emotion ANGER fear

820

belated/ disambig?

see fear hype

see grievance

see polarization

see fascism

see fox

see social media

an 8 23 no lnx

The fascist who doesn’t want America to think

'A harasser and an abuser': Donald Trump seethes at special counsel Jack Smith

Robert ReichAugust 27, 2023

I want to talk about symbols, images, and fascism.

Here is Trump’s mug shot from his arraignment yesterday in Georgia. It’s a look of defiance — which I’m sure he practiced repeatedly beforehand — intended to make his supporters and his Republican base feel defiant, too.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is Trump’s thousand-word response to Wednesday night’s Republican debate, which he declined to attend.

He timed his arraignment in Georgia for yesterday so that it — and this photo — would dominate Thursday’s and Friday’s news, rather than anything or anyone emerging from the debate.

But a defiant photograph isn’t “news.” It’s a symbol, an image. Which is exactly what Donald Trump is. He has no political platform, no specific policy agenda, no new ideas,and no plan for what he’ll do if he gets a second term.

He exists as a symbol for the anger, discontent, bigotry, and vindictiveness he has unleashed in America.

He is as close as America has come to a fascist leader, who doesn’t want his followers to think or analyze. He wants them only to feel.

Trump’s lackeys fell in line, expressing the defiance Trump projected in his mug shot.

On Newsmax, Sarah Palin called for civil war.

Fox’s Laura Ingraham told viewers that Trump’s arrest was proof that government officials are trying to “take them out.”

Fox’s Sean Hannity said the Department of Justice will target Republicans “until there’s nothing left of the party.”

All brainless bile.

Last Thursday, Trump complained that Fox News “purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big ‘orange’ one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they’re not. Just like 2016 all over again … And then they want me to debate!”

Of course he’s angry. For the man who’s all symbol and image and without substance, a photo like the following conveys a brainless buffoon. It must drive him crazy.

But Trump is not a brainless buffoon. He’s a cunning marketer, a diabolic manipulator of the public, a sly producer of his own daily reality show. His lead in the GOP’s presidential sweepstakes has grown. He will almost certainly be the Republican candidate for president next year — even if he’s in jail.

How to debate a symbol? How to take on an image? How should Biden and the Democrats, and everyone who cares deeply about this country, respond to a demagogue who obsesses over what he projects rather than what he stands for? How to deal with a fascist who doesn’t want followers to think but only to feel rage?

Expose him for who he is.

-=-=

MMA

September 1, 2026, edition of The Benny Show, uploaded to YouTube

BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): But this is the fundamental question of our time, and it's a curse on us, and it makes me so angry at older generations. And I love y'all. This is not gonna be some boomer hate screed. But you don't understand what was destroyed. And it's impossible because it's so hard for — this is why, like, the whole victimhood stuff is such trash — so impossible to put yourself in somebody else's position. It really is very hard for somebody to do this. So I'm not going to ask you to do it, but, like, think about what's been destroyed.

I have to homeschool my kids. Because I can't trust that they're not going to be indoctrinated or abused inside of the public school or killed, you know, right? Obviously, like, killed by a gang of like Third World miscreants that want to scalp a white kid. That didn't exist when I was growing up, when the boomers were raising their kids, except maybe the worst conceivable schools in the worst conceivable parts of the most downtrodden bombed out cities in America. Maybe you could find a public school like that. Now it's every public school, every one. Institutional trust is at absolute zero. That's why homeschooling is exploding.

-=-=

an 2 23 badash?

**Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene** (R-GA) celebrated Presidents Day by calling for red and blue states to separate in a "national divorce."

"We need a national divorce," Greene tweeted Monday morning, barely weeks after calling President Joe Biden a "liar" in the nationally-televised State of the Union. "We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this."

Greene also calledDemocrats "traitorous," and angrily accused them of shoving down Republicans' throats "sick and disgusting woke culture issues."

"From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat'straitorous America Last policies, we are done."

