Much has been written about misinformation in today’s politics, but one particular phenomenon deserves greater examination. The best term for it is probably “idiotception.”

Idiotception is a self-perpetuating, IQ-destroying cycle: Politicians hear or invent a stupid lie, which they plant in the minds of their followers. Their followers then repeat that stupid lie back to those same politicians. Then, the politicians insist they have no choice but to act on the stupid lie. After all, the public demands it!

This is precisely what transpired recently with Republicans’ baseless, racist lies claiming that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

In a private Facebook group, a woman shared the sordid tale of a local cat that had allegedly been abducted by Haitian residents. Subsequent reporting from NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, found that the cat in question belonged to the woman’s neighbor’s friend’s acquaintance.

Nope, that comically long-distance connection isn’t a Mel Brooks bit. It’s the actual sourcing of a national news story. To be fair, that’s not the only source; there was another lady who thought her cat went missing, only to find it days later in her own basement.

The cat rumor found its way to GOP vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, a man known for his deep concern for human-feline relationships. Having determined this was a politically convenient story, Vance chose to amplify it.

“Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” Vance tweeted.

Journalists raced to fact-check the claim, which local officials and the Ohio governor unequivocally contested (including in conversations with Vance’s own staff, the Wall Street Journal reported). Too late. Unlike Springfield’s kittens, this lie soon worked its way up the food chain. The next day, Vance’s running mate, Donald Trump, megaphoned the story to 67 million Americans during the presidential debate.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he said. It was a sound bite that would be endlessly repeated, memed and remixed.

Within days, half of Trump voters believed this dehumanizing story was true, a YouGov poll found. Security threats forced school evacuations and hospital lockdowns in Springfield. Local officials pleaded for national figures to stop repeating the baseless claims.

You can guess what happened next. Vance went on TV and defended his comments - in fact, he embellished them. Why? Because, he said, voters were now complaining to him en masse about immigrant pet-eating! “I am hearing from dozens of constituents who are concerned about these issues,” he told CBS. What choice does a U.S. senator have but to embrace his voters’ concerns and demand action? Such as, oh, mass deportation?

The “Stop the Steal” 2020 election lie had much the same idiotception arc. Without evidence, Trump and his underlings declared there had been widespread voter fraud. This sowed widespread distrust about election integrity. Then the widespread distrust itself became the rationale for launching probes into imagined election fraud.

In this, Trump had many Republican co-conspirators. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), for instance, spent the weeks after Election Day pushing conspiracy theories about why the results might not be legitimate or settled. Then, when he chaired a Senate hearing titled “Examining Irregularities in the 2020 Election,” he explained: “Even though courts have handed down decisions and the electoral college has awarded Joe Biden 306 electoral votes, a large percentage of the American public does not believe the November election results are legitimate.”

Gee, I wonder why that might be.

To be clear, the idiotception cycle is not unique to Republican politicians. Democrats have occasionally used the technique, too, just in versions dressed up with more footnotes, push polls and various pseudo-academic trappings. This is basically how the left-wing base got duped into believing that “corporate greed,” rather than supply and demand, caused inflation. It’s also why Democratic leaders then got backed into proposing nonsense “solutions” to crack down on greed. Democratic elites got high on their own supply.

Democrats’ greedflation silliness has led to some extremely dumb policy ideas (such as having the federal government limit prices by fiat), but at least they are unlikely to lead to violence. Unlike with the GOP examples, greedflationists probably won’t incite an insurrection or threats against immigrants.

Dumb, baseless stories floated by randos have always had the ability to gain followers. But in today’s media environment, they can spread and strengthen astonishingly quickly, particularly when they serve the agendas of manipulative, morally malleable politicians.