The immovable Republican Party and 'ink-blot politics'

Supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was an effort to stop the procedural certification of a presidential election that Joe Biden won and Trump lost. The mob was egged on by conspiracies and Trump's lies about that 2020 election. Those are facts. One year later, and a day after the commemoration on Capitol Hill of that attack, those facts should be indisputable. And yet millions on the right do dispute them. They've been convinced by Trump, reinforced by right-wing media and enabled by Republican elected officials that his meritless lies about a stolen election are somehow true. They are not. The independent judiciary, with many judges who were appointed by Republicans and Trump himself, as well as audits in state after state, have rejected Trump's false claims.

The media landscape is fractured. Confirmation bias is real — if people believe something, there's likely a link on social media that shows them why they're right (even when they aren't). There's fertile ground for that landscape, as trust in the media has declined over the last few decades. It hit 32% just before the 2016 election, the lowest ever recorded by Gallup. (As of 2021, it was a similar 36%.) The decline in mass media coincides with the advent of Fox News, the conservative cable channel. Fox was created in 1996, about when Gallup found a majority of Americans said they had trust in the media. Now, there are even more — and even more extreme — voices and outlets on the right, rife with misinformation and disinformation, that are gaining traction. An NPR/Ipsos poll released this week showed that a majority — 54% — whose primary source of news is Fox News or conservative media believe falsely that there was major voting fraud in the 2020 election.