The rise of conspiratorial thinking among the Republican grassroots went beyond QAnon. It wasn’t necessarily that everyone was donning Q shirts or picketing their local pizza parlor. In her focus groups, Longwell found that Republicans she interviewed were increasingly living in what she called a “post-truth nihilism.” They saw reality as a multiple-choice question, where you could select the facts you most preferred. They didn’t bother to investigate whether what they received from Facebook or conservative social media outlets was true. For them, there wasn’t a single truth. Instead, you
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