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Michael Riojas is a senior studying journalism and an opinion writer for The New Political.

Please note that these views and opinions do not reflect those of The New Political.

In recent years, misinformation has run rampant in the United States. As a result, belief in conspiracy theories reached an all-time high, trust in our nations democratic process has waned and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from a preventable disease. To understand the role of misinformation, we first need to understand two things about it: how it spreads and where it originates.

The spread of false knowledge is the bulk of the problem. Disinformation, information that is intended to deceive, is the catalyst for misinformation. Most disinformation is created by a minority of people on social media, often in regard to social and political issues such as vaccine conspiracies or election lies.

Politicians, especially Republicans, have been using disinformation to their advantage for years. Clips of Senator Rand Paul and Donald Trumps CIA Director Mike Pompeo show how blas lying is for many conservative politicians. Even more egregious, Trump has told over 30,000 lies during his time as president and is perhaps the most responsible for the dystopian rise in COVID-19 and election conspiracy theories.

The 2020 election, by every account, was one of the most secure elections in U.S. history. Still, nearly 70% of Republican voters believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump. According to Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, none of his Republican colleagues actually believes the 2020 election was stolen, but many GOP elites continue to disinform. The decrease in trust in American democracy has been the result of one mans fractured ego and the willingness of his sycophants to play along despite knowing better.

However, elected Republicans are not the only ones spreading disinformation. Conservative TV media have perpetuated election lies about voting machines and mail-in ballots. They have also played a large part in their viewers willingness, or lack thereof, to get vaccinated. Based on a 2020 Pew Research study, Republican voters received their news mainly from one source: Fox News. Like other right-leaning sources, they provide their viewers with mixed messages regarding vaccine information and have likely contributed to preventable American deaths, especially in red counties. A small handful of conservative hosts pander to the Republican establishment, and their pandering hurts their viewers. As a result, these voters are not only ill-informed regarding some of the significant issues our country faces but tend to elect leaders that continue to perpetuate similar lies, thus creating a cycle.

This isnt to say that networks who cater liberal politics are free from error. Corporate Democrats, along with networks such as CNN and MSNBC, have been accused of perpetuating pro-military-industrial-complex and pro-status quo propaganda, but currently it seems the most dangerous disinformation comes from right-wing sources.

As misinformation continues to spread rapidly, trust in our government will likely continue to diminish and the U.S. will pay the price of these lies. With midterm elections coming up and 2024 not far off, the threat could become much, much worse.

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OPINION: US faces deadly threat of misinformation fueled by conservative leaders The New Political - The New Political

'I want to be able to break ground next year,' Beshear says on Brent Spence Bridge project

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced plans to apply for two federal grants totaling up to $2 billion to fund a new bridge.

Kareem Elgazzar, Cincinnati Enquirer

COVINGTON, Ky. The Brent Spence Bridge between Ohio and Kentucky could finally be getting its companion bridge and it won't require new tolls.

At a news conference Monday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced plans to apply for two federal grants totaling up to $2 billion to fund a new bridge to carry Interstates 71 and 75 over the Ohio River.

"I want to be able to break ground next year,'' said Beshear, a Democrat, during the news conference.

Brent Spence Bridge: Timeline of trying to fund the $2.5 billion project

The application for funding is expected to be submitted within the next few months and a final decision on the funding could happen in the fall of 2023, officials said.

The total cost of the new bridge would be about $2.8 billion, according to DeWine, a Republican. Kentucky and Ohio will contribute whatever funds aren't covered by the federal government.

Both states will apply for the grants together once the U.S. Department of Transportation releases guidance on the application process. Governors DeWine and Beshear said it's unclear exactly when that may be.

Transportation officials estimated construction of the companion bridge and improvements to the Brent Spence would take about five years to complete.

Beshear and DeWine said the new bridge would be built without tolls.

In the 1990s, the Federal Highway Administration declaredthe Brent Spence functionally obsolete because its narrow lanes carried more cars than it was designed for with no emergency lane.

The Brent Spence was built in 1963 to handle 80,000 vehicles a day, but is now used by double that number.

Improvements to the existing bridge and building a new companion bridge would add much-needed capacity by separating local and through traffic to ease the ongoing traffic backups and accidents.

"We believe that there is no bridge in this country that is as necessary and in needing of a change,'' DeWine said. Interstate 75 is a key freight corridor reaching from Canada to Florida, so officials said slowdowns affect commerce throughout the eastern United States.

A semi-truckhauling potassium hydroxidecrashed into ajackknifed truckon the Brent Spence in November 2020, causing a fire that shut down the bridge for weeks.

And in 2021, the bridge was ranked as the nation's second-worst for traffic bottlenecks.

For years, everyone agreed a new bridge was needed. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump were unableto secure funding for the project.

The infrastructure bill, which President Joe Biden signed into law in November, provided new hope for funding the bridge. The bill provides multiple grant opportunities that the bridge project would qualify for, including at least $39 billion specifically for bridges.

