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May 9 - June 5, 2022
ONE SET OF FANTASIES HAS had more current, awful, undeniable real-world consequences than any other: the one that recast owning guns as among the most important rights, as American liberty and individualism incarnate.
among the million-plus Americans interviewed in ten years of Crime Victimization Surveys, exactly one sexual assault victim used a gun in self-defense—several
The NRA has won. Yet they and their compatriots seem no less paranoid or angry, still convinced that tyranny is right around the corner and that federal agents are coming for their guns.
between ages eight and ten, nearly everyone has a creationist explanation for how life emerges; biological evolution doesn’t yet make sense. But by age twelve in the United States, her study found, it’s pretty much only children in fundamentalist Christian households who still believe that animals and people were created supernaturally and simultaneously.
Skepticism of the press and of academic experts has been a paramount fetish on the right for years, which effectively trained two generations of Americans to disbelieve facts at odds with their opinions.
our Christian party chose the candidate who was the least Christian of the lot, and that white evangelicals nonetheless approve of President Trump overwhelmingly.
Whatever he believes or doesn’t, he makes untrue assertions more frequently than any U.S. leader in recorded history.
If the Dutch had extended their influence beyond New York and beyond the 1600s, the sensible and cosmopolitan strains of our national character might be more dominant.
What if we hadn’t been so tolerant of slave labor? What if the American Revolution had failed, or the Confederate secession had succeeded?
Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment’s empiricism, and you get our American mania for connecting all the dots,*5 irrationality in rationalist drag.
The zone between make-believe and true was expanded and became a quintessential product of entrepreneurial America.
The political scientists who wrote American Conspiracy Theories (2014) found that the least educated are almost twice as likely as the most educated to be highly predisposed to believing conspiracies.
let’s call 2000, the first year a majority of Americans were online, the unequivocal first year of full Fantasyland.
As far as religion goes, then, America isn’t so much secularizing as splitting into two distinct societies, one more secular and reality-based, one much less so. Rationalism and reasonableness are gaining some ground, but the true believers, still the bigger cohort, are sticking to their guns.
