{"id":10648,"date":"2013-01-28T17:33:31","date_gmt":"2013-01-28T16:33:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=10648"},"modified":"2013-01-28T17:34:55","modified_gmt":"2013-01-28T16:34:55","slug":"why-do-so-many-americans-believe-so-much-nonsense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=10648","title":{"rendered":"Why do so many Americans believe so much nonsense?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to results from a recent Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind Poll,\u00a063% of registered voters in the United States buy into at least one political conspiracy theory.\u00a0The nationwide survey of registered voters asked Americans to evaluate four different political conspiracy theories: 56 % of Democrats and 75 % of Republicans say that at least one is likely to be true.<\/p>\n<p>This includes 36% who think that President Obama is hiding information about his background and early life, 25% who think that the government knew about 9\/11 in advance, and 19% who think the 2012 Presidential election was stolen. Generally, the more people know about current events, the less likely they are to believe in conspiracy theories \u2013 but not among Republicans, where more knowledge leads to greater belief in political conspiracies.<\/p>\n<p>You can read more detail on the survey <a href=\"http:\/\/publicmind.fdu.edu\/2013\/outthere\/final.pdf\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Does this matter? I think so. I have written an essay on &#8220;The Reason For Truth&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/truth.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to results from a recent Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind Poll,\u00a063% of registered voters in the United States buy into at least one political conspiracy theory.\u00a0The nationwide survey of registered voters asked Americans to evaluate four different political conspiracy theories: 56 % of Democrats and 75 % of Republicans say that at least one is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10648"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10653,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10648\/revisions\/10653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}