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JWeinCom on 04 December 2016
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Shadow1980 said:

While not all conservatives believe outlandish nonsense, I cannot help but notice how American conservatism in general has become more and more open to rejecting objective reality. Bircher-style paranoia is becoming ever more mainstream. We are, after all, talking about a political movement where the majority of its members think that not only is the scientific consensus on global warming is wrong, but that the science is part of some vast left-wing hoax designed to destroy America's economy or something else equally nefarious. We have dozens of Congressmen and now also a president-elect who parrot this nonsense. AGW denialism has become increasingly ingrained into the very notion of what it means to be a conservative. More and more it's becoming part of their identity. Fewer than one in four Republicans accept the scientific consensus that global warming is real and predominantly due to human activities.

If you can be convinced to reject physical reality itself, you can be convinced of a host of other outlandish claims supported by zero evidence. Even in 2016, less than 30% of Republicans agree with the statement "Barack Obama was born in the United States." And most relevant to this discussion, at least 60% of Republicans believe voter fraud is common. Again, we have conservative people in positions of political power who either refuse to fight against these obviously false ideas, or they believe in them themselves. This is not healthy.

They say that all stereotypes have an element of truth to them. While support for science denialism or Birtherism or voter fraud conspiracies are not unanimous, they are present in an overwhelmingly majority of the conservative populace.

To be fair, there are plenty of liberals who believe ridiculous things, but in every case I can find, support for such notions is far, far from mainstream, and in many cases it has no significant ideological component (liberals and conservatives are both just as likely to be anti-vax or anti-GMO, for example, and such views are a relatively small minority). The "paranoid style" is largely a conservative phenomenon in today's America.


That's the beauty of conspiracy theories.  Once you've accepted that everything is a conspiracy, you are free to reject any piece of evidence without any reason. 

And that's what Trump has been doing this whole election.  He never actually came up with any evidence to dispute what was being said about it.  He just said that the media/establishment/SNL is out to get him.  Never really provided evidence, but just gave his supporters an excuse to reject anything without reason.