How did we get so polarized? And what can we do about it?

In this episode, I start out by delving into how humans evolved tribalism, how our news media has become less objective and more biased over time, and how social media makes that even worse.

Then I go into the psychology of Donald Trump, how the Republican Party progressed to the point of nominating someone like him, and how he gets people to believe whatever he wants them to believe.

After that I look at confidence versus proof, the specific example of the 2020 Presidential election, and where things are heading from here.


I dedicate this episode to Howard Boyer, my last surviving grandparent, who lived to a ripe old age of 98 1/2 and passed away the day before this episode went up.  Rest in peace, Pop Pop.

Transcript

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Hi. Today I'm going to delve into a key problem that's beginning worse and worse in American society in recent years. It's hard to pick a specific name for this phenomenon, so I'm going to go with the term polarization. The basic problem is that people are more and more often getting their news from sources that reflect their own biases and are revising their political beliefs accordingly. Hence, people are dividing up into counts with like-minded friends on social media. Now technically there's a lot of nuance there since it's not just the two poles of the left and right. Within those sides there are various subsets where some are more extreme than others. But the term polarization still gets the main point across. Evolutionarily speaking, it benefited human beings greatly to operate in tribes. The idea was that one would very much work along with other members of one's own tribe, hunting together, protecting weaker members from wild animals, caring for the sick, and so forth. Any people who didn't evolve some sort of tribal mindset would die out since a more tribal atmosphere is acquired to raise young and keep the species going. Without hunting, obviously a given tribe's hunting party would sometimes run into the hunting party of a different tribe. Well, food resources are not unlimited, so with scarcity concerns you couldn't just share everything with everyone. And as per human nature, people would be inclined to stock up on non-perishable items so that they could feed their tribes for the winter. Hence it was only natural to see people of another tribe as competition. To some degree, that would certainly lead to physical conflicts, and obviously to some degree people would spread out over larger swaths of land, especially as their tribes continued to grow. Ultimately they had people around them that they were familiar with, all building up certain shared beliefs and understandings together about how to do things, and they could trust them. If they ran into people from a different tribe, they would find that certain things were just done differently in ways that seemed wrong to them. And the more different, the greater the mistrust and animosity. In the nineteen sixties, there were only three television networks in the United States NBC, ABC, and CBS. A great many people certainly wanted to get their news live in the evenings and occasionally throughout the day as warranted. So there weren't a lot of options for that. One of the most well-known news anchors of the era was Walter Cronkite, and he was known for very much just reporting the news and not expressing his own opinions on it. So people kind of thought of news like that. You just go to it and you can trust it to be fair and reasonable. The mentality then was that news was a public service, not a commercial entity. But that started to change in 1968 with the TV show Sixty Minutes. His trademark and initial conceit was that it used a unique style of reporter-centered investigation. And it was very highly regarded and incredibly popular for years and years. But it's much harder to avoid reflecting one's personal biases once one goes into in-depth analysis on a given subject. Sometimes it's just about what details to include or not and how deeply the positive versus negative sides of the story are conveyed. And of course, tribalism comes back into play again as the people in charge of the show bring in the reporters and the staff who tend to think like they do. Over time, the people in the news media, while still adhering to professional journalistic standards, tended for the most part to skew to the left. So in 1996, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes saw an excellent business opportunity. They launched the Fox News cable channel to cater to a more conservative audience. Having little competition for that audience, it did very well. But much like how the Fox Network seemed to skew towards less wholesome and sometimes grittier shows than the other three networks did, the Fox News channel brought in their own commentators who increasively played to their base. Now let's think about how a news website works. People go to the main page and look through the headlines. Certain types of articles get clicked on more than others do. People go to the pages with those articles, and then they click on other links toward the bottom of the page. Usually there are mysterious headlines about famous people or quote unquote sponsored stories you might like, or headlines like where to invest right now, avoid these dying careers at all costs, the best whatever of all time, ranked in order. So how to make more money, how to save more money, some salacious rumors about various celebrities, best of list ranked in order, or basically any headline they can justify putting a picture of a cute girl with. That's how websites make money, clicks and click-throughs. So if a given topic does well, then obviously you can expect to see more about that, and