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You don’t have to be a Lady Gaga fan to disagree with the Facebook video Alex Jones posted before the pop star’s Super Bowl performance this month.
Jones, a member of the so-called “alt-right” and founder of the conspiracy website InfoWars, told viewers to avoid watching Gaga’s performance because, he claimed, Gaga is part of a totalitarian “new world order.”
“She’s reportedly going to be on top of the Super Bowl, they’re saying she may cancel doing this, on top of the stadium, ruling over everyone with drones everywhere, surveilling them in a big swarm,” says conspiracy theorist Jones in the video. “To just condition them that I am the Goddess of Satan, ruling over you with the rise of the robots in a ritual of lesser magic.”
While this sounds ridiculous to the outside viewer, devotees will see this as yet another example of the powerful elite conspiring to overthrow the government.
In fact, conspiratorial thinking and social exclusion can trigger a vicious cycle that further isolates those who believe false narratives, according to a study published in the March edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that’s already available online.
This can lead to real world consequences, like when an armed man entered a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant to investigate Pizzagate, an outlandish conspiracy theory that some alleged 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and campaign chairman John Podesta were running a child sex ring from the venue. The claim was debunked, but not before people including retired Gen. Mike Flynn, who went on to briefly become National Security Advisor under President Donald Trump’s administration before resigning, tweeting the outrageous claims.
It works like this: You feel socially excluded and begin believing conspiracy theories. Endorsing those theories, unsurprisingly, prompts your family and friends to exclude you even more. You’re left out again and again, so you double down on your conspiratorial beliefs.
The final stage of the cycle: You seek out a like-minded community that accepts and reinforces your conspiratorial beliefs.
“At that point they become unchangeable,” Study author Alin Coman, assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, told The Huffington Post.
“Social exclusion leads to search for meaning,” Coman continued. “We believe that this search for meaning ‘overshoots’ in a way that makes people assign meaning to situations that are highly ambiguous and meaningless.”
Part one of the study included 119 participants recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants wrote about a unpleasant experience they’d had with a close friend recently, then rated how socially excluded they felt after the event. Next, participants filled out a meaning in life questionaire, which included statements such as “I have discovered a satisfying life purpose.”
Finally, participants assessed how much they believed in the following conspiracy theories:
Part two of the study included 102 Princeton University students aged, on average, 20. The second part of the study mirrored the first, also requiring participants to write descriptions of themselves and the people they wanted to be, in addition to the exercises above.
Researchers concluded that when the participants felt excluded, they were more likely to endorse conspiracy theories.
And intelligent people aren’t immune to conspiracy theories, either.
Even highly educated affluent individuals can fall prey to conspiracy theories and superstitious beliefs.
Study author Alin Coman
Notably, many of the participants in Coman’s study were Ivy League students, a sharp contrast to the popular perception that conspiracy theorists are an uneducated lot.
“Even highly educated affluent individuals can fall prey to conspiracy theories and superstitious beliefs,” Coman said. “It can happen to anyone.”
And while the new study didn’t specifically address today’s post-factual political climate, Coman did have a few suggestions for disrupting the cycle if a friend or family member falls prey to a conspiracy.
First-line defenses include fostering inclusive environments and disputing unproven facts and conspiracies in group discussions settings.
You can also educate yourself about your own biases and take a critical look at your media consumption, experts believe. If you agree with every political post in your social media feed, as well as all of the pundits in the news shows you watch, you’re setting yourself up for confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias, or seeking out information that supports your previously established beliefs, isn’t just lazy. It’s dangerous.
If you ignore factual or scientific evidence because it is at odds with your worldview, you’re an easy target for conspiracy theories ― regardless of your political affiliation or intelligence (see: anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists against Genetically Modified Organisms, climate change deniers and 9-11 “Truthers”).
There’s also value in interacting with people on social media, and in the real world, who you disagree with. “Make an effort to connect and interact with individuals who hold dissenting views,” Coman said. “A society in which very few members feel excluded is probably more resistant to the propagation of misinformation.”
This reporting is brought to you by HuffPost’s health and science platform, The Scope. Like us on Facebook and Twitter and tell us your story: scopestories@huffingtonpost.com.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Local officials in Santa Cruz, California didn’t hide their disdain towards the Department of Homeland Security after a gang bust turned into an immigration raid once the federal government got involved.
