It’s a deadly crisis threatening the United States: not COVID-19, but misinformation, which in turn has compounded the pain of the virus and provoked political dysfunction and violence. Even Tom Brady alluded to former President Trump’s theory that he won the election at a recent White House visit. The Boston Globe’s opinion writer Abdallah Fayyad and the NAACP's Michael Curry joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss how misinformation harms both Americans’ health and democracy.
Curry said public officials, especially Republican officials at all levels of government, should start to speak out: “We have what I call a ‘crazy train’ — a whole bunch of people who want to believe lies and want to keep themselves in power, do it by any means necessary,” he said. “If we have enough defections, enough jumpers, off that crazy train, for people to say ‘I’m not self-interested, it’s not about winning in the midterms’ — if we do that, I think we can make a dent in this ignorance.”
Fayyad called out the Republican party: “This is a party that believes that if you repeat something over and over again, no matter how far from the truth it is, eventually enough people will believe it so they can get away with evading reality.”
In addition to compelling Republican officials to endorse the vaccine publicly, Fayyad said, “part of the antidote is to give platforms to the people we need to — to public health officials who actually know what they’re talking about.”
WATCH: The American misinformation epidemic