vice versa. For example, right now, as this podcast goes out, there are a lot of articles about the war in Ukraine. A lot of stuff certainly gets covered, but a lot of stuff gets ignored as well. If you try to completely avoid this type of business model, then you're just not going to earn the revenue that you need to have to really keep doing much journalism at all. The newspaper industry has certainly greatly shrunk since the dawn of the internet. We're at a point now where there are quote unquote local news deserts all throughout the country. It's just not profitable to run a small town paper anymore. So what does this type of business model encourage and discourage? Well, if your news site has a left-wing readership, an article about some outrageous thing that Donald Trump did is likely to get clicks. Say Donald Trump did something positive or helpful. Do the readers really want to hear about that? Will they click on it? Go back to the tribal brain. Here's somebody from outside of my tribe, so I think he's bad. If I see a headline about him doing some outrageous thing, then my anger will be triggered, and I'm going to want to know all the details. So I'll click on the link. Now, I personally experienced a lot of this when I was listening to a podcast of the Rachel Maddow Show and The Last War with Lawrence O'Donnell over an almost four year span. There were all sorts of instances where Trump did something that got me all upset. Maybe it triggered my sense of injustice. Maybe it played into pre-existing notions that rich and powerful people are always screwing over the little guy and never having to suffer any consequences for it. Or maybe it just exemplified more and more corruption, cabinet officials operating in their own self-interest and making money off of those positions rather than just doing their jobs and helping the greater good. So if most people are primarily consuming news from one of these types of sources, they're just building up more and more anger and frustration with the other party over time. What's really depressing is that, well, say you're on the Democrat side and the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House, like they do now in 2022, these news sources make you feel like you're still losing because all the so-called forces of evil are still so powerful and still doing all these big things to screw over whatever progressive agenda would supposedly fix all these huge problems. So given these cable news channels and other news entities who are adjusting their flavoring to better serve the taste of their audiences, it's not surprising that you see people more definitively picking a side and vehemently defending that side. One website that I particularly like is called Ad Fontes Media. Adfantes is Latin for to the source or back to the source. Adfontes is the home of the media bias chart, which was initially put together by patent attorney Vanessa Otero. The chart ranks news sources such as websites, podcasts, and TV on two scales. One scale measures political leanings. It goes through hyperpartisan left, through the middle, and over to hyperpartisan right. And the other scale measures news value and reliability. It goes from fact reporting through various levels of opinion, analysis, and propaganda down to contains inaccurate slash fabricated info. For example, I like to listen to podcasts, and one podcast I found myself quite interested in was the one for the Rachel Matto show on MSNBC, like I mentioned earlier. Looking at that on the chart, I can see that it's between SKUs left and hyperpartisan left. One might think that Sean Hannity's show Hannity on Fox News is the equivalent of Rachel Matto's show, but that's incorrect. His show is well within hyperpartisan right, almost at most extreme, and his reliability level is way down into selective, incomplete, unfair persuasion, propaganda, or other issues. At this point, I've mostly switched over to the NBC News website, which is significantly closer to the middle and significantly more fact-based. Obviously, you also have these very fringe websites that have an appeal to certain parts of the population. In these cases, I presume you just have people who don't care about actual truth or objectivity at all. Maybe they just want to have people to hate and reasons to justify hating them. Basically, any substantiated rumor will do as long as it makes their good guys look good and their bad guys look bad. Growing up, I remember we had the National Enquirer and grocery stores, and it was all this completely ridiculous stuff that no rational person was going to believe. But obviously it was entertaining enough that it continued to sell. Let's talk social media. This is a whole new level. Now it's one thing to have news websites, newspapers, and cable news channels where things are pretty clearly divided into left and right. But with the advent of social media, a whole new level of more personalized customization can be employed, so you get positive feedback not just about your own side, but about any little nuanced or fringe movement that happens to trigger a little emotion in you in the first place. You have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and other social media networks whose primary driving force is to make money. They make money based on ads, so the more time they can get you to spend it on their sites, the more ad revenue they get. So they have to engage you emotionally in a way that draws you in and pushes you to want to get your say out there as well. If you don't have the time or the inclination to comment or reply, you can still like or otherwise appropriately react to a given post or tweet. And getting likes and responses on your own post triggers something along the lines of a dopamine hit in your brain, giving