bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki, japan, helping push japanese leaders to surrender and end world war ii. tonight, los alamos describes the worry leading up to that historic test. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern, and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3. we're back with daniel cox, who is the polling and public opinion research fellow at the american enterprise institute. and daniel's here to talk to us about a new study on post-election political violence and conspiracy theories. daniel, good morning. >> good morning. >> so, first, start us off by giving us some background. what is the survey center on american life? >> so, it's a relatively new venture at the american enterprise institute, started last fall. and the purpose is really to try

to understand the lives of everyday americans. so much of the public opinion landscape focuses on these national debates, national issues that a lot of americans don't spend a lot of time thinking about. so we wanted to dedicate our resources and our research understanding just how americans are living their lives. >> you're the director and founder of that survey center. so tell us about the new aei report coming from that center. what did it focus on, and how did you do this report? >> sure. so, it was a survey, a national survey of american adults 18 and older. we looked at a variety of different issues and experiences. but the three major areas we focused on are just the outcome of the election, what americans thought about it, what were they thinking moving forward, the existence of a conspiracy theory, whether it's antifa's involvement with january 6th attacks on the capitol, qanon,

and theories like those. we want to look at political violence as well obviously post-january 6th is something that a lot of folks are rightly concerned about. and then the last thing that hasn't got as much attention, but we are really interested in understanding views on american exceptionalism. do americans still believe the u.s. is a shining city on the hill, or have attitudes changed pretty significantly on that measure? >> now, before we get into some of your survey results on conspiracy theories, for us, define exactly what a conspiracy theory is first. let's give a little base line here. what do you consider a conspiracy theory? >> sure. so how we measured it, and people take different approaches in measuring conspiracy theories and public opinion research. but we provide a claim. so in one instance, the claim was pretty explicit. we said, do you think donald trump is secretly fighting a child sex trafficking ring that

includes prominent democrats and hollywood elites, and is this claim very accurate, mostly accurate, mostly inaccurate, or completely inaccurate? and we had the people, the respondents, just get a measure of what they thought about it. and that's how we measured conspiracy theories in the polls. we have a variety of different ones that we measured. this poll focused mostly on political conspiracies. but we had a whole poll before the election looking at issues in public health, too. sort of like the anti-vaxxer stuff. so we've done a fair amount of work in this area. >> let's talk specifically about the question you just brought up. one of the questions that y'all asked to people who took the survey was, the qanon theory question you just brought up. and the theory question was, donald trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent democrats and hollywood elites. the results of that survey was 15% of the people you asked

believe that theory. 42% rejected it. but 41% were uncertain whether they believed it or not. explain to us a little bit about what happened there. >> sure. so, for a lot of these things, we didn't want to force people to choose, you know, they did or did not believe. we wanted to provide an option for them to register some uncertainty or that they didn't know. i think a lot of the things with conspiracies, they can sound in some cases plausible or believable. and so if someone hasn't heard a lot about it or doesn't have, you know, hasn't heard enough to make a sound judgment, we didn't want to force them to make a choice one way or the other. and i thought that was the fairest way to try to get an accurate measure on this stuff. and one of the things that we did i think is different than what other pollsters have done is we didn't use the word qanon

in the survey. we didn't want to try to move folks on that question by using that survey. and a lot of polls found that people aren't that familiar with qanon. so we just put the statement out and had people react to it. >> what does it say about where we are now that this statement even after i think four years of this being batted around, possibly even more, given the pizza gate issue we had here in washington. what does it say that you have 15% who still believe it and 41% who say they're not sure. that's more than 50%, half of the people you asked were either believed it or say they're not sure about it. what does that say about where we are as a country? >> i think there were a number of things in the poll that were troubling. you mentioned 15% of the public overall. but three in ten republicans roughly said that it was mostly or completely accurate. we had another question about whether antifa, the sort of anti-fascist group was involved

in promoting the violence and engaging in violence on the january 6th attacks. again, about a third of the public and half of republicans said that that was accurate. so, we're in a state where a significant portion of the public is engaged in these sort of different reality bubbles. and so that's really concerning. and i think one of the things that came through with this poll is just how widespread some of these ideas have become. >> and how do we get to this point? is this because of social media? is this because of the fracturing of all of the different media into perhaps conservative versus liberal? how did we get to the point where these type of conspiracy theories not only flourish but seem to spread so fast? >> yeah. i think it's important to remember that the conspiracy theories have been around for a long time. but i think what makes, you

know, what's happening now different is that they're spreading, as you said, so easily and so rapidly. and, in part, that's because, you know, they're incredibly easy to disseminate stuff online. people just have access to this information that would've been more difficult to a generation ago. the other thing is there's been a real precipitous decline in trust in major institutions. so, people's trust in the media, in government, in scientific bodies. if you look better the past 20, 30 years, we're at a real low point in terms of how much we trust the major institutions in this country. and so if i'm looking for some information, i may be more inclined to use my social circle, use stuff i'm finding on the web. the phrase you often hear is doing my own research. the other thing is that peer-to-peer information sharing has become much more common.

so we get really used to this idea of sharing information sometimes about really technical complicated issues online through, you know, channels like tiktok, youtube, facebook. and so it becomes much more natural to get information this way. and i think those are part of the reasons why this has happened. >> let me remind our viewers that they can take part in this discussion. we're going to open up our regular lines for this conversation. that means republicans, you can call in at 202-748-8001. democrats, your line's going to be 202-748-800. independents, 202-748-8002. you can always text us. and we're always reading on social media on twitter and on facebook at facebook.com/cspan.