Some blasted Greene's choice to make her remarks on the national holiday, officially Washington's Birthday, some noted she sits on the Homeland Security Committee, whileothers noted blue states contribute more to the federal coffers than red states, which are more likely to be supported by blue states. (The "red" and "blue" state descriptors are not only somewhat subjective, but fluid, as Democratic voters flipped two states from red to blue and held all the others in 2022.)

One Twitter user reminded that Greene is a "key advisor" to **Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy**. Her support of the embattled McCarthy helped put the gavel in his hand, and he has pledged loyalty to her. "I will never leave that woman," McCarthy reportedly said after becoming Speaker. "I will always take care of her."

attorney, journalist, and SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah had just four words in response: "This is treasonous. Period."

Others also called it "treason," and still others "sedition."

Ryan Cooper, managing editor of The American Prospect, tweeted,"remarkable how casually these people suggest literal treason."

Another Twitter user observed, "This is a member of Congress, who sits on Homeland Security Committee, calling for secession. We fought a war over this once and160 years later the losers still can't let it go."

rubber glue: WE GOP didn't steal the election (by gerry and voter suppression of POC] DEMS stole by chicago style dead ppl vote; WE did not have insurrection, the REAL one was election.

aha: bannon is just latest extension of rove's dismissal of reality-based journalism?

alt rt trolls win by owning the libs, often by making outrageous claim they know to be false to provoke an emotional reaction in weak woman-y snowflakes.

recall early graphic of blogs red/blue but red more insular/echo

flood the zone bannon/ troll it is a deliberate strategy to overwhelm correction [by lamestream media, fake news?!] and thus moderation; you cannot trust news nor gubmint thus civil society erodes and --> authoritartian/fascism strong MAN/strict FATHER to fix, maga

soc media co attempt to tamp down BS evaded by misspell or vol/forced migration to gab etc that prides self on lack of moderation [censorship]

flood the zone with shit/disinfo might originally been troll tactic to deflect accurate critiques/blame and rubber glue inverse crypto bizarro mirror world --> Earth2; but always hype fear about THEM enemy threat to all that's good, grift for $ to fight the evil

amplify/accelerate --> radicalization; enemy // target // tyrant gubmint is tyrant, they deprive us of vote/legit means so all is left is righteous violence--> when do we get to use the guns?

aha echo ALGORITHM is the opposite of correction,[WELL THERE'S A SORT OF CORRECTION BUT IN THE WRONG DIRECTION BY A SMALLER AND SMALLER SUBSET OF WACKOS THAT IS IRONICALLY GETTING LARGER AND LARGER AND FINDING/MAKING EACH OTHER [[CRAZIER]]; and algo gives incremental DOSE of crazy that builds on previous slightly less crazy:--> earth2 delusional break from reality is phase shift/level up/ tip pt? doom spiral?

12 21 an salon https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/tucker-carlson/

t he TV was talking to me. I was in the midst of a delusion that the news anchors on CNN were operatives of a shadow government run by the Clintons. Every time I crossed the living room of my father's dingy basement apartment, their heads followed me and the news anchors interrogated me about my role in the Russia investigation. I believed "Russia investigation" was really code for a global conspiracy to enslave humanity through mind control. President Donald Trump and the Republicans were secretly working to overturn this shadow government and end the deep state programs. Targets of torture like me would be set free.

I turned the channel to FOX News. They repeated over and over that Hilary Clinton was a criminal. Even though I was a Democrat and had voted for Bill Clinton twice, I mailed in the form to join the Republican Party. Then I faxed evidence to the Russian consulate and sent a letter to the CIA offering to cooperate in the investigation.

What I didn't know I was that I was in the advanced stages of untreated paranoid schizophrenia. I was experiencing a psychotic break from reality.

It all seemed so real.

When I was eventually treated, my psychiatrist explained to me, "With paranoid schizophrenia it's just like "The Bourne Identity" — there are people for you, people against you, and somebody always has to be the villain."

I know what you're thinking — thank God they have medication for these people.Now, I wonder, is the average American so different from me? Are we all susceptible to paranoid thoughts, conspiratorial thinking and bias when executive function in the frontal lobes and our ability to reason are disabled by fear?