you a pleasurable experience that you're inclined to pursue again. So you're creating and sharing content that some other people will engage with, and you're generally synchronizing with other people who feel the same types of positive and negative emotions you do. When you have some sort of definitive bad guy to rally against, your news continually finds stuff that the bad guy did and paints it in a way that makes you upset with that bad guy all over again. There's a situation I run into on rare occasion on Facebook that's particularly fascinating to me. I myself barely have any adversity to conflict at all. To me, being able to debate and get the opposing ideas out there is so incredibly worthwhile that I'm perfectly willing to go into anger territory to achieve that. Obviously, the people who are friends with me on Facebook are at least open enough to what I have to say to put up with me. But the fascinating thing here occurs sometimes when I'm commenting on a post with someone I disagree with. Sometimes one of their Facebook friends will jump in on the conversation as well, and they'll take the debate into a totally new level. It's like they haven't had any contact at all with a person with my viewpoint in years, and they've been reinforcing their hatred against us in their echo chamber for that whole time. So they just respond with this massive anger attack. For example, recently I got into a debate with a Facebook friend who clearly has an axe to grind against any and all religion. And of course a friend of his showed up or he called him in special or whatever. So both of these people are quote unquote prove there's a god types. Maybe you've seen people like that yourself. Anyway, the core of my spiritual belief is basically that there is only God and that there is nothing out there that is quote unquote not God. Well, these people didn't know how to handle that since they're used to demonizing the more traditional Christian types. So if they say prove there's a God, and I say, everything is proof that there's a God, and then they start delving into arguing against the old man in the sky with a beard thing, well, I try to explain that I don't believe in the old man in the sky with a beard. And I try asking them about things like the first cause or prime mover or whatever starred the whole universe in the first place, but they're not interested in that. So they go after me with the classic straw man of you don't believe in all those other gods, just the one. I just don't believe in one more god than you do. Of course, this completely misses the point of anyone with any actual depth to their spirituality. Basically, it's just this grand opportunity to yell at me about how wrong I supposedly am about all sorts of stuff that in reality I don't believe in at all anyway. But they don't care because I represent something to them that is significantly different from my actual self. Basically, you get this psychological situation where a person is, well, to use religious terminology, trapping themselves in their own private hill, full of all sorts of hatred towards something or someone else. And of course, they have this smug logic tenet that they think is completely unassailable. You can't quote unquote prove there's a God by the little logical structure they've co-opted from somewhere or other. It's really just smugness, though. A lot of the time when people try to make logical arguments, they're just not applicable, or they're starting from premises that are just not the correct premises to start from. What do I mean? It's like this. They'd say the answer is four because we're adding two and two. But I'd say no, it's actually six because we're adding two, two, and another two on top of it. Just because their addition is correct doesn't mean that it's the right answer for the actual issue at hand. There's a famous saying that I like to quote, and it has many permutations, but this one sums it up very well. Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Let's stop for a second and let that sink in a little. Holding a grudge against someone else or thinking that they're incredibly terrible doesn't actually do anything to them at all. Maybe what you're upset about is completely justified, or maybe it's a massive misinterpretation of reality. But either way, those negative emotions are just stirring up inside you and they're not making your life any happier or more fulfilling. Obviously, I'm not saying I'm above this myself or that it's easy to just stop holding on to resentment and start being happy, but any little bit of improvement on this front helps. On a lighter note, another adage comes to mind when you think about how social media works. Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it. Now that we understand the whole situation with how our news sources have evolved and how they work today, let's look at how Donald Trump specifically works and then how he's flourished in this environment. I've heard a great deal of psychological analysis about Donald Trump. Now, I have to acknowledge that most of it comes from sources that are leftward biased to some degree, but I don't see any sources that are rightward biased or centrist who are analyzing the man this deeply, let alone positing counterarguments to these assessments, so I'm gonna go with them. Also, one nice thing about someone being an incredibly public figure is that not only do they show up in potentially biased news media a great deal, but you can also quite often find information from them that the media can't have tampered with, live and unedited videos, tweets directly from an official account, and so forth. And though I'm not a professional psychologist, psychology is very much a hobby of mine, and I build my analysis off of people with much greater expertise