Many voters are willing to accept misinformation from political leaders – even when they know it’s factually inaccurate. According to our research, voters often recognize when their parties’ claims are not based on objective evidence. Yet they still respond positively, if they believe these inaccurate statements evoke a deeper, more important “truth.”
It may be related to all the trolling we do to each other, such as deckpeckers, left-handed smoke shifters, snipe hunting and soft-punching contests.
It may not make reasonable sense at all, but humans are silly muppets.
It’s why I hypothesize that teapots in space (between the Earth and Mars, orbiting the sun) would be almost certain evidence that time travel to the past becomes possible and cheap, and if we ever attain the capacity to detect distant teapots and don’t find any, that may be evidence that time travel is not possible, or at least cannot be made cheap enough to be used for practical jokes.