A Lot of People Are Saying

by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead

[Kevin Costain]

Right from the beginning, you know this is about Trump. From using his catchphrase as a title to labelling him the “conspirator in chief ” in the introduction. So, yes very critical of Trump, but are we going to also get a deeper examination of hive mind conspiracies? This is my hope.

The point about Red Sox fans and their ambulance to The Yankees hit well:
“With respect to the Yankees, the question of justified belief does not arise for RedSox fans, at least not in a philosophic or scientific way. It arises from a tribal context, where validation comes from repetition by those in the relevant community—in this case, RedSox Nation.“

Conspiracism is not skepticism.

The problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.” This is dangerous in a president, Will observes, for it “leaves him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.”1 And when that mind demands that its reality be accepted as how things are, we are embattled by an assault on our sense of what it means to know something.

So, even with this book, we don’t have a definitive answer on how to face this scourge. I do wish it delved deeper into the beginnings of some of the more crazy theories such “Pizzagate,” but as a short look at these problems we now face regularly, this book does well.