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I spent a lot of time as a young teenager on various message boards, particularly TalkOrigins, arguing against creationism and its various nonsensical offshoots

I spent a lot of time as a young teenager on various message boards, particularly TalkOrigins, arguing against creationism and its various nonsensical offshoots. It taught me a lot about biology, but it also taught me a lot about the nature of truth, and how people believe things emotionally more often than they believe things rationally. The quantity and persuasiveness of evidence doesn't matter if a person has an emotional investment in their own version of the truth. So when Trumpism came around, with all of it's big lies and little lies and conspiratorial thinking, I wasn't too shocked. It almost seems natural that as one set of emotionally-driven mythologies fades away (biblical literalism) some other version would have to fill the void.

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partdavid 4y ago
Interesting, I also feel like I've been fighting this fight (in person, in debates that were a side project of our academic decathlon club) since I was a teenager, and learned some of the same lessons. Though I don't know that it's zero-sum: I don't think flat eartherism, evolution denial, anti-vaxxism or the like "made way" for Trumpism in the sense that they became less popular and Trumpism became more popular; it might be the other way around, that these tend to reinforce each other and have a large overlap. There seems to be an undercurrent in all of them that you can simply deny and disbelieve the facts you don't like and make them go away.
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