As I noted in our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex:

Long before Covid arrived, I’d joked with friends that if the ever boasting and self-promoting President Trump discovered the cure for cancer, his detractors would rather forgo the treatment than acknowledge he’d done something of value for humanity. It’s probably an inevitable outcome of America’s two-party system that any president may become the object of hyperbolic loathing. In the nineties, Republicans obsessed about President Clinton’s faults, real and perceived. In 2003, the columnist and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer coined the expression Bush Derangement Syndrome as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.” Green Breakdown: The C... Steve Goreham Best Price: $15.58 Buy New $20.12 (as of 08:02 UTC - Details)

During the presidency of Donald J. Trump this syndrome became so virulent that it created a strangely binary posture in public affairs. If Trump expressed even mild enthusiasm for a policy, person, or thing, his opposition automatically rejected it. To be sure, Trump often threw gasoline on the fire with his vices, his bombastic personal style, and occasional buffoonery. The qualities that had once been viewed as showman’s schtick were widely deemed unacceptable in a US President. The court jester had become king, and it drove the lords and ladies at court mad.

As anthropologists and psychologists have long understood, humans are hyper-social and tribal. Stanford Professor Rene Girard has pointed out that during times of stress and rivalry, we are inclined to ascribe blame not to a complex state of affairs, but to a particular person or group. Persistent problems and misfortunes build up negative psychic energy, which generates a collective yearning to destroy the person or persons on whom the blame is heaped. This process of scapegoating is amplified by what Professor Girard called mimesis—that is, imitation—the tendency to embrace an opinion or sentiment because everyone in a preferred group is embracing it. In trying to make sense of the world, we often look to those around us for cues to guide us in our perceptions and opinions.

When presented with information, we all have a tendency to evaluate it in accordance with the identity of the messenger. People who identify themselves as conservatives tend to be automatically skeptical of any representation made by a messenger who is associated with the political Left.

Likewise, people who identify themselves as liberals or leftists tend to be automatically skeptical of any representation made by a messenger who is associated with the political Right.

I thought of this cognitive bias this morning when I stumbled across a 2017 study published by the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin titled More than 300,000 estimated victims of human trafficking in Texas. The report states: Approximately 79,000 minors and youths are victims of sex trafficking in Texas.

The Boys in the Boat: ... Brown, Daniel James Best Price: $1.38 Buy New $10.94 (as of 06:20 UTC - Details) Upon reading this, I was instantly reminded of the film Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel, that was released on July 4, 2023. Apparently because the the producers and cast are widely associated with right-wing Christian circles, pretty much every legacy media film review panned it as a “QAnon Fever Dream” or a film “linked to QAnon” or a film championed by “supporters of QAnon.”

In other words, instead of applauding the filmmakers for telling a dramatic story about an enormous organized crime (79,000 minors sex trafficked in the State of Texas alone), the MSM critics all panned it in the same programmatic and robotic way.

Now we are seeing a similar cognitive bias happening with respect to the Israel Gaza conflict among many people who identify themselves as conservatives. After an estimated 1000 armed men identified as Hamas fighters committed mass murder and other atrocities against an estimated 1200 Israeli civilians, the Israeli Defense Forces launched a military offensive into Gaza.

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