One of these grant programs is the Bridge Investment Act, sponsored by U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman of Ohio.This act provides $12.5 billionin grant funding to repair or replace outdated bridges. In a press release, Brown said he wrote the Bridge Investment Act with the Brent Spence in mind. Portman was one of the main Republicans who helped negotiate and pass the infrastructure bill.

In Kentucky, Sen. MinorityLeader Mitch McConnell voted for the bill, and Sen. Rand Paul voted against it. Both senators are Republicans

The bill passed the House on a largely party-line vote; all the Greater Cincinnati Republicans including Southwest Ohio's Reps. Steve Chabot, Brad Wenstrup, Warren Davidson and Northern Kentucky's Thomas Massie voted against it.

Northern Kentucky reporter Rachel Berry can be reached at rberry@enquirer.com. Follow her on Twitter @racheldberry.

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New Ohio River bridge next to Brent Spence won't require tolls, governors of Ohio and Kentucky say - The Cincinnati Enquirer

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said the Emergencies Act that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently invoked to quell the trucker convoy protests is "very, very dangerous" and warned against similar legislation that exists in the United States.

"I think statutes that allow presidents or heads of state to invoke emergencies are very, very dangerous," said Paul during an episode of the BASED Politics podcast that aired Sunday. "We have the same sort of statutes here, and I have long-time been an opponent of these. We actually have in the United States an Emergency Act that allows the president to shut down the internet."

Several Canadian civil liberties groups have also spoken out against Trudeau after he invoked the Emergencies Act to cut off funding for "Freedom Convoy" truckers, freeze their bank accounts and crack down on the lingering demonstrations in Ottawa. The trucker protest has been largely cleared from the Canadian capital, but Trudeau has not yet relaxed the state of emergency.

Paul explained how he failed in his attempt to corral anti-Trump Democrats into an alliance with libertarian-leaning Republicans to strike down such emergency power legislation during the Trump administration.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., arrives for a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing to examine the federal response to examine the federal response to COVID-19 and new emerging variants on Jan. 11, 2022, at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. GREG NASH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

"[Sen.] Mike Lee had some reforms that he put forward on the Emergency Act, and it's something we should look at, because these things go on and on," Paul continued. "There are some emergencies in the U.S. that have been going on for many, many decades. And the president can just renew them every year. There's no real stopping him."

CANADIAN CLERGY REBUKE TRUDEAU FOR INVOKING EMERGENCIES ACT, OTHER TYRANNICAL ACTIONS'

Paul pointed out how he tweeted on Feb. 16 that Canada had become Egypt, where Paul said President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has repeatedly extended emergency powers and arbitrarily detained people.

"And so the emergency edict that Trudeau has done in Canada allows him to do some horrendous things, allows him to stop travel, allows him to detain people without trial. Now we don't know that he's going to do that, but it is very, very worrisome what he might do," Paul added.

Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime minister, speaks during a news conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022. David Kawai/Bloomberg

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said the truckers protests did not meet the standard for Trudeau to have invoked the Emergencies Act, which exists for "the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada" and only for actions that "cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada."

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Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, one of the Republican Partys staunchest devotees to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, continued to spread such claims this week and in the process delivered one of the more honest statements about voter fraud and stolen elections any Republican lawmaker has made this year.

How to steal an election, Paul tweeted Monday night, before quoting an article from The American Conservative. Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.

The attached piece, which purportedly described Democrats and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergs efforts to steal Wisconsin for President Joe Biden last year, failed to provide any proof of nefarious behavior: Instead, it documented efforts to encourage and Increase Absentee Voting and dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.

As Pauls tweet helpfully noted, all of these efforts were perfectly legitimate: The phrase legally valid is prominently featured in the sentence he chose to excerpt. Routine audits of Wisconsins elections, meanwhile, produced no evidence of fraud or irregularities in last years contest.

But proof of fraud is not the point of this claim or any other Paul, Trump and various Republicans have made over the last year or, really, over the last decade. As Pauls tweet stated more clearly than Republicans typically do, their claims about voter fraud, stolen elections and election integrity are merely euphemisms for the GOPs actual belief that people voting for Democrats is enough to render an election entirely illegitimate. A Democratic victory is, by definition, the result of theft.

This is the core belief of the modern Republican Party, which reacted to the 2020 election by spreading lies about election fraud, attempting to overturn Trumps loss, and fomenting a riotous insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, all because Trump lost what numerous Republican, Democratic and independent election observers have repeatedly called the safest, most secure and most audited election in American history. When that didnt achieve their desired result, they institutionalized the aims of the insurrection, passing more than 30 new laws to restrict voting rights and asserting new levels of partisan control over local and state election systems ahead of the next presidential contest.

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has routinely spread lies about the 2020 election. (Photo: Pool via Getty Images)

These efforts have all primarily targeted voters that tend to favor Democrats Black people, Latinos, Native Americans, college students, people with disabilities, and anyone who lives in cities or other localities that typically vote blue. And they are all obviously rooted in Republican anger that too many voters voted for Democrats, not that anyone mightve cast ballots illegally.

