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Participation Awards have become common in youth sports in the last several years. Everyone gets a ribbon, a medal, or a trophy based solely on participation.

The psychological impact is now a matter of debate, focused around the question of whether they promote a sense of worth and inclusion or diminish the value of achievement and create an unrealistic view of life that doesn’t match reality.

Sadly, I want to suggest that belief in the efficacy of participation awards has spread to people’s attitudes about opinions.

It is commonplace today for people to believe all that matters when it comes to holding opinions is having one, as if an informed opinion is no better than an uninformed one, as if having an opinion is sufficient for having a voice in a discussion or an election,

It has in fact become so extreme that many people actually believe opinions have equal value to facts and evidence.

I will leave the psychological impact of participatory awards to the experts, but when it comes to a level field of opinions and their equal value to facts, it doesn’t take an expert to know how foolish and dangerous such thinking is.

The fact is, not all opinions are of equal value. You may have the right to your opinion, but that doesn’t mean your opinion has any value. Some opinions are informed while others reflect appalling ignorance.

That’s simple common sense, but common sense is in short supply in today’s America. More people than you can imagine apparently believe that there is a participation award for ignorance based solely on the right of an individual to think whatever they want to think.

No doubt social media has contributed to this development to the point where an entirely new professional category in our society has emerged.

It’s called Opinion Influencers, defined as “digital content creators and subject-matter ‘authorities’ who shape public views, consumer choices, and political attitudes through social media networks.”

Some influencers such as Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, and Paul Krugman have academic credentials to back up the opinions and views they share.

Those on the right such as Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and the late Charlie Kirk are jacklegs who thrive on misinformation and disinformation, and at times plain old lies.

They are part of the problem because they depend on their listeners not being informed. As such, they are influencing people to believe having an opinion is all citizenship requires.

This kind of lazy thinking can be practiced by anyone, and found among diverse groups, but I would argue it is especially widespread among Trump supporters.

Saying that is more than an opinion, and certainly more than an uniformed opinion. Test it out for yourself. Ask Trumpers why they believe Trump is doing a good job and what you will hear is an uninformed opinion that reflects a shocking level of ignorance that should embarrass anyone who values knowledge.

But it’s worse than that. It is not true that Trumpers don’t know what they’re doing. Just the opposite. They know exactly what they’re doing because it is a conscious choice they have made to hold opinions rooted in ignorance.

In point of fact, Trumpers are examples of people who exhibit all the signs of being trapped in the logical fallacy neuroscientist Steven Novella calls “motivated reasoning” (The Skeptics Guide to the Universe: How to know what is really real in a world that is increasingly fake).

Motivated reasoning is confirmation bias on steroids. Confirmation bias is an unconscious process of seeking evidence or approval for what you already believe or think.

But once you consciously seek support for what you already believe or think, you have transitioned into motivated reasoning.

People who engage in motivated reasoning have abandoned any desire to know the truth. They have convinced themselves that having an opinion is good enough, that being informed before forming an opinion either requires too much work or isn’t important.

That’s why they turn to influencers. It makes them feel good when someone who pretends to know what they’re talking about tells them what they want to hear. They’re like an athlete who could do better, but is satisfied with receiving a participation award.  

The damage they are doing, of course, is that Trumpers themselves are influencing their children and grandchildren to believe having an opinion matters just as much as having an informed opinion, even to the point of teaching them that opinions have equal value to facts.

Having grown up receiving participation awards that covey the message, even if unintentionally, that excellence and achievement and winning don’t matter, future generations of Trumpers are likely to consider knowledge as unnecessary as their parents and grandparents do.

It’s another example of the myriad ways Donald Trump’s damage to America goes beyond government itself and will be felt for generations to come.

We will recover, of course, because that’s what people left with the damage done by political leaders do. They recover and rebuild.

At the same time, though, we may as well prepare ourselves for the fact that when Trump is finally gone, he’ll still be around.