Monica Sheppard lives in Rome, Georgia, where she runs a bee-themed arts-and-crafts shop. Rome is a right-leaning town in the rural, poor, and intensely conservative northwest corner of the state. Education rates are low, and mainstream news does not easily take root. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who became the district’s congresswoman in 2021, was elected in part because, for many voters, identifying with the QAnon conspiracy theory, as she’d recently done, was less troubling than identifying with the Times. Sheppard, who is fifty-seven, is an occasional Times reader, but she has plenty of friends in the area who do not share her news-reading habits or her mostly liberal views. And, despite what Sheppard calls the “brick-wall-head-beating of it all,” she often engages with them over political issues online. “I guess I’m just fascinated by how people think,” she told me.
Recently, Sheppard showed me one of many Facebook posts that have concerned her. A friend named Scott had shared a meme from a Facebook page called The Absolute Truth, which takes scattershot aim at science, liberals, the media, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and the TV show “The View,” among other things. Its ethos is neatly outlined in one of its posts: “You get used to it, I don’t even see the news anymore. All I see is false flag, psyop, bullshit.” The meme that he posted showed an image of a Chili’s storefront. “Another major American franchise bites the dust,” it read. Scott added in his post, “I saw on U tube that 10 other big chain restaurants are on the endangered list including Fudruckers, Krystal, Red lobster, and others you know!” Some commenters noted other “major American” restaurant chains on the brink of collapse, and others made mocking reference to Joe Biden’s economic policy (“Build back better you know”), which they seemed to hold responsible for the closings. Still other commenters pointed ominously to larger forces at play. “A BIG reset is coming,” one woman wrote.
After stumbling across this discussion on Scott’s Facebook page, Sheppard told me, “I did a quick Google search and found multiple articles about these viral memes about restaurants closing that are not true.” Beneath Scott’s post, Sheppard wrote, “This actually isn’t true.” Scott responded gracefully, by the standards of the medium, but without quite giving in. “I do hope you are right but business closing and layoffs are appearing more each day for some apparent reason?” he wrote. A woman named Deena added, “Show us how it isn’t true?” Sheppard replied, “All I had to do is search ‘Chili’s closing all stores’ and found many news stories about it not being true and about a rash of viral memes like this one . . . none of which are true.” She went on, “It is always wise to research a meme before taking it as fact!” Arguing ensued about how many stores Chili’s was closing—fewer than twenty, it turned out, out of more than fifteen hundred—and what this meant. Many suggested that the meme was pointing to deeper truths: the economy was bad, Biden was responsible for it, and anyone saying otherwise was not to be trusted. “We also know that the media lies,” Deena said.
A commenter named Heather questioned Sheppard’s methodology. “And you believe google?” she wrote. Sheppard decided to log off. “I found it scary that she would trust a meme that her friend posted on Facebook, but would not trust Google providing multiple sources from which to choose for more reliable information,” Sheppard told me. She noted that this was not her first encounter with poorly informed Georgians. A family member, she said, gets some of her news from televangelists.
I reached out to Scott, who works in private equity. He stuck by his guns. “I love Monica,” he told me. “But I think Monica goes directly to sources of information.” This, he suggested, was not the right approach. “Use common sense,” he went on. “Food is much higher now. There’s so many things against restaurants right now.” The Biden-Harris Administration was at fault, he concluded. “They created this.” He mentioned a right-wing YouTube channel called Liberal Hivemind, where he gets some political news. The only other person from the Facebook thread whom I reached was Heather, a real-estate agent. She was friendly on the phone, and we spoke as she prepared for a cookout she had planned that evening. She told me that she is “very, very conservative,” and, like Scott, would be voting for Donald Trump, but that she doesn’t consume a lot of news beyond what she gleans from the right-wing TV network Newsmax. She also engages in political discussions on Facebook, adding, “I probably shouldn’t.” She went on, “It’s hard for me to even watch the news, because it kind of nauseates me.”
A few weeks later, Sheppard alerted me to another Facebook conversation. This time, someone had posted a chart that compared the Biden and Trump Administrations using metrics like inflation rates, average hourly earnings, and the costs of gas, groceries, and electricity. The chart made a compelling case for Trump. But there was a problem: a label added by the platform’s fact checkers noted that it included “partly false information.” Sheppard pointed that out in a comment. A man named Danny responded, “Whole Lotta stuff be labeled ‘not true’ on Facebook. Almost like Facebook has its own agenda.” Sheppard asked him what news sources he trusted. “I don’t trust any media . . . nor google . . . nor Facebook,” he said. “I trust what I see.” Sheppard later told me, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’d be electing my cat if I only relied on the behavior that I see!”
