The justification merry-go-round

Today's post is about several links that all appeared in my inbox more or less simultaneously, and are even more interesting in juxtaposition.

First, let's look at the study that appeared this week in the European Journal of Social Psychology called "'They've Conspired against Us': Understanding the Role of Social Identification and Conspiracy Beliefs in Justification of Ingroup Collective Behaviour," authored by Maria Chayinska and Anca Minescu.  The gist of the research is that people jump into belief in conspiracy theories with the greatest of ease -- as long as such belief reinforces the behaviors of the social groups they already belonged to.

The study looked at 315 people in Ukraine, split between people who were supporters of the anti-Russian "Euromaidan" movement and ones who were against it. The researchers presented them with (false) conspiracy theories about the annexation of the Crimea by Russia, and looked at the degree to which they believed it without question.  The Euromaidan supporters were far more likely to accept the conspiracy theory that secret societies and evil plots were at work to sabotage the Ukrainian resistance movement.

Study co-author Maria Chayinska writes:

We found that supporters of a particular cause not only were prone to endorse specific conspiracy beliefs but also to use them in a blame game, thus justifying collective behavior of the group they identified with.  Contrarily, the opponents of the same cause were found not to endorse those beliefs at all.  Thus, we found how ideologically charged social identities align with the tendency to believe in particular conspiracy theories surrounding acute political and societal issues that commonly cause a divide in a public. 

Conspiracy theories are ideological in nature, so people who either strongly endorse or oppose them have a reason to do so.  This reason is oftentimes rooted in their psychological commitment and loyalty to particular social groups that advocate a certain ideology.

Which is an interesting, if not especially surprising, result.

The same day as a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me the above story, I received five -- count 'em, five -- links addressing the current practice of indefinite separation of children from parents who are attempting to immigrate to the United States.  Let's take them in order of least-to-most egregious:

First, Fox News's Tucker Carlson:

This is one of those moments that tells you everything about our ruling class.  They care far more about foreigners than about their own people.  You probably suspected that already.  [The Left's] only solution is immediate amnesty for anyone who crosses our borders with a minor in tow.  And of course, that's the same as no borders at all.

Well, if you think that everyone objecting to the horrid treatment of these children is a member of "the Left," you're including Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Laura Bush, Bill Kristol, Ted Cruz, John McCain, and (for fuck's sake) Reverend Franklin Graham.  And Carlson's blatant straw man argument -- that Democrats are, one and all, for completely opening the borders to anyone -- is so idiotic it hardly deserves refutation.  (Allow me to say only that I defy you to find one elected official, left or right, who has proposed allowing unrestricted immigration.  Just one.)

Then there's Laura Ingraham, also (surprise!) of Fox News:

As more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents.  And temporarily housed at what are, essentially, summer camps.

Lady, I don't know what kind of summer camp you attended as a kid, but I'm guessing it didn't require sleeping inside a locked cage.

Speaking of cages, there's Steve Doocy, of... guess where?:

While some have likened it to — them to concentration camps or cages, you do see that they have those thermal blankets, you do see some fencing, but keep in mind — some have referred to them as ‘cages,’ but, keep in mind, this is a great, big warehouse facility where they built walls out of chain link fences.

So not cages!  Just nice guest rooms!  With chain-link walls and cement floors!

Working our way up the nausea-induction scale, we have none other than Ann Coulter, who I honestly thought had decided she had better things to do than to vie for the 2018 Eva Braun Award, but I guess I was mistaken.  Here's what she said:

I get very nervous about the president getting his news from TV...  I would also say one other thing, these child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now — do not fall for it, Mr. President...  A New Yorker article, the New Yorker is not a conservative publication, they describe how these kids, these kids are being coached.  They’re given scripts to read by liberals, according to the New Yorker.  Don’t fall for the actor children.

No worries!  The screams are all scripted!  Says so right in a non-existent article in the New Yorker!  (Maybe the kids are the same "crisis actors" the Deep State got to portray the victims of the Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Boston Marathon massacres.  May as well reuse them, since it worked so well.)

