“The pandemic has made more people want to blame someone else because they’ve lost their jobs or they’re lonely,” Crigler said. As shutdowns paralyzed the economy in the first months of the pandemic, Americans sharply increased searches for extremist and white supremacist materials online, according to Moonshot CVE, a research firm that studies extremism. ADADThe result, he said, is a surge of extremism on the right and the left, including widespread embrace of counterfactual versions of current events. The pandemic undermines trust — trust in government and science to curb the spread of the disease, trust in neighbors and strangers who might carry the infection, Kruglanski said. “Especially now, when trust is low in government, in Congress, in science, in medicine, the church — there’s nobody you can trust, so you trust your friends, your tribe.

Source: Washington Post February 15, 2021 10:52 UTC