In April, NBC News released the results of a poll that looked at how a thousand respondents consumed political news, and how they planned to vote. At the time, Biden was the overwhelming favorite among people who read newspapers, watched network news, and followed online news sites. Trump, meanwhile, led among those who frequently got their information from social media, cable news, and YouTube. The poll also showed that Trump most dominated among a subset of people described as “low-information voters.” Definitions of this group vary among experts, some of whom begin by pointing to the ubiquity of ignorance. “If you know what the F.T.C. did last week, you’re a freak,” David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School, told me. There were gaps in basic political knowledge even among law professors he knew. “It’s just a matter of degree,” he said. Nonetheless, he continued, low-information voters tend to have “fewer observations about politics with which to make vote choices.”
Joshua Kalla, a professor of political science at Yale, notes that being low-information is not necessarily a problem. A better question is whether voters know about the specific things that matter to them. “You may think, incorrectly, that the 2020 election was stolen—but, if you know which party will cut your taxes and that’s all you care about, then does it matter?” Kalla asked. “The important thing is that you’re informed on issues you care about.” Of course, finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.
Richard Fording, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, who has written about low-information voters, told me that they “generally just vote in Presidential-election years—if they vote at all.” These voters seem to have once been spread pretty evenly between the political parties. Low-information voters who turned out for Bill Clinton in 1992 may have known little more than that he played the saxophone; some George W. Bush voters may have simply associated the former governor of Texas with the South. Partisan pundits have long blamed the successes of candidates they oppose on such voters. In 2012, the late right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh pointed to them to explain Barack Obama’s popularity. “We’re gonna have to redefine low-information voter,” Limbaugh said. “They’re not just people watching TMZ. In fact, I would venture to say that over half of the average, ordinary Democrats voting for Obama have no clue what they’re really doing.”
By 2016, Fording told me, low-information voters appeared to be moving to the right. (His analysis specifically examined white low-information voters, whom he defined as those unable to correctly answer two of the three following questions: how long is a U.S. senator’s term, which party currently controls the House, and which party controls the Senate.) “Trump’s whole playbook was to attract these people,” Fording stated. Low-information voters, he found, are more likely to embrace stereotypes of other groups, and less likely to fact-check claims made by politicians. “Trump was kind of the perfect candidate for them,” he said. After the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked, and voters largely stuck with Trump, Fording dug deeper into the low-information category. He came across a metric in psychology called the “need for cognition” scale. “A question that really caught my attention on the scale is an agree or disagree: ‘Thinking is not my idea of fun,’ ” Fording recalled. He and a colleague ran a study to see whether agreement with the statement correlated with support for Trump. It did.
Fording admits that the concept “sounds very condescending.” But, he told me, “it’s been extensively studied for decades: people vary in terms of the enjoyment they get out of searching for new information.” It’s not a measure of intelligence, and, though it correlates with education level, it’s not the same thing: some low-information voters have college degrees. Whatever their education, low-need-for-cognition voters are less likely to seek out alternative views, and more likely to trust people they respect. In November of 2016, as Fording had anticipated, they showed up in significantly larger numbers for Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton. Given that they are not highly mobilized voters, Fording said, “it was kind of an impressive feat Trump pulled off.”
Americans have been believing bad information since long before birtherism, or the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. How many people, Schleicher asked me, believe conspiracy theories about the assassination of J.F.K.? “More than you’d think,” he said. But, he cautioned, “this does not mean people are stupid.” He brought up Joseph Schumpeter, the famous Austrian economist and political scientist from the nineteen-thirties, who found that many people demonstrate a high degree of intelligence in their day-to-day business affairs, but suddenly sound like fools when they talk about politics. Schumpeter wondered why. “The answer is they have incentives to know something about their business,” Schleicher said. “And their incentive to know specifics about politics is extremely weak.”
The stakes, in any case, are high. “Lower-information voters may only account for a one- or two-point difference in this election, in the end,” Schleicher said. “But that could be decisive.”
Jan Pourquoi runs a small carpet factory and a logistics business in Dalton, Georgia. Dalton calls itself “the carpet capital of the world,” and, like nearby Rome, has about forty thousand residents. Pourquoi, who is now in his sixties, moved there from Belgium nearly four decades ago, and he’s cultivated a Tocquevillian view of his adopted home and its politicians. Some of them he has come to detest. In 2022, Pourquoi paid for a thousand signs to be produced and distributed around the district, which, as best he could recall, read “Save Democracy! Stop the Lies of Marjorie Taylor Greene & Her Treasonous Cult.” “I was a Republican,” Pourquoi told me. “But she and Trump are too far.” He noted an increase in the G.O.P.’s “political misfits, power-seeking opportunists, and”—before Tim Walz made it a mainstream critique—“weirdos.”
