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Donald Trump's Conspiracy Essay

Decent Essays

Five years ago, who’d have thought Donald Trump could become the most powerful person in the world? Truth may be stranger than fiction, but if there’s any lesson here, it’s that too many people prefer fiction to the truth. Conspiracy theories have gripped the public imagination to such an extent that an armchair crank stands at the White House lawn.
Preening himself at the mirror of his nation’s prejudices and delusions of grandeur, his policies of extreme nationalism, and protectionism, are founded upon conspiracy and misinformation.
His self-professed “straight talking” starts with a “that’s good” or a “that’s bad”, and then proceeds in a linear stream of consciousness resulting in whatever course of action would “make American great …show more content…

Closer to home, we have One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts who’s still enthralled by the vintage conspiracy theory that Jewish International Bankers control the world. He may have read Pauline Hanson’s ironically titled book, The Truth, in which supported to the crazy paranoia about the “New World Order”.
Since that déjà vu moment, when her quavering falsetto echoed through the Senate chamber, informing us that we’re in danger of being swamped by Muslims (not Asians), her support has quadrupled.
Mysteriously, the conspicuous failure of Asians to overrun us since her prediction 20 years ago, hasn’t dampened Hanson’s confidence, or fatally wounded her credibility. Quite the opposite, in fact. Why is this so?
An answer may be found in the Dunning-Kruger effect: the curious phenomenon of “confident idiots” emboldened by their own ignorance, rather than cautioned by it.
The 1999 Dunning-Kruger study found those armed with low metacognitive skills grossly overestimated their own competence in metacognitive tasks. Those with test scores in the 12th percentile estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.
And so, according to David Dunning, those with intellectual deficits are often “blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like

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