This is a longer process that started before Donald's first term as president.
Now it's bearing fruit, people seriously doubt EVERYTHING official. If anyone with a degree or a generally trusted platform says something, a worrying number of people reflexively don't accept it as fact - instead they make up their own facts or get them from people they, for some reason, trust.
Can't remember where I saw the quote: the goal of misinformation is not to get people to believe the misinformation; it's to get them to believe nothing.
It takes the scientific consensus on climate change, turns it around, and exploits climate change for its own devious benefit. I guess school doesn't teach one how to form and test hypotheses.
It's been happening way before COVID, your post exemplifies the sentiment: if trusted sources fail at any point they become absolutely distrusted, and people prefer to choose their sources which further departs from a shared reality.
There might have been issues with censoring the lab leak theory, perhaps there were reasons for that such as it not being publicly proven, there was conjecture, etc. but because someone chooses to believe in it, and someone else do not then you got a split reality between them.
Rinse and repeat for a multitude of topics and we get to where we are.
The USA is the canary in the coal mine for this, or perhaps the seed that's spreading across many other countries, hard to tell. Given the free speech absolutism I personally believe it's a bit of both, it's the canary that also seeded a whole movement of conspiracy theorists grifters. I see that happening in Brazil as well, following on the footsteps of what people like Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, etc. created in the USA. And now in Europe I see glimpses of it everywhere.
> It's been happening way before COVID, your post exemplifies the sentiment: if trusted sources fail at any point they become absolutely distrusted, and people prefer to choose their sources which further departs from a shared reality.
This doesn't happen when they fail it happens when they lie to manipulate the public.
For instance: With the lab leak theory, I believe that was suppressed because the authorities didn't want some kind of backlash against China, therefore regardless of any merits the theory had, it was treated as absolutely false and unspeakable. With masks, I believe the authorities very publicly said they didn't work, because they didn't want the public to consume them.
I don't think they'd have lost trust if they hadn't done stuff like that, or spoke with a false confidence when they were just guessing.
And I say this as someone who followed all the recommendations during COVID, except for using a mask when they were telling people not to.
It’s been happening since the Warren Commission and it’s going to keep happening for good reason. The government isn’t trustworthy and by deliberately hiding things from the American public, the American imagination begins to wander. We talk about government censorship around COVID like it’s a drop in the bucket, well it’s a pretty big drop in a pretty deep bucket. Now we have the same corporate media who allowed themselves to be censored by the government telling us that we ought to remove free speech protections when they’re far more complicit than any social media CEO, it’s pathetic.
Now it's bearing fruit, people seriously doubt EVERYTHING official. If anyone with a degree or a generally trusted platform says something, a worrying number of people reflexively don't accept it as fact - instead they make up their own facts or get them from people they, for some reason, trust.