If it wasn't for the American addiction to disinformation, Vice President Kamala Harris would have won the 2024 election. There's a lot of tap-dancing around this reality — pundits and politicians don't like suggesting that large numbers of voters are irrational — but it's true. People turned out by the millions to vote for a lying conspiracy theorist in Donald Trump because they are drowning in social media-driven nonsense and struggle to tell fact from fiction. Belief in conspiracy theories has risen dramatically, while consumption of reality-based news has plummeted. There's a high correlation between ignorance and voting for Republicans, so of course the GOP benefits as more Americans replace real news with a steady flow of baseless speculation spewed on popular podcasts and social media.

Over time, belief in conspiracy theories pushes people rightward. Kennedy is a good example.

Democrats have reached the "bargaining" stage of post-election grief because some are starting to whimper about how maybe it's time to give in to the conspiracy theory juggernaut. The hope is that by indulging the disinformation fandom a little more, they can win over some voters otherwise sucked into the disinfo vortex. The first sign that some Democrats were flirting with conspiracy theorists was alarming: Colorado's Gov. Jared Polis praised Robert Kennedy after Trump nominated the vaccine denialist to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Polis has generally been regarded as a sensible Democrat, so it surprised people when he posted a lengthy and effusive tweet claiming Kennedy "will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA." He then took some quotes from Kennedy out of context to falsely imply that Kennedy is interested in better health and nutrition for Americans.

In reality, Kennedy has pushed anti-science disinformation that has contributed to the resurgence of diseases like measles and the unnecessary spread of COVID-19. In the former case, one Kennedy-linked outbreak led to the deaths of 83 people in Samoa, including many children. That is the proportional equivalent of nearly 125,000 deaths in the United States. Kennedy also helped fund the film "Plandemic," which falsely suggests that COVID-19 was manufactured to........

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