Believers treat absence of evidence as proof of sophisticated concealment

Evidence

“We need an investigation,” a woman named Angel told me patiently. A casino worker in her midforties, she’d driven all the way to DC to hold a neat hand-lettered sign featuring a picture of a Comet staff member’s toddler daughter, her hands taped to a table with heavy white masking tape. “We can’t call people innocent without an investigation.” … “I’m sure they’ve cleaned themselves up to the point where if you look, there’s nothing there,” she told me. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 243

Categorization

• XREF: Links to vault claims about authoritarian/closed epistemic style — unfalsifiable belief structures that immunize against disconfirming evidence, echoing confirmation-bias material in the trust literature. — connects to: Conspiracy theorists reinterpret absence of proof and challenges as confirming evidence — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 216; Fringe believers conflate institutional silence with outright rejection of their claims — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 167

Broader Connections

• Conspiracy theorists reinterpret absence of proof and challenges as confirming evidence #corroborates (1.00) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 216