than my own. So let's talk a little about the dark triad. In psychology, the dark triad is a group of three malevolent personality traits that are often correlated with each other narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Now, I could do a whole episode about these psychological traits, and I could include multiple examples of situations in which Donald Trump clearly displayed one or more of them, particularly from during his presidency. But I'm here to get to the point. However, you want to debate subtleties and nuances, generally speaking, this whole dark triad thing overall very certainly applies to him. You can trust me on that, or you can do the research yourself, in which case I certainly believe that anyone acting in good faith would come to more or less the same conclusion. That acknowledged, let's look at how one man's mental health issues ends up having such a wide ranging effect. First off, the Republican Party has actually been progressing in a certain direction for quite a while. Think back to 2008 when you had Sarah Palin. She wasn't the most educated, intelligent, or well informed politician out there by any stretch of the imagination, but she was big on throwing metaphorical red meat out to the base. At that point in time, the Republican Party was wrapping up eight years under the George W. Bush administration. Buoyed by nine eleven, Bush's first term went extremely well, well enough that he was able to turn post 911 sympathy into enough support for an extra war in Iraq that we didn't need. This is the type of thing that happens when a political party gets too much power and popularity. The more extreme parts of their policies get enacted, and these inevitably go badly. Bush held on to the image that Iraq was going well enough to get through the 2004 election, and the economy held together well too. But after that, the massive cost and lives and money of holding on to Iraq and trying to establish a democracy there became more and more evidently not worth it. Then Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in August to September 2005 was perceived badly, and all sorts of scandals started piling up. 2006, the middle of Bush's second term, became like what you usually see in the middle of a president's first term, a shift in power where the opposite party retakes the house. And then by 2008, we had the housing market bubble bursting and the Great Recession where the economy fell apart. To be fair, the housing market crisis can most directly be traced back to policies that Bill Clinton put in place just before the end of his presidency and all sorts of Wall Street greed along with it. But when you're the president, you get the blame. I remember a quote from an interview with Ralph Nader in 2008. If the Democrats can't win now, they might as well pack up and go home. As it worked out, the Republicans end up going outside the box with picking John McCain, a self-proclaiming maverick, that year. It was probably the smartest feasible move at that point, to be honest. But in hindsight, I think it was an early version of people being fed up with government business as usual and looking towards some sort of outsider to pull things in a different direction. I don't think the 2012 election really fit that pattern. Obama was still relatively popular and the economy was getting better and better under his watch. Mitt Rowney was basically the runner-up for the Republican nomination from 2008, and his running mate Paul Ryan was the supposed smart guy in Congress and knew how to get the budget all worked out. By this point, Republican opposition was coalescing into movements such as the Tea Party, and a large number of Republicans were being elected to Congress who would absolutely not compromise at all in tax matters, and the era of government shutdowns returned. As Andrew Yang noted throughout the 2020 election season, Donald Trump was a symptom, not the root cause of the disease. In 2016, congressional approval ratings were extremely low and calls for outsiders were increasing. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, who of course is extremely far left and technically an independent, gained some serious traction towards actually getting the nomination. In fact, when he lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton, there were certainly some voters who cared so much about getting an outsider in office that they switched over to Trump rather than supporting Hillary. So as the 2016 election progressed, the general thinking was that Hillary Clinton was going to win it. She was ahead in the polls almost the entire time after the nominees had both been determined. But Trump was an extremely interesting character for the news media to report on, so he got a great deal of coverage throughout the campaign. Part of why Trump got the nomination in the first place is because of how Republicans do their delegate allocation throughout the primaries. While Democrats distribute them proportionally per state, Republicans have a winner-take-all approach. So, for example, in 2020, in the first Democratic primary in Iowa, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders effectively tied. So of course, they both got the same number of delegates from that. By comparison, when you look at early 2016, you can see that Donald Trump amassed a lot of delegates from the early states, building off of name recognition. With just a few bare majority wins here and there, Trump was able to get the nomination despite being supported by only a plurality of Republican voters. Not even a majority of them. But when you have something like 15 to 20 candidates, name recognition matters a lot. When you're down to just a few, people can focus more on the policies and the character of the people in question. So