Today’s composition class was one to remember. I finally launched my conspiracies unit in the way I wanted. I began the talk with an exercise my partner calls, Stranger than Fiction. In this iteration I used a series of conspiracies and situations both true and false. I gathered data from Time and NPR and Snopes. I went to Alex Jones and the National Review. I pillaged the Onion. I wanted to gather as many different kinds of truths and lies as I could. What I learned from the experience was that students come pre-programmed with biases–especially political ones. Here are the two they absolutely believed:
- Donald Trump, in promoting his Trade War against China tweeted, “China is taking us to the cleaners. Every dollar we give them enables this tragedy to go on. We are in a crisis. Americans need to stop ordering takeout from Chinese restaurants. When in these places we need to stand up and walk out without paying. #MAGA”
- Nancy Pelosi went to a benefit for kids with cancer recently, but she was so drunk she was asked to leave. After filling a beer mug with vodka and sprinkling some Crystal Light in there for color, Pelosi was so drunk she started making fun of the hats the kids had made earlier. Art Tubolls, the billionaire who organized the event, says he’s very upset that things went the way they did: “I asked Speaker Pelosi to come so the kids could see how leadership was handling the government shutdown. She showed up drunk and left in a vegetative state. It was embarrassing.”
Both are lies. Neither is even remotely grounded in reality, but both are founded on the idea of what we want to believe depending on what side we are on. Here is another lie they believed:
- Denver International Airport stands above an underground city which serves as a headquarters of the New World Order. Theorists cite the airport’s unusually large size, its distance from Denver city center, as well as assorted alleged Masonic or Satanic symbols, and a set of murals which include depictions of war and death.
They wanted to believe these things, because belief was easy. Belief triggered cognitive ease. It reinforced things they’d always heard or ideas they suspected to be true. What they believed is in a sense what we all believe: They believe what they want to be true. What corresponds to what works best for their lives and the people in their lives. The struggle occurs is when what we want to believe is entirely unaligned with the truth.
That is happening a lot these days.
Some Thoughts:
- The last L is love. It took a special person to remind me of that.