Judging a Message By Its Messenger

America's partisan cognitive catastrophe

As I noted in our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex:

Long before Covid arrived, I’d joked with friends that if the ever boasting and self-promoting President Trump discovered the cure for cancer, his detractors would rather forgo the treatment than acknowledge he’d done something of value for humanity. It’s probably an inevitable outcome of America’s two-party system that any president may become the object of hyperbolic loathing. In the nineties, Republicans obsessed about President Clinton’s faults, real and perceived. In 2003, the columnist and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer coined the expression Bush Derangement Syndrome as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.”

During the presidency of Donald J. Trump this syndrome became so virulent that it created a strangely binary posture in public affairs. If Trump expressed even mild enthusiasm for a policy, person, or thing, his opposition automatically rejected it. To be sure, Trump often threw gasoline on the fire with his vices, his bombastic personal style, and occasional buffoonery. The qualities that had once been viewed as showman’s schtick were widely deemed unacceptable in a US President. The court jester had become king, and it drove the lords and ladies at court mad.

As anthropologists and psychologists have long understood, humans are hyper-social and tribal. Stanford Professor Rene Girard has pointed out that during times of stress and rivalry, we are inclined to ascribe blame not to a complex state of affairs, but to a particular person or group. Persistent problems and misfortunes build up negative psychic energy, which generates a collective yearning to destroy the person or persons on whom the blame is heaped. This process of scapegoating is amplified by what Professor Girard called mimesis—that is, imitation—the tendency to embrace an opinion or sentiment because everyone in a preferred group is embracing it. In trying to make sense of the world, we often look to those around us for cues to guide us in our perceptions and opinions.

When presented with information, we all have a tendency to evaluate it in accordance with the identity of the messenger. People who identify themselves as conservatives tend to be automatically skeptical of any representation made by a messenger who is associated with the political Left.

Likewise, people who identify themselves as liberals or leftists tend to be automatically skeptical of any representation made by a messenger who is associated with the political Right.

I thought of this cognitive bias this morning when I stumbled across a 2017 study published by the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin titled More than 300,000 estimated victims of human trafficking in Texas. The report states: Approximately 79,000 minors and youths are victims of sex trafficking in Texas.

Upon reading this, I was instantly reminded of the film Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel, that was released on July 4, 2023. Apparently because the the producers and cast are widely associated with right-wing Christian circles, pretty much every legacy media film review panned it as a “QAnon Fever Dream” or a film “linked to QAnon” or a film championed by “supporters of QAnon.”

In other words, instead of applauding the filmmakers for telling a dramatic story about an enormous organized crime (79,000 minors sex trafficked in the State of Texas alone), the MSM critics all panned it in the same programmatic and robotic way.

Now we are seeing a similar cognitive bias happening with respect to the Israel Gaza conflict among many people who identify themselves as conservatives. After an estimated 1000 armed men identified as Hamas fighters committed mass murder and other atrocities against an estimated 1200 Israeli civilians, the Israeli Defense Forces launched a military offensive into Gaza.

Most criticism of this military response has come from people, institutions, and outlets that we associate with the political Left. The Wall Street Journal was something of an exception with its report on December 30, 2023:

The war in the Gaza Strip is generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.

By mid-December, Israel had dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells on the strip. Nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The bombing has damaged Byzantine churches and ancient mosques, factories and apartment buildings, shopping malls and luxury hotels, theaters and schools. Much of the water, electrical, communications and healthcare infrastructure that made Gaza function is beyond repair. 

It seems to me that the proper response to mass murder—whether conducted by terrorists of Saudi Arabian nationality on September 11, 2001 or by terrorists who reside in Gaza—is to treat it primarily as a matter for law enforcement.

I understand that mass murder committed by foreign nationals presents a major challenge to conventional law enforcement procedures. Nevertheless, at least trying to determine the identity of the culprits, their co-conspirators, and their directors, and to bring these perpetrators to justice, strikes me as the more appropriate legal and moral response than blowing a densely populated urban area to smithereens. The military response in Gaza amounts to punishing 2 million people for the actions of 1000 murderers.

Justifications for the military response range from “Israel has a right to defend itself” to the notion that the people of Gaza are suffering as a result of their allegiance to Hamas since an election in 2006.

While it’s certainly true that Israel has a right to defend itself, the assertion makes me wonder why the IDF didn’t defend the country on October 7, 2023. The intelligence and military failure of October 7, 2023 strikes as unfathomably strange.

As for the 2 million people of Gaza being accountable for the 2006 election: If it comes to war with nuclear-armed Russia, I hope the same reasoning isn’t applied to the millions of Americans who did NOT vote for Joe Biden.