that explains the systemic causes that open up the opportunity for someone like Trump to become president. Now let's get back to the other side of it. What is it about Trump that makes him the type of person who could end up becoming president in a system with an opening like this? Trump's mental health issues include some sociopathy. This is, basically speaking, a lack of caring and compassion for other human beings. That particular facet of what's supposed to help make a human a human, someone who helps the tribe overall survive, it just isn't there. Instead, there's an inherent focus on the self, putting the self first, making the self look good in any and all circumstances, presenting the appearance of success, wealth, and so forth, whether the reality is there or not. In other words, there's this willingness to latch on to absolutely anything that helps back up his existing worldview, or he's great. No matter how easily disprovable the statement is or how unreliable the source of it is. This particular disorder has an unsurprising yet, to me, extremely fascinating trait to it. When someone presents the person with bad news or news that makes them look bad or whatever, it's like there's a short-term memory loss that occurs. The information simply cannot be absorbed into the mind and processed. By comparison, when some piece of information of the opposite nature is presented, it is very much latched onto and remembered to be used again whenever the opportunity arises. This also causes or at least ties in with the ability to confidently lie without any sense of guilt or remorse. See how all the pieces fit together? The stuff he's remembering and believing in his own head is already very warped and biased to begin with, and then he doesn't care about other people at all, only that he gets what he wants out of them. So if he can say something that leads other people to think more highly of him, then he's very much motivated to do that. Every conversation is transactional. He sees it as having a winner and a loser, and he cares very much about winning every single conversation. Another side of this Is that there's actually a deeply buried subconscious lack of self-worth, which needs constant praise and adulation to cover it. So not only is positive feedback required, but attention is needed almost like oxygen is. Sometimes it's about doing what it takes to be in the news cycle at all, even if some of that coverage is negative. I remember one time when Trump was giving a live press conference to a bunch of different reporters. At one point he pointed to a member of the audience and said, CNN, you are fake news. Now, at one level, this looked like it was just part of an ongoing scheme to discredit the largely liberally biased media. But what I didn't come to understand until later was that in Donald Trump's own mind, he believes that CNN is fake news. Namely, whenever they say something bad about him, he automatically dismisses it as fake. He just doesn't believe it or internalize it at all. Here's another way to think about how Donald Trump operates. He has this massive, multifaceted, ongoing persistence and dedication to believing in this reality no matter what any external entities try to argue. If he wants to, he can just deem any external entity or information source to be inaccurate or worse, flat out lying. Another thing that he did during his presidency, as he'd certainly done before it, was surround himself with yes men, people who were loyal to him and just told him what he wanted to hear. I'm sure you saw the extraordinary rate of churn among cabinet members and other high ranking officials in his administration. Basically he was weeding out people who actually had expertise and intelligence and replaced them with people who went along with whatever he wanted them to do. You can see that Vladimir Putin has the same basic problems nowadays with his Ukraine invasion. My understanding is that once COVID started, Putin became very paranoid and basically only let about five people actually physically be around him. Though that itself doesn't stop you from being open to bad news since you still have remote communication, it certainly doesn't help. It gets rid of those longer, relaxed side conversations, maybe over hanging out with his buds over some vodka, I don't know. Or maybe he could have been gently conjoled into some other ways of thinking. One thing that's important to think about regarding human nature in general is that we have a great deal of respect for confidence. Evolutionarily, it makes sense. If someone knows what they're doing, then they're probably pretty confident about it. As people who don't have that person's expertise, we want to be able to trust them and work with them for the greater good. Now let's talk about what tactics Trump uses to exploit this aspect of human nature. One key thing is repetition. He uses a phrase from Stalin over and over again in his speeches. The press is the enemy of the people. As people hear that more and more, it sinks in and they start believing it. I watched Trump's speech at the end of the 2020 Republican National Convention. I don't really have the words to describe the massive degree of disconnect from reality that was in there. It's easy to make yourself sound like the best president ever and to make your opponents sound like the worst people ever if you just flat out make everything up. But I realized that this target audience is millions of people who've been listening to him and all his confidence and all his repetition since he started out in 2015. So they just kept buying into it more and more and trusting other information sources less and less, and by that point in time they were so far down the rabbit hole that they could actually believe all the stuff he was