But, if you can believe it, one person went beyond Ann Coulter, which I didn't even think was possible.  So if we can take one more turn on the justification merry-go-round, let's look at Christian television host and moderator of the podcast Faith & Freedom, Leigh Valentine.  The kids aren't actors, Valentine said; they're actually -- evil:

Immigrants crossing the border are committing rape after rape after rape.  Children below ten years old engaging in sexual activity — all kinds of sin and disgrace and darkness; the pit of the pits...  So we’re not getting the top-of-the-line echelon people coming over this border.  We’re getting criminals.  I mean, total criminals that are so debased and their minds are just gone.  They’re unclean, they’re murderers, they’re treacherous, they’re God-haters.

 Yup, that's a pretty sketchy bunch of debased, mindless criminal God-haters, right there.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Linda Hess Miller, Mesa Grande refugee camp 1987 116, CC BY 3.0]

Look, I'm not claiming I have an easy answer.  As I said earlier, I -- like damn near every left-leaning person in the United States -- am not proposing opening the borders and letting anyone in who wants to.  But the vast majority of these people are not criminals (and they fucking sure aren't actors, Ann Coulter).  They're people who are desperate because of awful conditions in their home countries, who want what all of us want -- a clean, comfortable place to live, enough food and water, and opportunities for their children.  Whatever the answer is, it is not demonizing them, dehumanizing them, and/or claiming that what they're going through is not so bad.

If you think a while, you might come up with a few instances in history where the people in power had precisely the same response to the plight of children being held in involuntary captivity.

None of those ended well.

What we are doing right now is wrong.  Pure and simple.  Separating children from their parents is immoral.  And don't start with me about under whose administration the practice started; that's entirely irrelevant.  It's happening now, and it's happening on a scale the likes of which we have never seen.

You stand up against it, or you have abandoned all claim to the moral high ground.

But it does make a weird sort of sense, in light of the Chayinska and Minescu paper we started with.  If you already believe that we're under siege, that immigrants are a threat to everything we hold dear, it's only a small leap to believing that the immigrant children themselves are to blame, or that the whole thing is some kind of grand conspiracy to destroy The American Way.

And all I can say is, if this is The American Way, I'm horrified at what our country has become.

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This week's recommended read is Wait, What? And Life's Other Essential Questions by James E. Ryan.  Ryan frames the whole of critical thinking in a fascinating way.  He says we can avoid most of the pitfalls in logic by asking five questions: "What?"  "I wonder..." "Couldn't we at least...?" "How can I help?" and "What truly matters?"  Along the way, he considers examples from history, politics, and science, and encourages you to think about the deep issues -- and not to take anything for granted.

Hypocrisy on parade

I told myself that I wasn't going to write about Roy Moore, the Republican candidate in the special election for Jeff Sessions's Senate seat in Alabama.  There didn't seem to be much to say.  Moore is, to put it bluntly, a raging bigot, only one example of which is his refusal to follow Alabama's non-discrimination rule with respect to same-sex marriage that got him suspended from the Alabama Supreme Court in May of last year.

But by now all of you know that bigotry isn't Moore's only problem.  In the last week, Moore has faced an accusation by five different women that he approached them for sex when he was in his thirties and they were all under 18.  (The youngest was 14.)  So to put in bluntly, Moore's been accused of pedophilia.

But that's not why I'm writing this post.  I'm writing this post because of the reaction of Moore's supporters.

First, there was conservative talk show host and former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh, who tweeted, "Roy Moore should stay in, stand strong, and fight hard against these allegations.  Oh...and he should ignore all these spineless Republicans hiding under their beds because of a 38 yr old accusation."  He later softened this to imply that all he was saying was that Moore deserved due process and "the voters of Alabama should decide."  But you know that wouldn't have been the message had Moore been a Democrat.

Even more blatant was (unsurprisingly) Ann Coulter, who has been doing nothing but tweeting about Moore.  As a couple of the more pointed examples, we had, "As an Alabaman said on @chucktodd yesterday, right now, all that matters is that Roy Moore will vote for a wall.  Luther Strange wouldn't & the Dem definitely won't."  Because "the wall" evidently supersedes any consideration of following the laws about age of consent and statutory rape.  But when that got her some backlash, she responded, "Hey Dems!  JFK had an extra marital affair with 19-year old Mimi Alford when he was 45 years old."

I just have two things to say about this:

1. There is a difference between 14 and 19.  Cf. my earlier comment about age of consent and statutory rape.
2. I'm quite sure the affair Coulter references will become a huge campaign issue the next time Kennedy runs for office.

