Yes, there is a lot of truth in what you say. In any war, both sides exaggerate the evils of the enemy.
And in the US, the base of the Right is 'low-information'. There are a lot of grifters preying on them. A good analysis of this situation, by someone on the Right, can be found here, in the essay "Liberals read, conservatives watch TV" [
Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV ]
However, it's not as simple as smart Lefties and dumb Righties.
First of all, those who follow, or even were on, the Left for the last 50 years know that the 'left-of-liberals-Left' (say,
The Nation magazine leftwards) have always claimed that the government lies, and the mainstream media back up the government.
That's how we got into Vietnam ('Tonkin Gulf incident' [
Gulf of Tonkin incident - Wikipedia ], and how the invasion of Iraq was justified. For nearly 20 years, we were told that we were making steady progress in Afghanistan. So it's ironic to hear Lefties saying that we should now believe the government and MSM.
You list four issues where the Right believes nonsense:
I don't think the 2020 national election (or the 2022 Arizona election) was stolen. However, it's understandable for ordinary Trump voters to be skeptical about mainstream media assurances on this: they saw massive Trump rallies, and anemic Biden rallies.
And there were some unusual statistical anomalies around that election, reported here:
[
Biden’s Inexplicable Victory - Chronicles ]
The problem is, we KNOW the the Mainstream Media is partisan in the stories they choose to report (including all the hoaxes, from those Catholic boys in Washington to Jesse Smollet), and the stories they choose to cover up.
It's like the little boy who cried wolf. So when the liberal media and liberal 'fact-checkers' obsessively attach the word 'baseless' to Trump's claims, they don't have the convincing power they once would have had. This is too bad, but it's not our fault.
As for Covid and the vaccine, note that originally anyone who raised the possibility that the virus was a 'leak' from a Chinese bio-warfare lab was dismissed with sneering contempt by 'the establishment'. The scientific evidence was 'overwhelming', etc etc. Here's the 'fact checker' Snopes:
So ... only kooky rightwing "conspiracy theorists" thought the virus might be made in a lab. There was "rigorous scientific research proving otherwise."
But now, evidently the FBI and CIA have become kooky rightwing conspiracy theorists.
Do you understand why people on the Right might not be blindly trusting of the Official Line anymore?
I have not followed closely the arguments about vaccine effectiveness, whether children should have been vaccinated (and kept out of school), whether lockdowns were justified, the efficacy of masks, and vaccine injury. I did find the Swedish response interesting.
However, I don't think that skepticism about the 'official line' in the US is at all unjustified. For example, there seems to be a re-appraisal going on now about whether the extent of the measures taken was justified.
Of course, mixed in with various degrees of skepticism about vaccine effectiveness, the cost-benefit ratio of extreme lockdown measures, vaccine danger ... is the nutty stuff about Bill Gates and the WEF plotting to depopulate the world. It's a shame that we cannot trust the government for reliable information, but it's where we are.
As for anthropogenic global warming. Again, there seems to be a lot of room for rational skepticism -- not about the raw fact of warming, but about its cause, its extent and above all projections of what will happen based as the century wears on, based on computer models.
Are all AGW skeptics slack-jawed redneck Trump supporters, who couldn't tell a second-order partial differential equation from the label on their beer bottle?
Well, here's one of them, physicist Steven Koonin:
Here's a book by him, for anyone interested in a serious examination of the other side of the AGW argument:
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters.
(I'm reading this book right now. I looked for serious critical reviews of it before I started, but couldn't find any. If anyone knows of one (or more), I'd be grateful for the links.)
Finally, as for paedophilia. Certainly, there are plenty of loony conspiracy theories circulating on the Right. In another post, I mentioned a particularly crazy one involving 'Red Shoes' made from the flesh of children.
But ... there is no doubt that there is a tendency on the Left working to destroy what they see as the final taboo of capitalist society, all of whose other beliefs are, as they see it, just a reflection of power relations designed and implemented to keep the ruling elite in power.
Thus, a US Socialist Workers Party activist, the late David Thorstad, started the North American Man Boy Love Association [NAMBLA] in the late 1970s, and a similar group, the Paedophile Information Exchange [PIE], was started in the UK.
NAMBLA was accepted as a member of the International Gay and Lesbian Association, which has consultative status with the UN. However, many gay people changed their mind about co operating with paedophiles, and the IGLA expelled NAMBLA in 1994. In the UK, a similar evolution happened with PIE: at first acceptance on the Left, but later rejection.
These people are still around, just not as visible. They're not stupid, and learned something from their original 'coming out' forty years ago. Now they work step by step, behind the scenes. "Drag Queen Story Hour" is just a first step towards the sexualization of children.
Note: there is an excellent organization working against these people: Gays Against Groomers.They don't think that concern about paedophiles is just a Fox News fantasy pushed out to an audience of gullible Trump supporters. Here's what they say:
[
Gays Against Groomers ]
So, in summary. Yes, the Right has a problem with unfounded nutty theories believed by a lot of its base.
But these theories have not sprung out of nowhere. They're based on a well-justified skepticism about the veracity of what the Deep State/Work Corporations/Mainstream Media tell us about important issues.
That's the problem with lying. Once you realize someone has told you
one lie, you stop automatically believing
anything they say, even if it's true.