Terrified by a global pandemic, there are people who believe Bill Gates is an evil mastermind who engineered the coronavirus, with plans to depopulate and microchip the world's population, while profiting in the process. Antivaxxers refuse to take a vaccine they think will alter the structure of human DNA. Our brains seek to impose order. Conspiracy theories can provide answers to people who feel overwhelmed. But ideally the frontal lobes should step in to challenge strange thoughts by asking the question: Is what I am perceiving based in reality?

Dr. Oliver Freudenreich, Co-Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychosis Program, states that there is no generally agreed-upon definition on what constitutes a delusion. From a psychiatric or biological perspective, delusions are driven by excessive amounts of the neurotransmitter dopamine. There is a biological basis to them, and treatment can correct this abnormality. A person with such delusions (e.g., somebody with schizophrenia) is expected to respond to being treated with an antipsychotic medication which blocks dopamine. In other words, one can take a pill and think rationally.

However, many people can't do that if their delusional thinking is part of a worldview that is more an ideology. According to Dr. Freudenreich, when people create their own insular groups — where delusional ideas are never corrected, but simply bounce around in an echo chamber — it is much harder to fight those types of delusions.

Policy divides are now often framed as a battle between good and evil.The most obvious consequence of overheated partisan rhetoric is that someone with an untreated psychiatric illness can go on to commit an act of violence against a person or group that they believe is a perpetrator of their suffering. This is rare. More common is the normal person who goes down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and finds a world that makes sense to them.

On January 6th, 2021, incited by President Trump and believing the election had been stolen, a mob attacked the Capital building. Some in the crowd showed up for the "Storm," which is a QAnon conspiracy theory that posits that Trump was planning mass arrests of a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles and coup plotters, headed by Hilary Clinton and George Soros. Capitol police described the scene as being like fighting a medieval battle.

Social dynamics can propagate conspiracy-based thinking that mimics biologically triggered delusions. But there is no medication that will stop mass violence fueled by conspiracies.

I was a forty-six-year-old filmmaker when I suddenly began to have paranoid thoughts that people were following me. When I lost my day job due to bizarre behavior, I lost my excellent health insurance. I was dumped into America's broken mental health care system that offers substandard psychiatric care to patients on Medicaid, while spending vast amounts of taxpayer money. Misdiagnosed and neglected at the county hospital, I got sicker and sicker … until the TV started talking to me.

Years of my life are now gone. I try not to be bitter that I ended up unemployed, bankrupt and almost homeless, when all I needed was proper medical care. Every day I am grateful that I didn't wind up living on the streets or locked up in prison, like so many people with schizophrenia.

It's easy to mock people who think Bill Gates wants to put a microchip in them with the coronavirus vaccine. But it's much harder to separate conspiracy theorists' larger existential fears from our own. We're approaching the second year of a global pandemic, which is causing mass anxiety and depression. The internet routinely displays images of future roads in major cities as gushing rivers due to climate change. Billions of fish were boiled in the American Northwest and Canada during an unprecedented heatwave this summer. If someone's mind starts spinning with their wildest fears and finds solace in a conspiracy theory, can you really blame them?

Television is a powerful medium. CNN and FOX News repeat the same headlines, the same phrases, over and over in the same news day. Back then, these read to my unhinged mind as coded speech; to the unsuspecting public, it is more akin to propaganda. When I was psychotic, I thought a shadow government had a ministry of propaganda and they colluded across networks. I worry about living in a country where the two major political parties are always at war, unable to get anything done, and the public is fed a delusional world by networks and social media companies competing for viewers.

