, public science campaigns, and comedy? How do you reach people who have a bias, who only believe the shit that they like to believe? How are you going to get to them and get them to give up their fandom of bullshit?
Rosner: So you’ve got 30% of voters who will vote for Trump regardless. The cliché is something he said himself, that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose a single follower. I believe, like, what if at one of his rallies, he said the N-word over and over, like 15 times? Would that cost him a significant percentage of his followers? I don’t think so. I don’t know how you counter it. I think the conclusion many people have reached is don’t waste your time trying to persuade Trumpers to switch over. You can be welcoming and say if you ever have enough of this guy, join the fold of people who don’t like him. But it’s really hard to win them over. Instead, we should focus on independents, who comprise about 40% of American voters. Roughly, it changes all the time, and it’s a nebulous distinction, but 30% of Americans identify as Democrats, 40% as independents, and 30% as Republicans.
And it’s probably better to leave the 30% of Republicans as a lost cause for the time being. Go after the independents. Try to expose them to enough of the obvious bullshit so that they realize Trump holds his base in contempt. Concentrate on getting Democrats out to vote, people who support decency and truth and will hold their noses if they don’t think Biden epitomizes that. I’m fine with Biden. He’s decent. I don’t think he’s particularly dishonest. But there are people throughout the big tent of “anybody but Trump” who don’t like Biden. But you’ve got to get them to hate Trump and be afraid enough of what Trump will do that they hold their noses and vote for Biden. So you asked, how do you win over the people who are mired in bullshit?
In the short run, you don’t. If a Trumper wants to have a dialogue with me, sometimes that happens on Twitter. There are a few people that, like Lance, a fucking Trumper, and we can have dialogues. I don’t change Lance’s mind, but we don’t hate each other. It’s similar for Trumpers on Twitter. They’ll come at me and sometimes call me out. I’ll make a mistake and admit it. Sometimes, we can have a dialogue, or I’ll say something, and they won’t come back at me with a slur. We won’t be changing each other’s minds, but we can exchange tweets that aren’t “fuck you.” So there you go.
I think most liberals think the damage done by the Trump bullshit machine will take many presidential cycles to heal, assuming Trump doesn’t get reelected. If Trump gets reelected, who knows how long, if ever, it’ll take to drag America out of near fascism. If Trump gets reelected, the U.S. will sink further into horribleness. Yes, there will still be more people who hate Trump than like him, but it will reinforce the huge chunk of the population who sucks up the bullshit. I think what will happen is that A.I. will increasingly… People will have to get intimate with A.I. to negotiate the world. Given a Trump victory and whatever follows, it’ll take people working with augmented abilities from merging with A.I. over the next 20 years to extricate us from the mess. That’s throwing up my arms and saying, leave it to the fucking robots.
Jacobsen: One last question. Comedians in the United States tend to lean liberal, and those with late-night talk shows or comedy… They’ll do very tight, polished comedy takedowns of various topics, at least from a liberal perspective. Are these effective?
Rosner: Not really, no. It used to be that the late-night hosts tried to be reasonably neutral or apolitical. They’d make fun of politicians, but the idea was that they only made fun of stuff that was worthy of being made fun of. Talk show hosts tried not to let viewers know which party they might belong to or which candidate they might have voted for. You don’t want to alienate half of your audience, but since Trump, the late-night hosts who aren’t idiots… Late-night hosts are fantastically smart, except for Greg Gutfeld, who hosts a Republican version of a late-night talk show on Fox News. He’s a schmuck. Almost all the reasonable, very smart talk show hosts eventually had to show their contempt for Trump because Trump is deserving of contempt to an extent unlike any other president or major presidential candidate in the last century.
But even the late-night hosts don’t always lean liberal. Jon Stewart has gone after Biden in a way that some people think is unfair. He doesn’t go after Trump. He isn’t exactly a late-night talk show host, and I think he thinks he’s a liberal or some kind of… I don’t know. But he spotlights many people who come on his show and say a ton of right-wing bullshit, like Ann Coulter. So, what was the original question here? Do you think liberal comedians are effective? Yes, late-night hosts like Kimmel or Colbert have lost their Trumpy viewers. The hardcore Trumpers won’t watch them, so they can’t be persuaded by them. There may be some closet, not quite as Trumpy people in Trumpy households across America. I imagine a wife who waits until her husband falls asleep and might tune in to a late-night show. There are probably hundreds of thousands of spouses of hardcore Trumpers who will secretly vote against Trump. But since they’re living with an asshole, they don’t want to fight the battle and are pretty closeted. Out of a nation with a quarter billion people of voting age, does a quarter million people who are secretly going to vote against Trump or secretly tune into Kimmel make any difference in the election? I don’t know.
I did the math on COVID-19, killing more Trumpers and more people in red states. It kills them at a higher rate than liberals and people in blue states because Trumpers have been taught to minimize the severity of COVID, to think it’s no big deal, it’s a cold. “Pure blood” means, if you see it in a Twitter bio, that they’ve never been vaccinated against COVID-19. So, they die at a higher rate. I did the math, and even though hundreds of thousands more Trumpy Americans have died needlessly of COVID, that is, if they’d been vaccinated, maybe they would have lived, probably they would have lived if they’d taken precautions. You’re looking at, I don’t know, as many as half a million Trumpy people who died needlessly of COVID. But if you look at where they live, there’s not enough of them in any one red state or purple state to flip that state blue. For people in Canada, red means Trumpy and conservative, purple means kind of equally divided like Georgia can go either way and blue means liberal. There aren’t enough people. In Florida, Florida has needlessly, because of Florida’s shitty COVID policies, lost 60,000 people. That’s not enough to flip Florida. Similarly, the people who might secretly watch a late-night show after their spouse is in bed probably aren’t enough to flip any states.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 