Pourquoi gets his news from the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and The Economist, along with a broad sampling of network news. He has plenty of quibbles with the “woke leftists,” as he calls them. But he worries about the voters around him. “Everybody is a journalist and a scientist now,” Pourquoi said. He offered a few examples. “Just this morning, a guy told me that the funeral homes see a lot of dead bodies from people who took a COVID vaccine. He said that their blood thickens and becomes a string in their veins. And they are told by the Biden government to keep it quiet.” He went on, “The same guy asked me a few months ago if I had noticed that many ‘illegals’ are very young. He said, ‘I wonder what the Democrats do with all these children.’ He believes that the Democratic Party is involved in organized pedophilia.” Pourquoi continued, “Even more widespread is the ‘news’ that Democrats want to make a law that can force parents to subject their children to surgery to change their genitalia.” He sighed. “There is no end to the uninformed nonsense.” I asked where to find such folks, and he said that they were everywhere: “Just go to the Walmart parking lot. You’ll see.”
On a hot day in late June, I pulled my truck into the parking lot of a Walmart in the town of Calhoun, a little south of Dalton. Among Calhoun’s claims to fame is a giant tree house made from the salvaged parts of a boat, a plane, and a prop submarine that was supposedly used in a movie starring Elvis Presley. The first person I talked to was Drake Mickley, a twenty-seven-year-old garbage collector. When I asked him where he got his news, he replied, “I don’t really pay attention to it, man. I’m on social media. But I try to avoid politics there as best I can.” He said that he was “neither a Republican or a Democrat, you know. But I definitely do not like Biden.” He did plan to vote in November: “Probably just do what my daddy says.”
A middle-aged man who introduced himself as Chuck, and said he worked in cell-phone sales, told me that he found his political news on the Internet—“mostly YouTube.” Chuck, who is Black, said that he was leaning toward voting for Trump: “I feel more at ease with him.” A bearded white man in his sixties, who wore a Black Sabbath shirt, told me that he got his political news from “people in the neighborhood. Friends. I don’t got no TV or nothing.” He had a felony on his record, he said, and couldn’t vote. “Biden is a pedo,” he added. Another shopper waved me away, and pointed to his bumper sticker: “HOW ABOUT WE WATERBOARD THE MEDIA TIL THEY TELL THE TRUTH?”
I walked over to a stand selling fireworks in the parking lot. Stepping up to the counter, I cautiously began my spiel once again. “It’s O.K.,” Riley Charnote, the young man at the cash register, said, gently cutting me off. “I listen to NPR.” He said that he was “exhausted” by the misinformation he regularly encountered around him—talk of stolen elections and poisonous vaccines. “The older people tend to fall for it,” he said. “Just be careful. If you say the wrong thing . . .” Eventually, a security guard rolled up in a truck. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you can’t do it here,” he told me. I left and headed to a nearby Kroger. I asked a woman named Juanita, pushing a cart loaded down with watermelons, where she got her political news. “My husband watches it sometimes,” she said. “Trump news. . . . We don’t have Internet.” She continued, “I usually get my news from the Bible.” A Kroger official briskly approached us. “It’s the end times,” Juanita added. “It’s almost here.”
Plenty of voters defy easy categorization: evangelicals who vote for candidates connected to porn stars, prison abolitionists who vote for career prosecutors. Fording, at the University of Alabama, pointed out another example: the kind of voter who does enjoy thinking, but who uses dubious information to “connect the dots in weird ways.” There is now so much bad information floating around that thoughtful people, skeptical of the mainstream news, can do their own research and reach their own conclusions: The COVID vaccine will kill you. The Bidens are felons. These people can influence the low-information voters around them.
Before I met Michael Faulk, I read his views in the Press-Sentinel, based in Jesup. The newspaper covers Wayne County, in southeast Georgia, and features a predictably light stew of local concerns: softball scores, school-board budgets, the latest crimes. It also has an opinion page, which, in addition to political topics, serves up benign community messages about things like self-care and picking up pennies. These days, Faulk’s submissions are “in a class of their own,” according to the paper’s editor, Drew Davis. Faulk has authored as many as a hundred politically oriented opinion pieces, by his own estimate, with titles like “The Late, Great, United States of America,” and “America has a serious problem.” Davis told me that, as far as he knows, Faulk holds the Jesup political opinion-writing record. “He gets mad when his stuff gets edited and says he just won’t write anymore,” another Sentinel employee told me. “Then suddenly there he is. He’s currently on the outs with us, but I don’t expect that to last.”
