The Homeless Veteran Hoax and Confirmation Bias
Conservatives were recently apoplectic over the news that a group of veterans had been kicked out of a hotel in Newburgh, New York to make room for migrants.
It was a story that reinforced the widespread delusion among the right that when veterans come home from war they are spat at, pissed on and harassed relentlessly by ingrates who cannot understand or appreciate their sacrifices while everyone who illegally crosses the Mexican border is given a briefcase full of diamonds, a mansion and access to advanced medical procedures even Americans know nothing about.
The story fed into every Conservative meme about the unconscionable injustice of our country abandoning the brave men and women who risked their lives for it while opening our doors to potentially dangerous, even deadly non-documented immigrants.
Republican assemblyman Brian Maher was so angry that he took to FOX News to express his righteous rage, calling the move, “a slap in the face to veterans, to citizens of New York in this country, who are really being cast aside to allow for asylum seekers to come here.”
It was a clear-cut illustration that the Biden administration and New York Democrats prioritized the needs and desires of people who were not born here, and did not enter our country through legal channels over its own brave warriors.
The only problem was that it was all bullshit. A complete fabrication. There were no veterans being kicked out of the hotel to make way for migrants. There were no veterans there at all.
Instead, a group from a homeless shelter was recruited to pretend to be veterans who had recently been kicked out of the hotel to make room for migrants in exchange for two hundred dollars and a nice meal.
Once the hoax had been exposed, Maher pleaded ignorance, claiming, “When Sharon and several veterans explained to me their situation, I believed them at their word. I had absolutely no knowledge of any wrongdoing and believed that their stories were real until a phone conversation with Sharon yesterday afternoon when she explained to me that this did not happen the way she purported it to.”
Maher believed that the stories were real because he wanted them to be real. That’s not because he hates veterans and wants them to suffer but because he is deeply invested in a long-standing Conservative narrative that our country rolls out the red carpet for undocumented immigrants while treating our own vulnerable citizens, particularly veterans, with callous disregard.
It’s confirmation bias in action. Maher wants to believe that veterans were being treated terribly while migrants were being feted like kings so when he saw a story that fit that narrative he jumped on it.
We’re all guilty of confirmation bias, particularly in the internet era. I cannot count how many times I’ve seen something posted online that was revealed almost instantly as a fraud or a fiction, only to have online commenters give it currency not because it is real but rather because it seems real. Lies maddeningly get at least partial credit for seeming plausible.
It’s Stephen Colbert’s “Truthiness” or Kellyanne Conway’s Alternative Facts: lies with the ring of truth that are treated as truthful despite being extremely non-true.
That’s confirmation bias in a nutshell. It seemed real to Maher that veterans would literally get booted out of a hotel en masse to make room for migrants. So he chose to believe in it.
We saw confirmation bias on a massive scale with Q. Cultists were so desperate for validation, approval and proof that their crazy delusions were true that they were willing to accept literally ANYTHING as evidence that the plan was working and the Storm was imminent.
That’s the danger of online discourse: we’re so committed to our side and our point of view that we’ll believe anything that promotes it.
So let’s not reflexively believe everything that supports our politics and conception of how the world works. The truth is the truth. Everything else is just a goddamn lie.
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