London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Thursday, Sep 18, 2025

From Trumpism to lockdown, people believe in the craziest things

From Trumpism to lockdown, people believe in the craziest things

Following his disgruntled supporters’ rampage through the Capitol, Donald Trump’s fate hangs in the balance.
But one artefact of this disreputable administration will survive Trump himself: doubt over the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, shared by some 39 per cent of the electorate, including two-thirds of Republicans.

However refuted in the courts, Republicans’ pervasive conviction that the election was ‘stolen’ must be partially rooted in their rollercoaster emotions while watching the returns. On election night, Trump seemed to be winning. Trump himself declared victory. Only across the following four days, as counts of mail-in ballots dribbled in, did the President’s lead slip agonisingly away.

It’s far more upsetting to appear to win something only to be ‘robbed’ of that victory than to lose outright at the start. Most Trump voters feel the election was stolen because that was their subjective experience of that week.

Trump’s own demented belief in his pilfered ‘landslide’ must have become quite so bitterly consuming because he’d enjoyed that brief period of elation on the Tuesday night, which was, however temporarily, based on fact.

Granted, Trump had primed his constituency to expect the Democrats to cheat for months in advance. Yet however consequential this ‘alternative fact’ for the American public’s shared faith in their political system, the astonishingly prevalent myth of the ‘steal’ exemplifies a far bigger problem than this one highly contagious lie.

At its inception, the internet promised instant universal access to more information than people had ever historically enjoyed by orders of magnitude. During the web’s early days in the 1990s, expectations were idealistically high.

We would all become wiser and better educated. With hard data and qualified expertise at our fingertips, we’d actually know what we were talking about, rather than spout rubbish off the tops of our heads.

We’d communicate with a vast range of social and professional contacts, resulting in an explosion of innovation and personal empathy. I know. Painful to recall. Almost funny, except it isn’t.

Little did we anticipate that loads of information is not the same thing as loads of accurate information. We didn’t remember what people are like. We form opinions first and look for evidence later. We believe what we want to believe, and we’re suckers for whatever promotes our perceived self-interest.

We’re not, in the main, rational creatures, and act more from emotion than reason. We prefer interaction with the like- minded, who fortify what we already think — meaning we instinctively seek out the very antithesis of education. If anything, the internet has made us stupider.

Putting people in touch with one another has proven a dubious business as well. The formation of geographically dispersed but ideologically uniform ‘communities’ magnifies myths and multiplies misinformation. One of the main reasons we believe something is that other people believe it. One can now locate scads of folks fiercely convinced that the US is controlled by Satanic paedophiles.

All this agreement feeds itself. Crazies who mix exclusively with other crazies feel perfectly sane. Given America’s political segregation — now more drastic than racial segregation — many Republicans will not know a single person who thinks that the 2020 election was free and fair.

In the US, this crisis — over no less than what is reality — has been exacerbated by media polarisation, which has tainted once-reliable news sources with partisan advocacy. In fact, the integrity of the mainstream media has been one of the most dispiriting casualties of the Trump era. Presenters on latter-day CNN sound like evangelists.

For most of my life I’ve turned to the New York Times for dependable factual content. No longer. (I especially distrust any article about Britain, on which the paper has been waging a vicious propaganda war since the referendum.)

To triangulate, I now subscribe to a plethora of newspapers and magazines, an impractically costly solution, and I haven’t the time to read them all. In the end, I’ve still little choice but to broadly trust mainstream news, if only because regarding all sources of information as dishonest is exhausting, and logically leads to disengagement and apathy, if not to nihilism and misanthropy.

Nevertheless, how do we know what we think we know? Most of us imagine that cult-like belief systems sustained by self-reinforcing feedback loops are the pitfalls of other people — the loons who spend all day watching fringe firebrands on YouTube. Few Britons will be susceptible to the counter-factual universe in which Trump’s 2020 ‘landslide’ was ‘stolen’.

Nevertheless, 85 per cent of Britons endorse lockdowns to suppress Covid-19, and the stricter the better. Yet liberal democracies have never before responded to contagious disease by rescinding civil rights, repressing family and social life and stifling their economies.

Just as conspicuously, lockdowns, and the UK’s equivalent high-tier restrictions, demonstrably have not worked. Turn on the news: lockdown is not working now. The coronavirus is ‘out of control’ because it’s never been in control. Biology does not respond to government fiat, much less to absurd micromanaging like having to order a ‘substantial meal’ with a pint or classifying a coffee as a ‘picnic’. Joining some two dozen similar international studies, yet another peer-reviewed paper from Stanford University documented last week that while mild interventions like social distancing and appeals to the public have some epidemiological effect, lockdowns do not: ‘We fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures.’

Yet so imperviously certain is the fact-proof popular belief in lockdown that anything I might write to debunk the policy will fall overwhelmingly on deaf ears. For many readers, I’ve merely revealed once more that I live in the same sort of dangerously deranged, even murderous, alternative universe as the ‘stop the steal’ camp that ransacked the US Capitol. Lockdown advocates have the numbers.