People with paranoid schizophrenia see patterns that don't actually exist. Just like conspiracy theorists, they are constantly scanning the news for pieces of information to connect the dots about unseen forces controlling events. Both groups believe they are being persecuted by others. I had grandiose beliefs that I was at the center of every news story on TV. My mind was looking to cast a villain to account for the symptoms of a brain disease. The media handed me a culprit to blame. [q or trump sent me]

Dr. Anthony Fauci has complained about the extraordinary divisiveness surrounding the public health crisis created by the pandemic. The current battle is over masks and vaccines. FOX News paints the Democratic Party as a threat to democracy that has invented domestic enemies, such as the unvaccinated, to desperately cling to power. News anchors across CNN repeat the phrase "viral blizzard" to warn the public and scare the unvaccinated about the new variant. Fear mongering is psychologically destabilizing to the most normal person. But this media environment can be toxic to someone with an untreated psychiatric illness. I wish politicians and their media allies would stop contributing to the collective unraveling of the American mind.

an 12 21

Midterms are coming. In case that phrase doesn't already inspire enough dread, it looks like this particular round will be defined by an escalation of the already gross "woke wars" going on in the Democratic ranks.

A chorus of increasingly loud voices in the Democratic Party aren't focused on the threat of gerrymandering, voter suppression, or that whole thing where Republicans plan to simply void elections when they don't like the results. Dealing with that problem is hard and requires serious actions like ending the Senate filibuster. So instead, the ire is being turned on a soft and easy target to blame: the small number of people in the Democratic caucus who use politically correct terms like "Latinx" and "pregnant people."

In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes about centrist critics who argue that "Democrats have steered off track on cultural issues because the party is unduly influenced by the preferences of well-educated white liberals." (Its an argument that ignores that Black Lives Matter, the movement that most angers the cultural right, is spearheaded not by white liberals, but Black activists.) In a similar piece in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall notes the evidence that "working-class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues than by economics," and that many political strategists believe "Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues."

A particularly humorous example of the genre arrived this week from writer Zaid Jilani's newsletter, in which he chastised the AFL-CIO for sending out a tweet celebrating International Pronouns Day. "Most Americans are probably wondering what in the world International Pronoun Day has to do with wages, benefits, or conditions," he griped.

Most Americans?

The tweet in question, as of this writing, has 32 retweets on it and 35 likes. And that really underscores the major flaw of this argument: It presumes that right-wing anger at the left is an authentic and unmediated direct reaction to anything real-life Democrats are saying and doing in the world. And the evidence for that presumption is weak indeed.

None of this is to deny that the majority of white Americans, especially non-college-educated white Americans, are in a constant fit of outrage over "wokeness." I, too, have Facebook and two working eyeballs and can see that is true. But they're mostly not reacting to anything the Democrats are actually doing.No, mostly what gets white America going is bullshit, and lots and lots of it, being heaped out at an astounding rate from a well-funded GOP propaganda machine whose reach dramatically eclipses even the fondest dreams of any Democratic communications specialist. And that bullshit-generating engine doesn't need progressives to say a single, solitary word to keep their bullshit generation systems going. All progressives could shut up forever, and the right-wing noise machine wouldn't skip a beat.

Look, for instance, at what the two biggest news stories the shameless hucksters at Fox News are hyping right now: The Jussie Smollettguilty verdict and the arson of the Fox News Christmas tree. I would absolutely bet my life savings that both stories have a lot more Americans talking than the AFL-CIO's opinion on pronouns. And both are being hung by the propagandists around the necks of Democrats, even though Democrats have literally nothing to do with either crime.

Fox News is running with a bunch of "gotcha" attacks on prominent Democrats, such as Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who initially supported Smollett in the days after he claimed, falsely, to be the victim of a hate crime. Thebad faith of this is extreme, of course. Those folks are more properly understood as Smollett's victims because he took advantage of their generosity in order to perpetuate this hoax. But it doesn't matter to the liars of Fox News, because this one random man's bad actions are useful for perpetuating a hoax of their own: The claim that racism isn't real, and that it's just something Democrats make up to score political points.

The umbrage over Smollett's fake hate crime is particularly hypocritical, as Fox News is currently in the process of also falsifying a hate crime against themselves. The Christmas tree burning did happen, to be clear. But it is not a "hate crime," as multiple pundits at the network falsely claimed. (Which is a designation they refused to acknowledge for the Charleston church shooting.) And it certainly isn't comparable to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as oneFox News yapper dramatically declared. It appears it was committed by a mentally ill homeless man who blamed the arson on "mothers who rape their daughters." But that didn't slow down the faux outrage or efforts to pin the blame on Democrats.

