Phil Keith nailed it in his recent Mostly Right column [“A Conspiracy Of Dunces,” Opinion, January 7]. To generalize from Phil’s specific example, the American public, as information consumers, is engulfed in an epistemological problem: We can’t agree on basic facts, and we can’t separate opinion from fact, and it’s preventing us from reaching consensus on important things like presidential elections and pandemics.
Phil cites the example of a Facebook group’s inability to accept basic data — the number of registered voters in the United States — giving rise to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
Examples of weakly concocted voter fraud allegations abound, but there’s no better state to examine claims of voter fraud than Georgia. President Trump personally intervened in Georgia’s post-election recount, urging the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 11,780 more votes so that he could win Georgia by one vote.
Further, convinced by frenzied nightmare scenarios laid out by his election law team, a credulous Mr. Trump alleged … [more]