In Georgia, Republicans added stricter voter ID requirements to absentee ballots, tightening access to a vote-by-mail program the GOP created more than a decade ago in a way they never felt was necessary until Biden became the first Democrat to win the state since 1980. In Arizona, the GOP-controlled legislature made similar changes to absentee ballot laws they originally enacted, after Biden notched Democrats first presidential victory there in more than two decades. In Texas where its already harder to vote than in most other states they barred drive-through voting and imposed other new voting restrictions in an effort to ward off potential Democratic victories in the near future.

Republicans and their conservative allies have also targeted election officials and offices in key states, purging or stripping power from those who made it too easy to vote or refused to go along with Trumps election gambit, part of a broader effort to bend the 2024 election to their liking or try to overturn the result if they need to. In Wisconsin, the subject of Pauls tweet, Republicans have sought to undermine the electoral system they just reformed less than a decade ago and are attempting to forcibly replace the states top elections official.

None of this will prevent the sort of nefarious behavior their countless utterances of voter fraud are meant to evoke, both because that sort of behavior is exceptionally rare in American politics and because actual voter fraud has never been the target of their ire. But neither will insisting to Republicans, or to conservative voters who believe their claims, that voter fraud doesnt actually occur succeed in thwarting the GOPs attempts to suppress votes and subvert American democracy.

Its painfully obvious what Republicans are trying to do, and why. Paul was simply, if perhaps inadvertently, candid about it: To the modern GOP and an increasingly large share of its conservative base, theres no such thing as a legally valid vote for a Democrat, and no such thing as a legitimate election if a Democrat wins it.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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Rand Paul Inadvertently Tells The Truth About Republican ...

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FIRST ON FOX: Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., doubled down on his opposition to Ukraine joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), saying it would be an extremely provocative action toward the "pariah nation" of Russia.

Fox News Digital asked the senator on Thursday about his prediction on if or when Russia will invade, to which he responded that no one knows, but that it would be a "great downside" for "pariah nation" Russia.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE: BLINKEN TELLS UN WHAT US THINKS WILL HAPPEN NEXT: LIVE UPDATES

"I think nobody knows, I'm still hopeful that they won't invade. I think there's a great downside for Russia. They are already somewhat of a pariah nation, but I think they become more excluded from things, and I think there will be significant repercussions from the Europeans who buy a lot of natural gas from them if they invade Ukraine. So I think they need to know this is not going to, they're not going to get just a pass on this."

Rand Paul on Hannity. (Fox News)

The senator also doubled down on his criticism of Ukraine joining NATO, saying it would likely provoke and anger Russia and isn't the United States' problem to solve.

"On the other side of the coin, though, I do think it would be good, and it was at least a statement from the Ukrainian prime minister and the German saying there is no imminent call to put Ukraine in NATO. They should have been saying that for a decade or more. It's a dumb idea to put Ukraine in NATO, and it's a very provocative one. I asked the secretary of state the other day, Blinken, I said, What do you think our response would be if Mexico were joining a military alliance with Russia against the United States? We would be hopping mad."

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said recently that Ukraine's NATO membership is not on the table for the alliance, at the current moment.

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks as he greets embassy staff at the U.S. embassy, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool)

These statements come after President Biden and the State Department have expressed support for NATO's "open door" policy when it comes to Ukraine. However, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said during a press briefing recently that it will be up to Ukraine to fulfill membership requirements in order to join the alliance down the road, if the country decides to do so.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE: PENTAGON CALLS REPORTED SHELLING OF VILLAGE 'TROUBLING'

"So we have to understand that asking countries right on the border of Russia that used to be part of Russia to be in a military alliance against Russia is just a foolhardy idea. Kissinger said this, many others have said this, and I think we should offer them the carrot of that, that they won't be in NATO and at the same time, tell them, though, that if you invade there, the repercussions will be very, very costly and these will be economic repercussions. But all of that requires the cooperation of Europe because we don't buy that much from Russia," Paul told Fox News Digital.

Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and national security advisor under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, held similar views as the Kentucky senator.

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 11: U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) questions Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing to discuss the ongoing federal response to COVID-19 on May 11, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)

In a recent op-ed, Paul points out that Kissinger advised that Ukraine should remain neutral to survive due to its geographical location. Kissinger previously wrote, "For Ukraine to survive, "it must not be either sides outpost against the other it should function as a bridge between them."

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Paul threatened on Thursday to block a quick passage of the Senate resolution pledging support for Ukraine. The resolution required unanimous consent, meaning every senator had to agree in order to pass it in a timely manner.

"We have some amendments to it. We believe that it should say nothing in this resolution is to be construed as an authorization of war and nothing in this resolution is to be construed as authorizing the use of troops into Ukraine," Paul reportedly said.

Paul's amendment, that nothing should be construed as a declaration of war, was accepted and included in the resolution, which passed Thursday evening.

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Rand Paul says Ukraine joining NATO is a 'dumb idea', that would provoke 'pariah nation' of Russia - Fox News