Moonshine Ink editor and current friend of the Ink
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It materialized like a scene from war-torn East Timor or Benghazi, Libya a horde of extremists overrunning the Capitol, enflamed by lies, determined to destroy the democratic will of the American people.
That image, and that day Jan. 6, 2021 will haunt us through history. In a democratic republic, our elections are perhaps our most fundamental and sacred institution. If the people’s choice of who represents them is not honored, the entire structure of a democratic republic falls away like a building with its foundation ripped out from under it.
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Fortunately, the foundation held. Unfortunately, the lies remain.
The QAnon delusion has not loosened its grip
Uscinski found a substantial 0.413 correlation between those who support or sympathize with QAnon and “dark” personality traits, leading him to conclude that “the type of extremity that undergirds such support has less to do with traditional, left/right political concerns and more to do with extreme, antisocial psychological orientations and behavioral patterns.”
The illogic of conspiracy theorists is clear in the findings of a 2012 research paper, “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories,” by Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton, members of the psychology department at the University of Kent, and Michael J. Wood, a former Kent colleague. The authors found that a large percentage of people drawn to conspiracy thinking are willing to endorse “mutually incompatible conspiracy theories.”