On the other hand, this really isn't a surprise, at all, is it?

Revealed: populists far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories

They live in the Fox News, Alex Jones universe, after all.

Even Trump was publicly pushing anti-vaxx bullshit before the news started covering the current measles outbreaks.

Wait. This is a global study.

Populists across the world are significantly more likely to believe in conspiracy theories about vaccinations, global warming and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to a landmark global survey shared exclusively with the Guardian.

The YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project sheds new light on a section of the world population that appears to have limited faith in scientific experts and representative democracy.

. . . .

The World Health Organization and other public health bodies have embarked on major campaigns to remind the public of the importance of vaccination as anti-vaccine propaganda and conspiracy theories have flourished on social media.

Unicef recently revealed that measles cases had risen 300% in the first three months of this year compared with the same time last year. In 2017, approximately110,000 people died of the illness, most of them children. 

About 169 million children under 10 worldwide are unvaccinated, the UN agency said.

In the YouGov survey, people with strongly held populist views were on average almost twice as likely to believe that supposed harmful effects of vaccines were being deliberately hidden from the public. 

They were similarly more likely to believe that the US government knowingly helped the 9/11 terrorist attackers, and that manmade global warming was a hoax.

Two in five populists in the survey agreed that regardless of who was officially in charge of governments, “there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together”, compared with just under a quarter of the overall survey respondents.

Wait.

So 25% of the general population think “there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together”?

The Illuminati?

The Elders of Zion?

Jeez.

Read the Guardian story.

Lots more in the Guardian on the new populism around the world.