Then there was Jim Zeigler, Alabama State Auditor, who said that his biblical values gave him no basis for saying that Moore's alleged affairs were wrong:

Take the Bible.  Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance.  Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist...  Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter.  They became parents of Jesus.

So now pedophilia is okay because all it means is that your underage girlfriend might give birth to a prophet, or failing that, the Second Coming of Christ.

Then Breitbart got involved.  Two reporters for the far-right media outlet were dispatched, by none other than Steve Bannon, to try to find information to discredit the accusers.  Never mind that the five accusers did not know each other prior to this, and given the backlash that women inevitably have to face when they make allegations of sexual abuse public, they had every reason to keep silent.  (Which itself is a pretty horrifying indictment of the way women are treated in our culture.)

Nothing, however, made me gag quite as much as the reaction of ordinary Alabama voters to the Moore accusations, particularly the people who said they'd vote for Moore even if they knew for certain the allegations were true.  Consider this one:

Then, there was the poll in which we find out that 37% of Alabama evangelicals said they were more likely to vote for Moore after the accusations than before.  Because, you know, the media lies.  All of them, all the time.

Except for Fox and Breitbart.  They tell the truth.

All the time.

Oh, and Sean Hannity.  Roy Moore appeared on Hannity's show, where he said, "This is a completely manufactured story meant to defrock this campaign.  They don’t want to acknowledge that there is a God.  And we have refused to debate them because of their very liberal stance on transgenderism."

Evidently Moore doesn't know the definition of "defrock," but we'll let that slide.  More interesting is that Hannity clearly believes Moore and thinks all five of his accusers are lying.  As a result, Hannity began to hemorrhage sponsors, including coffee-maker company Keurig.  But when Keurig made the announcement, you know what the response was?

A whole bunch of conservatives announced they were going to destroy their Keurig coffee makers, Office Space-style.  As for Hannity, he said he was going to buy five hundred new coffee makers of a different brand for people who would video themselves smashing their Keurigs and post it on Twitter.  First come, first serve.

Let me make this clear: these people are destroying their coffee makers as a protest against a company that doesn't want to sponsor someone who defends pedophilia.

I'm afraid I have to agree with Alabaman Kate Messervy, who is a volunteer for the campaign of Doug Jones, Moore's opponent.  Messervy said, "Trump is president.  Nope, this won’t change Republicans’ minds.  Grabbing women by the pussy didn’t sway votes.  This won’t sway anyone."

What I keep coming back to is that this is not a conflict over political ideals.  This is a conflict over morality and decency, with the party that used to call itself the "Family Values Party" largely coming down on the side of an accused pedophile (and, in some cases, declaring that they would vote for him even if the accusations proved true).  This is the determination of people to vote for an individual who has "R" next to his name on the ballot regardless of any other considerations.

It is, to put it simple, hypocrisy on parade.  Many of these same people are horrified at the idea of two consenting adults of the same gender having sex in the privacy of their own homes.  Even more telling is the argument they made regarding why transgender people should be blocked from using the bathroom for the gender they identify with.  "What's to stop grown men coming into the ladies' room and molesting your daughters?", they said.

Um...?

I grew up in the Deep South, and my parents were both staunch Republicans.  And I know they would have been appalled at the accusations swirling around Moore's candidacy.  What has happened in those intervening years?  We have a cadre of talk show hosts and right wing activists who are training the rank-and-file to disbelieve anything in the media unless it aligns with conservative talking points.  Everything else, they say, is a liberal hit job, a smear campaign, or outright lies.

And it's worked.  Hell, they even fell for the claim that Hillary Clinton was running a child trafficking ring from the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn't have a basement.

The bottom line is that moral, decent conservatives -- and I know a good many of them -- need to stand up and say, "Enough."  I'm heartened by the fact that some have -- as just two examples, Mitt Romney, and amazingly enough, Mitch McConnell, have called for Moore to step down.  And this is what it takes.  It's not enough for the liberals to decry what's going on; the moral roots of the Republican party need to draw together and purge the party of screeching, we're-always-right bloviators like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity.  The propaganda campaign by Fox and Breitbart will continue to be successful -- and we'll continue to have amoral individuals like Moore and (it must be said) Donald Trump elected to office -- until the conservatives themselves decide they're done, and put a stop to it.