But crowds are known for both wisdom and madness. And people believe what they want to believe. No one wants to imagine that they’ve made often drastic personal sacrifices and helped ravage their country into the bargain to no purpose. How can you be sure which of us is living in a delusional, self-reinforcing bubble?
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
US Tech Giants Pledge Billions to UK AI Infrastructure Following Starmer's Call
Saudi Arabia cracks down on music ‘lounges’ after conservative backlash
DeepMind and OpenAI Achieve Gold at ‘Coding Olympics’ in AI Milestone
SEC Allows Public Companies to Block Investors from Class-Action Lawsuits
Saudi Arabia Signs ‘Strategic Mutual Defence’ Pact with Pakistan, Marking First Arab State to Gain Indirect Access to Nuclear Strike Capabilities in the Region
Federal Reserve Cuts Rates by Quarter Point and Signals More to Come
Effective and Impressive Generation Z Protest: Images from the Riots in Nepal
European manufacturers against ban on polluting cars: "The industry may collapse"
Sam Altman sells the 'Wedding Estate' in Hawaii for 49 million dollars
Trump: Cancel quarterly company reports and settle for reporting once every six months
Turkish car manufacturer Togg Enters German Market with 5-Star Electric Sedan and SUV to Challenge European EV Brands
US Launches New Pilot Program to Accelerate eVTOL Air Taxi Deployment
Christian Brueckner Released from German Prison after Serving Unrelated Sentence
World’s Longest Direct Flight China Eastern to Launch 29-Hour Shanghai–Buenos Aires Direct Flight via Auckland in December
New OpenAI Study Finds Majority of ChatGPT Use Is Personal, Not Professional
Hong Kong Industry Group Calls for HK$20 Billion Support Fund to Ease Property Market Stress
Joe Biden’s Post-Presidency Speaking Fees Face Weak Demand amid Corporate Reluctance
Charlie Kirk's murder will break the left's hateful cancel tactics
Kash Patel erupts at ‘buffoon’ Sen. Adam Schiff over Russiagate: ‘You are the biggest fraud’
Homeland Security says Emmy speech ‘fanning the flames of hatred’ after Einbinder’s ‘F— ICE’ remark
Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin Tyler Robinson Faces Death Penalty as Charges Formally Announced
Actor, director, environmentalist Robert Redford dies at 89
The conservative right spreads westward: a huge achievement for 'Alternative for Germany' in local elections
JD Vance Says There Is “No Unity” with Those Who Celebrate Charlie Kirk’s Killing, and he is right!
Trump sues the 'New York Times' for an astronomical sum of 15 billion dollars
Florida Hospital Welcomes Its Largest-Ever Baby: Annan, Nearly Fourteen Pounds at Birth
U.S. and Britain Poised to Finalize Over $10 Billion in High-Tech, Nuclear and Defense Deals During Trump State Visit
China Finds Nvidia Violated Antitrust Laws in Mellanox Deal, Deepens Trade Tensions with US
US Air Force Begins Modifications on Qatar-Donated Jet Amid Plans to Use It as Air Force One
Pope Leo Warns of Societal Crisis Over Mega-CEO Pay, Citing Tesla’s Proposed Trillion-Dollar Package
Poland Green-Lights NATO Deployment in Response to Major Russian Drone Incursion
Elon Musk Retakes Lead as World’s Richest After Brief Ellison Surge
U.S. and China Agree on Framework to Shift TikTok to American Ownership
London Daily Podcast: London Massive Pro Democracy Rally, Musk Support, UK Economic Data and Premier League Results Mark Eventful Weekend
This Week in AI: Meta’s Superintelligence Push, xAI’s Ten Billion-Dollar Raise, Genesis AI’s Robotics Ambitions, Microsoft Restructuring, Amazon’s Million-Robot Milestone, and Google’s AlphaGenome Update
Le Pen Tightens the Pressure on Macron as France Edges Toward Political Breakdown
Musk calls for new UK government at huge pro-democracy rally in London, but Britons have been brainwashed to obey instead of fighting for their human rights
Elon Musk responds to post calling for the murder of Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk: 'Either we fight back or they will kill us'
Czech Republic signs €1.34 billion contract for Leopard 2A8 main battle tanks with delivery from 2028
USA: Office Depot Employees Refused to Print Poster in Memory of Charlie Kirk – and Were Fired
Proposed U.S. Bill Would Allow Civil Suits Against Judges Who Release Repeat Violent Offenders
Penske Media Sues Google Over “AI Overviews,” Claiming It Uses Journalism Without Consent and Destroys Traffic
Indian Student Engineers Propose “Project REBIRTH” to Protect Aircraft from Crashes Using AI, Airbags and Smart Materials
French Debt Downgrade Piles Pressure on Macron’s New Prime Minister
US and UK Near Tech, Nuclear and Whisky Deals Ahead of Trump Trip
One in Three Europeans Now Uses TikTok, According to the Chinese Tech Giant
Could AI Nursing Robots Help Healthcare Staffing Shortages?
NATO Deploys ‘Eastern Sentry’ After Russian Drones Violate Polish Airspace
Anesthesiologist Left Operation Mid-Surgery to Have Sex with Nurse
Tens of Thousands of Young Chinese Get Up Every Morning and Go to Work Where They Do Nothing
×