No doubt the right-wing propaganda machine went out of their way to make progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota national figures, but it's naive to think that it's really due to anything either of those women say or do. It's because both are good-looking young women of color, and because Omar wears a head covering. Just the look of them sets off all sorts of ugly instincts in some white men, instincts that are tied up with, let's face it, a gross mix of racism and sexual desire that produces some really nasty emotional reactions. That stuff is way more powerful than words can ever be, and the GOP propaganda machine shamelessly exploits that.

The bleeding of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party has been going on for a long time — indeed, the decline started before Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were literally born — and unsurprisingly, the loss of those voters correlates strongly with the rise of right-wing media empires.

Which isn't to say that the audiences for the AM talkers and Fox News, much less the people who breathlessly share every bit of fake news generated by Russian bots they find on Facebook, are merely empty ciphers for this crap. There are very real changes going on in the United States. People of color are an ever-larger share of the population. Kids really are moving away from small towns and suburbs for college and never coming home. There's nothing that Democrats can or should do about that.

But the real problem here is a huge, well-funded machine on hand to tell aging white voters in rural and suburban areas that their resentment of these changes is justified, they are the real victims here, and they are right to be hiding in their homes, too afraid of the larger world to bother to get to know it.

Democrats can try to run away from the culture war all they like, but it won't work. It won't stop the two changes driving all of this white resentment. More importantly, it certainly won't stop the relentless churn of lies generated by Republican propagandists feeding people's worst instincts. Unfortunately, the only real way to deal with this culture war is to win it. Only by making a forceful case for progressive values and taking right-wing nonsense head-on is there any hope of defanging it.

We saw this most recently in Virginia, where a GOP hoax about "critical race theory" took over the gubernatorial race, helping GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin defeat McAuliffe. "Critical race theory," at least how Republicans use it, is just a nonsense scare term. But with only a little digging, it was easy to discover that the right-wing agenda underneath all the hype — removing all negative portrayals of slavery and Jim Crow from public schools — is utterly indefensible. Sure enough, once liberals in the state finally started to push back against the book burning posse, the right lost the argument and the left won. But by then, it was too late to save McAuliffe's campaign.

Looking further back, we saw the same thing with the debate over same-sex marriage. Republicans leveraged lies about "threats to traditional marriage" for years as a wedge issue against Democrats. But when Democrats stopped running from the issue and instead decided to fight back — and win — they defanged it completely. Now most Americans support same-sex marriage and Republicans basically gave up talking about it.

Bashing progressives and telling them to shut up is always a temptation, not because it works, but because it feels easy. It's certainly easier to tell progressives to shut up than, say, pass the Build Back Better plan so Democrats have something to run on, other than a bipartisan roads-and-bridges bill that Republicans can also take credit for.And it's a whole lot easier to tell progressives to shut up than it is to build up the kind of media empire that could compete effectively with right-wing propaganda.

But just because it's easy doesn't mean it's effective. Time spent on pursuing easy-but-useless strategies instead of rolling up sleeves and starting in on the harder-but-more-effective solutions is just time wasted.

ads basis of foodchain for facebook ND GGL

an 11 21

click eyeballs even mainstream media

In an article published by Mother Jones on Thanksgiving 2021, journalist Monika Bauerlein describes Americans as feeling mentally "exhausted" because of **all the bad news**on top of bad news that they are being inundated with. And media outlets, Bauerlein stresses, are creating that climate of exhaustion because it is good for business.

Bauerlein, in her Mother Jones article, writes, "Are you part of the exhausted majority?.… So many people are tired of feeling like everything is a disaster, everything is at risk, and we'll never be done fighting with unvaccinated relatives over who gets to come to Thanksgiving. And tired, too, of the news. I'm a journalist who lives and breathes news, and I get tired. So many headlines that want to get your attention. So much to worry about. Democrats in disarray, inflation, the climate — it's all at 11, all the time."

