A Plausibility Cascade Beginning?

It is no longer possible to deny the Democrats and their media allies were perpetrating a fraud by hiding Biden's true condition from voters.

Most of us are familiar with something called FOMO - the fear of missing out.

FOMO often creates something called a “preference cascade” (a phrase coined by Instapundit’s proprietor, Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee) - there are two sides to the preference cascade coin –  the positive side of the coin is about creating the perception that there are more people who believe in something than there really are, creating a powerful illusion of peer pressure, enough that people join up for fear of missing out and being ostracized.

It happens all the time when “cult” phenomena go mainstream. Ranging from the relatively harmless (the pet rock craze, the “Ice Bucket Challenge”) to the dangerous (Tide Pods, the “condom challenge” – where practitioners snorted a condom up one nostril and pulled it out the other) to the destructive (CRT and anything on MSNBC or CNN), these cascades can occur almost overnight.

There is a yin/yang sort of relationship in the FOMO preference cascades. To protect the larger “in crowd,” a negative version of the cascade is perpetrated against those who do not buy in. To protect themselves from criticism, the cool kids work hard to convince the dissidents they are alone together. Large populations of people can be dominated by small groups only if the dissenters can be convinced there are very few of them and that they stand alone. To do this, most citizens must be portrayed as loyal to the regime (whether they are or not), and everyone around the dissident is a potential informer. A huge dissident population can therefore be suppressed, by making them believe they’re all lonely voices in the wilderness.

I think preference cascades contributed to both the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. I think the election of Donald Trump was a “preference cascade” that began as many people looked at their neighbor and saw that none of them wanted anything to do with continuing the Obama years by electing Hillary. The day finally came that enough people in key states began to realize they were not alone, and most people didn’t support the Obama regime. That process by which the dissent became to be seen as commonplace, and eventually overwhelming, was the preference cascade that resulted in the Trump Presidency.

Biden’s election was driven by the negative side of the preference cascade and helped along with Facebook and Twitter banning and censorship as well as nightly harangues from the broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS) and cable outlets MSNBC and CNN that constantly hid the truth of Trump’s accomplishments, the success of his administration and amplified the negatives as well as falsely calling him a fascist and a racist while supporting groups that were both.

Closely related to the preference cascade is something I call the plausibility cascade.

Let’s say there exist three groups, Group A, Group B and Group C. Group A and Group B are opposed to each other, and Group C sits somewhere in the middle, sometimes allying with Group A and other Times with Group B. Now let us say a large percentage of the population (Group A) has been professing conditions exist that, aided by the media, another large percentage of the population (Group B) routinely denies - by calling it a conspiracy theory, cheap fakes, or simply a lie.

A plausibility cascade begins when a triggering event happens, often in the public view, causing Group C members, who had not previously been willing to believe what Group A proposed was true to begin to consider that Group B might just have been lying and Group A was being truthful.

For the current member of Group C, Joe Biden’s shocking performance during the June 27^th debate was the triggering event for such a plausibility cascade.

What Group B Democrats need is for Group C independent voters to stay with them. The problem with Biden's performance Thursday night exposes the Democrat lies that he was OK and that makes it easier for independents to believe what Group A Republicans  have been saying for years.

It is not a political statement to say that the 2024 edition of Joe Biden is nothing like the 2019 edition. That is an observable fact and proof that the concerns expressed by Republicans were real and not manufactured for political advantage and they know that no amount of money can change what America saw with their own eyes.

As Greg Gutfeld tweeted, “…the media democrat complex is reacting in horror over joe's condition not because they saw it - it's because you saw it.”

I don’t know what the result of this plausibility cascade will be.

There are those who will vote “Blue no matter who” (and that includes Biden). There are those who will never vote for a Republican who will vote for RFKJ (whom I think will be the beneficiary of many Democrat votes), and there will be those who will just not vote but I do think that no matter how hard the Democrats try to ignore this as just a “bad debate performance” know the pendulum is swinging and there is nothing they can do about it.

Over time, plausibility becomes probability, which eventually becomes certainty.

I think Democrats lose even if they pull someone off the bench because now the independents know they were being taken for suckers and no amount of money or propaganda will change that.