saying. But that's how it works. It's the same as the way things work with cult leaders and people getting indoctrinated into believing them. The next tactic is that he takes an absolutely minuscule or perhaps even non-existent threat and he overhypes it beyond all recognition. Hillary Clinton used a private email server for some of her communications. Yes. One thing I can tell you about the federal government is that they take security very seriously. If this had been a problem in any objective sense, they would have dealt with it. But Trump used that as a pretext that he took all the way to leading locker up chance. Never mind the fact that Trump and a bunch of his family members did exactly the same thing when they were in power. Here's another example. Say you have one male to female trans student in a whole state who wants to compete in women's sports in a high school, and the other students are actually okay with that. Well, you turn it into a trans invasion where it sounds like thousands and thousands of trans students are destroying women's sports entirely. And then there's voting fraud. In reality, they find maybe ten cases where some Trump supporter tries to get a second vote for Trump in, and that's it. But hey, just act like that's this thing that's happening millions and millions of times all over the country. It's easy for Trump supporters to believe that there's no way anyone would vote for Joe Biden after all, so certainly makes sense to them that that's what's going on here. And then having hyped all these virtually nonexistent threats up into some massive problem beyond recognition and having convinced your followers to get really, really angry about this, use the threat as a pretext to do whatever you want to do. Want to pass massive voter suppression laws? Sure. Want to invade Iraq? Of course. Heck, some people are so impassioned that you just need to put the seeds in place and they'll decide what actions need to be taken themselves. Want to hang Mike Pence on January 6th? Clearly he's not 100% loyal to cause, right? You've already got the news ready for Nancy Pelosi anyway, so you just need some more rope. You have the pretext in place for whatever you want to do. The sky's the limit. Completely ridiculous. But that's how it works. So you put all this together and you can see how Trump comes across as a very viable information source to his passionate followers. He believes in himself so much that if you want to believe in him, you can just agree with all the reasons he gives you for why he's right and why he's not wrong. Your mind is able to buy into this reality if it wants to, and it may very well want to do that, especially if you're already inclined to dislike or hate the Democrats, and you already kind of think that the country is going in the wrong direction whenever Democrats are in power. Trump started out with the whole Obama not being born in the United States thing, and he rode that as long as he could, right? So that gets us from what's going on in Trump's mind to what's going on in the minds of his followers. So now's a good time to address the concept of certainty. When you're thinking about a given belief, here's a very important question to ask yourself. What would it take to convince you that you were wrong? I can understand that we humans often don't want to open up to other people about our doubts, especially when we're trying to belong to a group of believers. But I'm not talking about admitting uncomfortable things to anyone else. This is for you personally in your own mind acknowledging how you're thinking and where your beliefs are coming from. You need to be able to do this in order to be honest with yourself. What would it take to convince you that you were wrong? One extremely important religious concept, in this case tied specifically to Catholicism, is the deadly sin of pride. The idea here is that any given human person has a tendency to see themselves as being quote unquote right or being quote unquote the best or even basically being God. But this is the ego self that does that. One concept that you find in many places, not just in religious contexts, but also in support group contexts, is the idea of submitting to a higher power. The idea is to realize that there is something greater than, quote unquote, me out there that understands truth better and more completely. There's something more powerful than the self that has better knowledge and better understanding and is better equipped to help you with your problem than you are. You're just one of about eight billion people on one planet in one galaxy out of all of outer space, and who knows how expansive it is. So that's the first step, understanding wrongness itself and why people can get caught up in it. But the next step is all about what you actually can prove. The way proof actually works is through science with the scientific method. And for this I'm mainly talking about the hard sciences, physics, chemistry, and biology. What you do is you test a theory and see what result your experiment gives you. The idea is that there's some sort of reasonably understandable way of assessing the things involved. And a completely separate person could run the same experiment somewhere else and get the exact same result. So you're trying to make sure that you've accounted for all the relevant inputs to your experiment, and hopefully someone else can replicate all the same relevant inputs and get the same output. In other words, the result is objective and replicable. It's important to note that the scientific method has one weakness. If one of the inputs is faith, then you can't test for that because science basically tests for what type of result you're going to get if you have no specific faith or trust in the process yourself. But