Bauerlein acknowledges that "there are a lot of crises out there," but she is quick to add that the world has always had crises. The difference in 2021, she argues, is media outlets have a financial stake in promoting "outrage."

"This is obviously not the only time of crisis the world, or America, has ever been through," the journalist explains. "It is, however, the only one in which we have lived in a 24/7 media ecosystem that depends for a significant part of its business on instant reaction and instant outrage. If you've been reading Mother Jones for a little while, you know about the basic problem:Advertising revenue for publishers and broadcasters depends in large part on both quantity — clicks, eyeballs, video views — and engagement:how long you stick around, whether you share, whether you comment. And all of those metrics are juiced when content tugs at your emotions, especially fear and outrage."

Bauerlein continues, "That can take the form of sensational headlines about simple news stories, or it can take the form of opinionated hot takes. Even for newsrooms that depend less on advertising than subscriptions, as the New York Times and the Washington Post do, quick-turnaround opinion content is key in getting people to subscribe. That's why you're seeing these prestige outlets add more and more columnists and associated newsletters." wapo pow roger pal

aha recall GOP sensitive amydila and pix bypass brain reptile brainstem

kellyanne says no sortage under trump but toilet paper? pix of shelve vs reams of data/facts? -->FEAR anger

11 21 an no lnx

Economist Paul Krugman: The US economy is on the right track — yet many Americans feel 'pessimistic'

Alex Henderson November 10, 2021

On Friday, November 5, the U.S. Department of Labor released its latest economic figures — reporting that unemployment in the United States fell to 4.6% in October and that wages had increased by 4.9% from what they were a year ago. Liberal economist Paul Krugman, who has often praised President Joe Biden's economic policies and his Build Back Better agenda, is bullish and optimistic about the state of the U.S. economy in his November 9 column for the New York Times. But Krugman also points out that many Americans are feeling "pessimistic" about the economy and addresses the reasons for their concerns.

"By the usual measures," Krugman observes, "the U.S. economy has been booming this year. Employment has risen by more than five million since January. A record number of Americans say this is a good time to find a quality job — a sentiment reflected in the willingness of an unprecedented number of workers to quit. Yes, high quit rates are a good sign. Yet Americans are, or say they are, pessimistic about the economic situation."

Krugman goes on to say that while Americans' economic concerns, including "inflation," are certainly valid, it is important to look at the big picture.

The economist/Times columnist explains, "How can people be feeling so bad about a seemingly good economy? One answer is that Americans are upset about inflation and disrupted supply chains. And that's surely true. But I'd suggest that it's only part of the story — that to an important extent, when you ask people about the state of the economy, their replies don't necessarily reflect their actual experience. Instead, they respond based on what they imagine is happening to other people — a perception that can be shaped by news reports and their own political leanings."

Krugman adds that although "inflation is indeed high by recent standards and supply-chain issues are real," right-wing media outlets have been exaggerating those problems.

"Some news organizations have been doing all they can to convey the impression of a troubled economy, whatever the reality," Krugman notes. "As I suggested, while supply-chain issues are real, their impact is often overstated; empty shelves are actually fairly rare. That, presumably, is why Fox News and Newsmax have been running segments about the Biden economy featuring photos of empty shelves that were taken last year or in other countries."

Economically, the COVID-19 pandemic and the recession it triggered have been brutal for millions of Americans, especially those who need to be physically present in brick-and-mortar businesses and don't have the option of being able to work from home. And all the MAGA Republicans who engaged in coronavirus denial, discouraged social distancing measures and the use of protective face masks, and promoted anti-vaxxer lies only made matters worse....

no lnx twt

Welcome back to HEATED, a newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis—written by me, Emily Atkin.

A new anti-climate leader

Dan Bongino, a climate denier who spread the Texas wind energy lie, is gearing up to take Rush Limbaugh's place today.

Emily Atkin May 24

Dan Bongino at Fox News Channel Studios on June 18, 2019 in New York City. Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images.

