From Pine View Farm

She Did Her Own Research on the Disinformation Superhighway 0

In a long article which I stumbled across at Boston.com, New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise takes a look at the furor over mask and vaccination mandates, lockdowns, and other measures intended to stem the spread of the pandemic. She talked with a number of researchers who suggest that much larger cultural forces are feeding the conflict. Given that we are facing wave number [mumble] of infections even as a large portion of the populace seems to embrace Typhoid Mary as a role model, the whole piece is worth a read.

What particularly caught my eye, though, was a snapshot of what happens when persons who don’t know how to do research (who don’t know, for example, how to vet sources, interpret data, or differentiate between fact and opinion) “do their own research” on the disinformation superhighway (emphasis added):

One of the first to speak at the City Council meeting that night in July was Melissa Crabtree, a home-schooling mother who owns a business selling essential oils and cleaning products. Crabtree was new to Enid — she had moved two years before from Texas — but also to politics, drawn in by the pandemic. When states enacted sweeping rules like lockdowns, mask mandates and school closures to combat the spread of illness, she was skeptical.

The more she researched online, the more it seemed that there was something bigger going on. She said she came to the conclusion that the government was misleading Americans — for whose benefit, she could not tell. Maybe drug companies. Maybe politicians. Whatever the case, it made her feel like the people in charge saw her — and the whole country of people like her — as easy to take advantage of.

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