Santa Cruz police and DHS jointly carried out the raid that they said targeted the MS-13 gang on Feb. 13. They arrested 10 people for suspected ties to the gang.
But DHS then detained all 10 people for immigration violations, the police said, even though police had been assured that the raid had nothing to do with immigration, Santa Cruz Police Chief Kevin Vogel said in a news conference Thursday. The detained were all eventually released.
“This has violated the trust of our community, and we cannot tell you how disappointed we are by the betrayal of the Department of Homeland Security,” Vogel said. “As a result of this betrayal of trust we will be taking a long and hard look about whether we will cooperate with this federal agency in the future.”
Yet DHS said it had warned the police department that detention was a possibility all along.
“The chief acknowledged this possibility and it was agreed that no foreign nationals would enter the Santa Cruz Police Department’s facility or their police vehicles,” James Schwab, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement.
This type of detention could be a sign of things to come.
DHS released a set of memos earlier this week laying out how President Donald Trump’s administration would approach the question of undocumented immigrants. It has loosened the criteria for enforcement, meaning that pretty much any undocumented person can now be deported. The focus of deportations during the administration of former President Barack Obama had exclusively been limited to those with criminal records.
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Budding fashionista Izana “Zaryia Mizrahi” Vidai, who identifies as transgender, opens up about the challenges of her beauty regimen in this exclusive clip from the new documentary, “Kiki.”
“I do have my days when I’m a little paranoid, when I feel like people are staring at me and they’re, like, trying to get in and see what my gender identity is,” Vidai, who is now 20, says in the clip. “And then other days, I’m like, “OK, they’re just looking.”
Vidai is one of seven young LGBTQ people profiled in “Kiki,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year. Directed by Sara Jordenö, the film takes an-depth look at New York’s “kiki” scene, which has evolved from the ballroom culture of the 1980s and 1990s, and its “artistic activists,” who predominately hail from the black, Latino and queer communities.
Ballroom culture was, of course, captured for posterity in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, “Paris Is Burning.” Jordenö, who co-wrote “Kiki” with Twiggy Pucci Garcon, told The Huffington Post that she’d like her film to have a singular impact. “What felt important was to make a film that was artistically significant. I wanted the [kiki community] to have a film that was just as powerful,” she said.
Of working with Vidai, Jordenö noted, “She, from a very young age, was able to claim her narrative and say, ‘This is who I am.’ She’s continued to do so… Every time I see her, I feel like she’s grown a little more.” Vidai’s story, she added, is emblematic of the kiki community as a whole. “People are incredibly resilient and, compared to what we see in ‘Paris Is Burning,’ they no longer want to stay in margins. They’re incredibly smart and strategic in their activism,” she said.
“Kiki” hits select theaters and VOD on Feb. 24. In addition, Jordenö and cast members will be on hand for two special showings at the Monica Film Center in Santa Monica, California on Feb. 24 and 25. Head here for more details.
For the latest in LGBTQ culture, don’t miss the Queer Voices newsletter.
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Over 80 prominent American civil rights and faith-based groups have come out against President Donald Trump’s reported plan to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terror organization, arguing it would provide a smokescreen to smear and persecute American Muslims and shut down important Muslim organizations.
An open letter published Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Brennan Center for Justice, and dozens of faith-based and social justice groups argued the terror designation could give a White House already hostile to Muslims the power to lead a “witch-hunt against Muslim society in the U.S.”
The designation, the letter states, would allow the administration to “destroy reputations and chill lawful activity,” and “runs the serious risk of stifling religious and political freedom and the ability to assist and represent Muslim communities without fear of retaliation.”
Anti-Muslim groups in the U.S. have long salivated over the prospect of designating the Muslim Brotherhood ― a culturally conservative political movement founded in Egypt to push for Islamic-based governments ― as a foreign terror organization.
For years, these groups have promoted paranoid conspiracy theories wherein the brotherhood is actively coordinating a massive, subversive plot among American Muslims to destroy the U.S. from within.
