Pulling Back The Curtain On Psycho-Spiritual Ruses Used By The Right To Deny Factual Truth

"Confirmation Bias And The Power Of Disconfirming Evidence"  
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/05/confirmation-bias-and-power-of.html

"How Truth Is Determined In Rural America"

An Epistomology That Insures Wrongness And

Confirmation Bias Is Everything
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-united-states-of-america-were-1.html

Alan: If you've never read any metalevel analysis concerning "confirmation bias" and the fundamental emotional/existential pre-determination of what information is "acceptable" and what information MUST be denied, the article below is a good primer.

How A Cognitive Failing Explains Why So Many People Reject The Facts About The Pandemic

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/how-a-cognitive-failing-explains-why-so-many-people-reject-the-facts-about-the-pandemic/

Excerpts: In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively easy: Just present strong evidence, or evidence of a strong expert consensus. This approach succeeds most of the time, when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen. But things don’t work that way when scientific advice presents a picture that threatens someone’s perceived interests or ideological worldview.

In practice, it turns out that one’s political, religious or ethnic identity quite effectively predicts one’s willingness to accept expertise on any given politicized issue...

The human talent for rationalization is a product of many hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation. Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one’s tribe required assimilation into the group’s ideological belief system – regardless of whether it was grounded in science or superstition. An instinctive bias in favor of one’s “in-group” and its worldview is deeply ingrained in human psychology...

A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens the worldview of groups with which they identify. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence – that is, we engage in “confirmation bias,” giving credit to expert testimony we like while finding reasons to reject the rest...

Unwelcome information can also threaten in other ways. “System justification” theorists like psychologist John Jost have shown how situations that represent a perceived threat to established systems trigger inflexible thinking...

This kind of affect-laden, motivated thinking (i.e., the process of deciding what evidence to accept based on the conclusion one prefers) explains a wide range of examples of an extreme, evidence-resistant rejection of historical fact and scientific consensus. Have tax cuts been shown to pay for themselves in terms of economic growth? Do communities with high numbers of immigrants have higher rates of violent crime? Did Russia interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election?

Predictably, expert opinion regarding such matters is treated by partisan media as though evidence is itself inherently partisan.

Denialist phenomena are many and varied, but the story behind them is, ultimately, quite simple. Human cognition is inseparable from the unconscious emotional responses that go with it.

Under the right conditions, universal human traits like in-group favoritism, existential anxiety and a desire for stability and control combine into a toxic, system-justifying identity politics.