gravity doesn't have anything to do with faith, neither do electricity and magnetism. So there's a great deal of stuff that doesn't involve faith at all that you can rely on and build from. We literally went from starting fires as cavemen all the way up to building and flying the space shuttles and making iPhones, all based on science. Science is all about modeling reality so that we can understand it and work with it better. One saying I've heard that I really like is no model is perfect, but some models are useful. And that usefulness is enough to get you all the way to space shuttles and iPhones. So let's get back to answering what would it take to convince you that you were wrong. Let's say it's if people ran some independent science experiments to test this, and I saw their methodologies and their results, and they came up with something that proved me wrong, then I would be convinced. That's a good, honest way to go about things. You always want to be willing to consider new information. If you do this type of thing for long enough, eventually what generally happens is that you don't run across huge, completely world-changing paradigms too often. Rather, increased knowledge tends to more often lead you to just a little bit of tweaking to your map of reality. Kind of like how at the macro level, Newtonian physics is slightly tweaked by relativity. Relativity gives you a much deeper level of understanding of what's really going on, and in some ways it matters a great deal, but you can still trust that the ball you throw is going to move in a parabolic arc, and you can calculate various things about that. Okay, it's time to look at one of the biggest examples of contradictory beliefs out there in the United States right now. And this is actually a binary one. Yes or no, true or false, one or zero. Here's the question. Did Joe Biden fairly win the 2020 presidential election? I'm not asking if everything involved was 100% legitimate. What I'm saying is that if you were to remove or undo any of the actually illegal actions that anyone did, the process of voting, counting the votes, otherwise determining the outcome, whatever, would you still have ended up with the result that Biden won? Or would you instead have ended up with the result that Trump won? So let's look generally at how the evidence and debunking progressed at a public level after the election. The idea is that we're juxtaposing these events with what's going on in the minds of people who believe that Trump won. If it's November 2020 and the election just happened, you're seeing all these suspicious claims appearing, then it might be exciting to buy into the whole idea that Trump won, if you're a Trump supporter. But as time goes on, it becomes less and less so. First, we have this guy, Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He was the administration's most senior cybersecurity official responsible for securing the election. On November 17, 2020, he tweeted that 59 election security experts all agree that the claims of fraud, quote, either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent, unquote. And he was fired by Trump that same day. There was a point in December when Trump's own attorney general Bill Barr acknowledged that the election was legitimate and that Biden won it. On January 6, 2021, it became apparent that Vice President Mike Pence didn't have a strong enough baseline to stand on to exceed Trump's wishes. It should be noted that Pence never had authority to change anything in his official duties of January 6th, regardless of what he had said. And of course, we had that sizable mob of people who stormed the Capitol, beat up many members of the Capitol police, and indicated some intent to kill not only several prominent Democratic legislatures, but also Mike Pence himself. It should be noted that a great many people who were involved in criminal activities then have been arrested and charged, and the trials are ongoing even now. It's also worth noting that Trump did not pardon a single one of them during the two weeks he remained in office after that day. So my general observation is that when it comes to public figures involved in politics who lean towards the right, there are two camps. One camp is those people who have either a political motivation or financial motivation to go along with this idea that Trump won. This includes any Republicans who are for re-election, conservative podcast hosts like Steve Bannon, and of course members of Trump's TV lawyers like Rudy Giuliani. The other camp is those people who really didn't have nothing to gain by playing along. Here you have retired politicians such as Dick Cheney and people who feel free to speak their minds like John Kasich or Chris Christie. It's also worth noting that Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican in the government at the moment, has more recently shifted closer towards acknowledging that Biden won, as have other Republicans. So when you take all these different motivations into account, it's extremely clear that the whole public movement agreeing with Trump on this is very much opportunistic. So where does massive widespread denial of reality go from here? We're at a point now where we had all those court cases about the election get thrown out. We have that audit in Arizona, and we have plenty of time for whatever other investigations people wanted to do to play out as well. And no proof of any widespread broader fraud has stuck. At the first extreme, Q and I adherents believed that people were going to arrest Biden Harris, among others at the inauguration ceremony, which of course didn't happen. And later on, some of them believed that JFK Jr. was going to reveal himself to still be alive in Dealy Plaza in Dallas where his father was killed, and that