Thursday’s letter notes how right-wing groups and leaders have for years “used false ‘six degrees of separation’ accusations about the Muslim Brotherhood as a way to smear prominent Muslims, American Muslim civic and religious institutions, as well as a range of other people.”
CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America ― and everyone from Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin to conservative activist Grover Norquist ― have been baselessly accused of working for the brotherhood, most notably by anti-Muslim figurehead Frank Gaffney.
And while Gaffney’s theories were once relegated to the fringe of American politics, they now carry real currency in a Trump White House with deep ties to anti-Muslim hate groups.
A terror designation would make it illegal for anyone in the U.S. to provide “material support or resources” to or be “otherwise associated with” the brotherhood, allowing the Trump administration to target groups like CAIR and ISNA.
This would enable the government to conduct warrantless searches and to seize the assets of these organizations over the course of yearslong investigations, effectively shutting the groups down. As Thursday’s letter states, the government wouldn’t even require proof that CAIR and ISNA had “actual intent or knowledge of wrongdoing” to prosecute them.
“As a result, the potential negative impact on American Muslim civil society of false and unjust smears and investigation resulting from a terrorism designation of the Muslim Brotherhood is high,” the letter states.
The destruction of these Muslim groups, the letter contends, could leave American Muslims vulnerable to persecution.
“Muslim civil rights groups work to protect communities against discriminatory laws and policies,” it says, “a role that is critical at a time when the threat of anti-Muslim measures is extraordinarily high and hate crimes against those perceived as Muslim have soared.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, which counts millions of members across the Middle East, renounced violence decades ago, and won elections in Egypt after President Hosni Mubarak was deposed during the Arab Spring in 2011. In 2013, the group fell into disarray after Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, a brotherhood member, was deposed.
Thursday’s letter marks the most comprehensive and organized opposition to date against Trump’s reported plan to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terror organization.
Foreign policy and counterterror experts across the political spectrum have vocally opposed the designation. And the editorial boards of both The New York Times and The Washington Post have also come out against it. Last year, an investigation by the U.K. government determined that the brotherhood is not a terrorist organization.
Aside from the designation’s implications for American Muslim groups, experts have noted that it might also be illegal for the U.S. to designate a terror organization on solely ideological grounds, without evidence that it is actively committing or plotting terror attacks.
Moreover, experts have argued that the designation would not only deeply disrupt U.S. relations with Middle Eastern allies where the brotherhood or its offshoots hold some level of power, but could also increase terrorism itself.
Politico obtained a CIA memo last month noting that the terrorist designation would “fuel” extremism in the Middle East.
The designation “would probably weaken” brotherhood leaders’ arguments against violence “and provide ISIS and al-Qaeda additional grist for propaganda to win followers and support, particularly for attacks against U.S. interests,” the memo said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the civil rights’ groups letter against the Muslim Brotherhood terror designation.
You can read the full letter below:
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As tyrants take control of democracies, they typically do 7 things:
1. They exaggerate their mandate to govern – claiming, for example, that they won an election by a “landslide” even after losing the popular vote. They criticize any finding that they or co-conspirators stole the election. And they repeatedly claim “massive voter fraud” in the absence of any evidence, in order to have an excuse to restrict voting by opponents in subsequent elections.
2. They turn the public against journalists or media outlets that criticize them, calling them “deceitful” and “scum,” and telling the public that the press is a “public enemy.” They hold few, if any, press conferences, and prefer to communicate with the public directly through mass rallies and unfiltered statements (or what we might now call “tweets”).
3. They repeatedly lie to the public, even when confronted with the facts. Repeated enough, these lies cause some of the public to doubt the truth, and to believe fictions that support the tyrants’ goals.
4. They blame economic stresses on immigrants or racial or religious minorities, and foment public bias or even violence against them. They threaten mass deportations, “registries” of religious minorities, and the banning of refugees.
5. They attack the motives of anyone who opposes them, including judges. They attribute acts of domestic violence to “enemies within,” and use such events as excuses to beef up internal security and limit civil liberties.
6. They appoint family members to high positions of authority. They ppoint their own personal security force rather than a security detail accountable to the public. And they put generals into top civilian posts.
7.They keep their personal finances secret, and draw no distinction between personal property and public property – profiteering from their public office.