In a piece, from March, published under the title “Truth vs. falsehoods,” he writes, “Biden is no question a corrupt criminal. Fact!” After a few more “facts,” Faulk concludes, “I do not print lies or propaganda; I print the truth.” Faulk has claimed that Biden’s Administration has increased the U.S. debt more than any previous President (untrue), that America was “energy independent” under Trump (untrue), and that Biden’s justice system disproportionately punishes conservatives (untrue). In his “factual articles,” as he calls his opinion pieces, he avoids vulgarities, but he will readily describe the Democratic Party as a “malignant cancer.” He sometimes deploys all caps to further stress a point.
When I met Faulk at a restaurant in Jesup, in June, Fox News was on a TV in the main dining room and pumped into the bathrooms. Given the tenor of his writing, and a strong hunch that I was a member of what he calls the “liberally biased and propaganda-spewing media,” I was slightly on guard. But he disarmed me with an avuncularity: “So, what do you want to know?” He sounded like a football coach, which, he said, he once dreamed of being. Faulk grew up in Enterprise, Alabama, where his father sold construction material and his mother was a bookkeeper for a newspaper. “If you ever said anything bad about Franklin Roosevelt in front of my grandmother, she’d chew you out,” Faulk told me. His parents were Democrats, too, and the family watched Walter Cronkite deliver the evening news. “Their belief was that the Democratic Party cared about small Americans, and Republicans cared about rich Americans,” Faulk said. He would have voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, when he was nineteen, if he’d understood the importance of voting. After getting a master’s degree, he started teaching high-school history. It wasn’t until Ronald Reagan ran for President that he began voting Republican. He credits his political turn to his reading of history. “I started digging into the Democratic Party,” he recalled. “The K.K.K.? Democratic Party. Jim Crow? Democratic Party. Segregation? Democratic Party.”
Now sixty-six, Faulk lives with his wife and his elderly father. They mostly subsist on Social Security, which he expects to soon dry up. They watch some cable news. “When we get back to the bedroom, sometimes my wife will turn on ‘Hannity,’ ” he said. “Occasionally—and it is rare—I’ll throw on CBS, ABC, or NBC. I don’t watch the Commode News Network,” his pejorative for CNN, “or the Malignantly Stupid Nutcase Bullmanure Company,” MSNBC. He doesn’t read newspapers, except the Sentinel, “for the headlines and sports scores.” His political views, he told me, are largely informed by conservative films and books. He’s especially fond of Mark Levin’s “The Democrat Party Hates America” and “American Marxism,” Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe’s “Arguing with Idiots,” and Michelle Makin’s “Culture of Corruption.”
Biden, Faulk insisted, has used his Presidency to enrich his family. “Now granted, a lot of politicians have done it,” he said. “But for him to go around and accuse Donald Trump of being a felon? O.K., they convicted him. But you are a felon.” After Biden dropped out of the race, in late July, Faulk felt disappointed: he wouldn’t have the satisfaction of watching Biden lose. “But, since Harris is even worse than Biden, she should be hammered even worse,” he told me. Faulk believes that Kamala Harris is “weak” and not very smart. “She also has one of the most annoying laughs in the world.” That last part, he said, was just an opinion, “not necessarily a fact.”
No one in Faulk’s life challenges his political beliefs, he told me. The only real pushback had come from a retired local mechanic named Alan Henry. “I read the paper,” Henry told me recently. “I watch ABC and CBS. I try to be as informed as I can.” He had come across a few of Faulk’s opinions in the Sentinel. “I just saw him as living in an alternate reality,” Henry said. In February of this year, Henry wrote a rebuttal, calling one of Faulk’s pieces “full of nonsense.” He disputed Faulk’s claims about immigration, the border wall, energy independence, inflation, and the prosecution of Trump. “I didn’t think he’d change,” he added. “But I wanted to set the record straight.”
Henry’s response didn’t move Faulk to do any new research. His views were set. “I’ve looked at who won,” Faulk told me, referring to the 2020 election. “Do I believe that Joe Biden got eighty million legitimate votes? No. I know that there were over a thousand people that came forward talking about voter improprieties. I’ve seen a documentary called ‘2000 Mules.’ It focussed on two thousand people stuffing ballot boxes.” I noted that a production company behind “2000 Mules,” which was written and directed by the right-wing political commentator and conspiracy peddler Dinesh D’Souza, had publicly apologized for making misrepresentations in the film and removed it from distribution just a week earlier. “You can count that maybe as one of my wrong sources,” Faulk replied.
He then pivoted to another “fact” related to his belief that the Democrats cheated in the 2020 election. “Late at night, Trump was leading in a lot of states,” he said, referring to Election Night. “Mathematicians said that what Biden did was almost mathematically impossible. Almost totally impossible. So that got my attention.” I asked him which mathematicians had said this. “Well, I got it from Fox,” Faulk said. He went on, referring to Trump, “With him leading that late in the game, it was almost impossible for him to have lost. So, yes, I’m trusting that source. But I didn’t check it out.” ♦
