Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).
Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.___
Lots of it stems from early childhood. If you are punished for asking questions, If you are rewarded for just repeating what your parents say, critical thinking gets buried deep within your mind. As the „we vs them“ tribal mentality, right and wrong stops being about the action and instead on the alignment of the person committing the action. So a priest molding children might not be nice, but he is one of the Christian tribe and that’s important. On the other, if an Democrat dies diverting, it’s by definition bad, because he is in another tribe. It’s simple as that, but hard to understand if you have a progressive worldview.