Consider yourself warned.
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Have you ever convinced yourself that you’re going to get fired because you think you don’t deserve to be in your job? “The only reason I got this gig is because I got lucky,” you might think. “Everyone is going to find out I can’t do this and that I’m a fraud.”
Thoughts like these are hallmark signs of impostor syndrome, which stems from an inability to internalize your own achievements.
Research shows nearly 70 percent of people feel impostor syndrome at least once in their lives, and it has potential health consequences: The condition can lead to clinical levels of depression and anxiety. Even high-achieving people such as Tavi Gevinson, Sheryl Sandberg and Lena Dunham have admitted to getting stuck in the mindset that they’re not enough.
Psychology professor Pauline Rose Clance first coined the term “impostor phenomenon” in the 1970s after counseling several young women at Oberlin College. Although women may be more verbal about feelings of self-doubt, data shows that this type of thinking is just as likely to manifest in men. No one is immune.
But the good news is that you don’t have to feel like this, according to Vincent Passarelli, a clinical psychologist based in New York City. Check out his tips below to shake that fraudulent feeling:
”Impostor syndrome is about an inability to believe in yourself,” Passarelli told The Huffington Post, noting that it typically stems from past instances of self-doubt more than the present moment.
Passarelli suggests thinking back to the earliest time you thought your voice didn’t deserve to be heard or that you weren’t good enough. These moments most often occur in childhood or adolescence, he explained. For example, it could have been the way that people communicated with you when you were younger or even a poor score on an important standardized test.
Lots of folks have an “aha” moment during this exercise, according to Passarelli. Such early moments form a negative belief system, which can lead to imposter syndrome later on. After you’ve identified past moments where you felt you could not believe in yourself or your abilities, grab a pen and paper and list them.
Separate those past experiences from your present self, and evaluate where they’re both similar and different, Passarelli suggested.
For example, let’s say your first public speech in middle school went horribly wrong. Today, you still feel worried about giving a speech or presentation at work. That’s where the experience is similar. But here’s the difference: You’ve likely given other speeches since middle school that didn’t go as poorly as your first. Maybe they’ve even led to some great outcomes.
After you compare and contrast, continue to write down all of your accomplishments, Passarelli advises. You might write down that in order to get your current job, you had to earn a higher degree, complete internships, show up to events and network. Or you had to focus every day and write a script or book until completion. You had to earn the spot you occupy today.
“We’ve all gotten lucky at various points in our life, so you have to acknowledge that,” Passarelli said. “But also acknowledge when you’ve worked very hard to accomplish what you have.”
“I ask people, ‘What is your definition of an impostor?’ You’d be surprised what people come up with,” Passarelli said. “They start to say things like, ‘You don’t believe in yourself.’ Or ‘I don’t know all the answers.’ And my response is, ‘Neither do I.’”
The answers above are what it means to feel insecure or self-conscious, not the definition of “fraud.” The word “fraud,” in the context of an impostor, means “a person who is not what he or she pretends to be.”
What many people describe is really a perfectionistic ideal about success and failure, Passarelli explains. When you are in the thick of impostor syndrome, there’s a good chance you have a distorted idea of what it means to be a thriving person in your profession ― and it probably feels impossible to live up to.
The best thing you can do is to deconstruct what you think it means to be an employee, parent or even just a human being, according to Passarelli, because many people have that initial insecurity, even successful writers and supreme court justices.
But in reality? You’ve got this.
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One of our best yet, if we do say so ourselves.
1. Malaysian police revealed that Kim Jong Nam was killed with an internationally banned chemical weapon. Further proof we are now living in some sort of science fiction universe. More here.
2. President Trump sees a huge difference between medical and recreational use of marijuana. Sean Spicer connected smoking weed to the opiate crisis… so there’s that. More here.
3. Alphabet’s Waymo is suing Uber saying that the company stole their technology for automated cars. Between this and the allegations of sexual harassment Uber isn’t having a good week. More here.
4. The Guatemalan army is blocking access to a Dutch abortion service boat. More here.
5. Philippine senator, Leila de Lima, who branded President Duterte a “serial killer” has been arrested on drug trafficking charges. Nothing to see here, folks, nothing to see here. More here.
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