he'd be supporting Trump. I didn't research all the details of this. I'm only interested in learning things that have some amount of truth to them, but that's what I hear. Anyway, it's been about a year and a half. We're a lot closer to the next midterm elections at this point. As things stand now in May 2022, it looks like the Republicans may very well gain ground in the midterms. And if they do take the House and the Senate, then a lot of Republican people are going to feel like they are actually represented and have a voice, which will balance things out to some degree. Eventually we'll reach the early stages of the 2024 election, and by then whatever Trump supporters thought about 2020 becomes irrelevant because they can start focusing on trying to get him re-elected. That said, there's still a major wild card in the mix for 2022 and 2024, and that ties back to my first episode. When I started writing this, the Supreme Court very much appeared to be on the way to replacing Roe v. Wade with a 15-week abortion ban. As it stands right now, there's been a leaked draft of an earlier version of the ruling, and it looks like the conservative Supreme Court majority is going much, much further than that. It looks like many states are going to have six-week bans in place, like the one in Texas. If really voting Democrats come out of the woodwork to stand up against Republicans on this, which is possible since it's a very high profile issue, then the Republicans won't regain Congress at all, and that would start getting Republicans really upset. But at least we have a better chance of rebalancing the Supreme Court to better reflect the will of the people if that happened. Ultimately, something fundamental in social media and in the news has to change in order for us to get out of being a society where you just get to customize a reality to your liking. Maybe the younger generation will ultimately want more fair and accurate news rather than biased stuff. It's already evident that a great many people who fall for the ultra right wing news stuff are people of the older generation who thought they could still trust news like they could in their youth. What happens when you grow up knowing about echo chambers? The younger generation is certainly more widely interconnected to the rest of the world than the older generation is. In a way, living in a small rural town with little or no internet connectivity is already like living in an echo chamber. But how well can people really isolate themselves away when they have hundreds of thousands of Facebook friends and will certainly run across people here and there online who make arguments that disagree with their biases? In conclusion, the systems that are in place now are not only letting us polarize ourselves among two fronts, but are actually letting us customize our own very personalized echo chambers. We have politicians who are quote unquote bad guys who are always going to be doing bad things and making the country worse. And we have politicians who are quote unquote good guys who stand for what we stand for and are getting the country in the right direction. There's always some enemy to complain about. There's always some bad guy with some sort of power, no matter how much power your Given side has. Are you starting to see why this podcast is a limited series? When you actually get to the point and you look at how things are progressing over time, you get to a deeper level of understanding about all and you actually come to some conclusions about it. The only way to do a ruling for this topic is to suggest what we ourselves can do in order to escape all these companies toying with our emotions so they can try to get our money. My ruling here is actually a pretty simple one. Be aware. Be aware of what these companies are trying to do. Be aware of what's triggering your negative emotions. Be aware of the fact that if your news source is biased, it's biased, and that objective reality would probably show you that the good guys aren't as good as you think, and the bad guys aren't as bad as you think. Be open to listening to people who get their news from the other side. Be willing to accept that you don't know everything, and that some things that you've heard over and over and over again may very much only be part of the story. They might even be completely wrong. And be willing to agree or disagree, because you know very little of what's out there is actually objectively true or false. A lot of these things are subjective. There are many different ways to see them. And someone else may very well have an opinion that's totally different from yours, and they're just as informed as you are and just as intelligent as you are, but that's how it works. And that's okay. Nobody's right or wrong in those situations. Since you're the appeals court judge, it's up to you to determine if my characterizations of the news media, people believing what they want to believe, echo chambers, and all the rest of it is pretty accurate, or if there are some big nuances that I'm completely missing. And it's also up to you to determine what, if anything, we can do to help get the world out of this mess that only seems to be getting worse and worse. It's not an easy problem to solve, but the important thing is that we're talking about it. Come back next time for the final episode of Get to the Point. We're going to go even deeper, addressing the flaws of human nature itself, and the existential philosophical questions humanity has pondered for centuries. We're also going to talk about the U.S. Senate, the filibuster, eighteen standards, terror limits, and whether or not the dysfunction in there will just keep getting worse and worse, or ultimately consume itself and get better. See you then. But for now, we are out.