another one of the questions that you asked in your survey dealt with the attack on the capitol on january 6th. and it asked about the antifa involvement in the capitol attack. and, first let's say that 30% total of the public said the claim that antifa was responsible at the u.s. capitol was mostly or completely accurate. now, out of that 30%, we see here on screen the breakdown of who that 30% was. 50% of that 30% were republicans. 28% were independents. and 20% were democrats. now, given that the fbi and other law enforcement officials have said repeatedly that antifa's involvement in the capitol attack was minimal, if not at all, it didn't happen at all. what explains that 30% number,

to begin with? >> well, i think that you have to look at the political leadership, particularly on the right where there was kind of this move to, in some places, downplay what happened to kind of rationalize, to offer false equivalence. and i think part of that was that, well, look at what blm was doing over the summer, and how was this any different and, oh, i thought i saw some folks that were wearing antifa garb. this kind of got promulgated and propagated out there. and you still see people talking about this. the wyoming republican party mentioned the antifa thing in their move to censure liz cheney. they mentioned the antifa stuff. so this stuff is out there, and people are promoting it. it's not surprising that it starts to kind of trickle down. >> now, i will say what surprised me most about that

political breakdown of that 30% was that 28% of independents and 20% of democrats also believe that antifa was involved in the capitol attack. is what we're seeing that people are just repeating the things they hear on television and they're seeing on -- they're repeating things they hear and they believe? because, once again, the law enforcement officials who are investigating this have said repeatedly, and we can see from the people who are being arrested and brought to court, that antifa is not involved. >> right. and i think this goes to the power of conspiracy thinking that if you repeat something long enough, loud enough, then it becomes kind of what people end up hearing and believing, despite that there's been pushback, no, we haven't seen any evidence to suggest this is true, you still are hearing that.

and if you trust the sources of information you're getting, by and large, you're going to believe it. the other thing that we found in the poll and i think that's a really important point is that your social network matters. so the people around you, to the extent that you have people who reflect your own political believes in your own social circle, you're much more inclined to believe conspiracy theories. if you're a republican and all your friends and family members are republicans, you're more likely to believe conspiracies. the same thing for democrats. democrats are actually more likely to believe in conspiracies, too, if they are also primarily surrounded by people who share their political views as well. >> let's start letting our viewers take part in this conversation. let's start with nathaniel who's calling from buffalo, new york, on the republican line. nathaniel, good morning. >> good morning. i'm looking at the situation of everything that's being discussed. al jazeera just recently did a report where they stated that

the fbi still is running the program where they believe black idealism is a threat to the country. we can physically and visually see the threat that all these groups are causing divisions and starting up militia activities. and it's just dangerous for everyone to walk around with these ideals and not think about the children that are going to be spawned from the activities that we're performing today for the future of the country and the people in the country. how do things like that get addressed to where those conspiracies and idealisms are coiled to where we can move forward and everyone can start educating on more idealisms of growth and unity? that's all i have to say. >> go ahead and respond, daniel. >> so, yeah. and i think, when i've talked to

people about this study, one of the natural questions is what do we do about it, how do we address conspiracies? and my first response is, you know, we should all be trying to get a wider ray of information sources to inform ourselves about politics. we shouldn't rely on just the people in our social circle who believe the same thing we do. we shouldn't use just media on the right or the left. but i think when it comes to our political leadership, we need to reinvigorate and really re-emphasize the importance of institution and institution building. we need to have trust. we need to increase trust in our political institutions in society. so when people have their issues, we can go, i trust the fbi, i trust the media to provide me, you know, all the information i need to make sound political judgments. and so far that hasn't happened. and it's i think a huge problem

moving forward. >> one of the other questions you all tackled in the study was about voter fraud. so, i want to just show to our audience the voter fraud conspiracy theory. so, the statement you asked them to react to was, there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and the results of that question was 14% of the people asked if there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election, said that that statement was mostly accurate. 15% said it was completely accurate. so just, once again, just about a third of the people still believe that there was widespread election voter fraud during the 2020 election. 52% rejected that. and 18% was unsure. despite all of the things we've heard from the state level organizers and the state level

officials who run the elections, who said that there was not widespread voter fraud, you still have just about 30% of the people believing it. once again, is this because that's what they're hearing from their leaders? >> yeah. i mean, absolutely. there is no doubt in my mind that if trump had conceded and said yes this was a free and fair election, this would not have happened. we wouldn't have had this huge partisan divide and views about whether the election was free and fair. the fact that you have a majority of republicans saying that biden was not legitimately elected, a question we asked in the poll, and that there was extensive voter fraud in 2020, despite there was no evidence for this. we had the fact that not only trump was promoting this idea, a lot of republicans were supporting him on it. so, you didn't have the kind of pushback that you needed to try to push back on this false claim. >> now, is the idea behind these conspiracy theories a desire to gain political power?

is it a desire to gain monetary gains? what's the advantage of coming up with the conspiracy theories that make people try to believe it? >> yeah. and i think there's a couple different kinds of conspiracies. so the ones we focused on this poll are primarily about politics. but there's also ones in public health, too. so, concerns about gmos, that's genetically modified organisms. we asked about that in a previous survey. you find people believing that that gmos are harmful. and despite the fact that there's no real evidence for it. and you find both republicans and democrats on some level believing that. it's harder to get a sense of who's gaining, you know, in the promoting of that -- >> we'll take you live now to a meeting of the house budget committee, which is considering the american rescue act of 2021. president biden's $1.9 trillion economic relief package. >> pursuant to