Rush Limbaugh’s death in February left a deep hole where some of America’s most influential climate disinformation used to be. That hole will start being filled today, as far-right Fox News pundit Dan Bongino steps in to take Limbaugh’s place.

Twitter avatar for @TPPatriots

Tea Party Patriots

@TPPatriots]

Donald Trump to Be First Guest on Bongino's Show, Expect a Powerful Debut Episode in Limbaugh's Old Time Slot

Dan Bongino will begin a new chapter of conservative talk radio Monday with former President Donald Trump as his first guest.

patriotproject.com May 23rd 2021 204 Retweets1,127 Likes

Bongino, who in 2018 declared his life mission as “owning the libs,” is already an popular purveyor of general disinformation.His Facebookpage, The Bongino Report, regularly boosts false claims of election fraud, among other things.

Though the page only has about 135,000 followers, these posts “consistently land among the site’s top posts and outperform mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, CNN and Fox News,” reports Forbes. That’s in part because Facebook’s algorithim rewards misleading content from conservative creators, as Wired reported in March:

According to researchers at the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University, far-right purveyors of misinformation have by far the highest levels ofengagementper follower compared to any other category of news source. Indeed, the researchers found that while left-leaning and centrist publications get much less engagement if they publish misinformation, the relationship is reversed on the far right, where news organizations that regularly publish false material get up to 65 percent more engagement than ones that don’t.

Bongino is about to be rewarded even further with his new radio show. Though it’s yet unclear exactly how many of the 600 stations that once ran Limbaugh’s show will pick up Bongino’s, the opportunity to pick up some of Limbaugh’s 15 million regular listeners is large. In addition, earlier this month, Fox News also announced that it would start airing a new show on Saturday nights lead by Bongino, called “The Big Saturday Show.”

Bongino is thus well-positioned to soon become one of the most influential sources of right-wing disinformation in America. Here’s what we can expect on climate front.

Less flagrant denial, more insulting liberals

Bongino is a straight-up climate denier, and for the most part, is not particularly shy about it. “These climate change alarmists have been wrong about just about everything. All their charts have been debunked,” he said on Fox in 2019. “The climate’s been relatively stable. There’s not any evidence that storms are out of control. All this stuff is made up.”

But just like the fossil fuel industry, Bongino’s anti-climate policy talking points lately have moved further away from flagrant denial. Instead, they promote more insidious falsehoods— like that wind energy was a significant contributor to deadly blackouts in Texas following February’s deep freeze, and that liberals were trying to cover it up.

Bongino delved into that subject specifically for a February episode of his podcast, which he began by strongly defending the quality of his own information regarding “What really happened with Texas and the energy system failures there.” “I never want to be first if I don’t have the facts,” he said. “I’m tired of the lies.”

Bongino went on to disparage “These filthy people on the left who can never ever tell the truth,” like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who he called a “sick little turd” for debunking Texas Republican officials’ prolific claims that wind energy was the culprit of Texas’s woes. Bongino did admit that natural gas and nuclear energy failed as well. But he said wind turbines had failed, too, and the only reason liberals were mad that Republicans were pointing it out was because they had to “protect their golden calf.”

He said liberals were taking “advantage of an ongoing tragedy to score cheap political points,” and added: “The hacks at Facebook and soviet fact-checkers will ding this segment because the facts trouble them.”

In reality, the blackouts in Texas were caused not by any particular power source, but by Texas’s failure to prepare for climate change-fueled extreme weather. In order to protect their “golden calf”—fossil fuels—Republican officials publicly sought to place the majority of the blame for Texas’s blackouts on wind reliability. Practically every major news outlet in the country debunked that lie, an attempt to use a tragedy to score political points.

Still, Bongino adopted wholesale the argument made by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which was that the only reason nuclear and gas failed during the deep freeze was because it was trying to make up for the gaps in wind power. Ironically, that editorial was debunked by the journal’s own news section.

[Twitter avatar for @EricKleefeld Eric Kleefeld @EricKleefeld

Texas’ utter failure to winterize — despite a freeze and rolling blackouts 10 years ago — makes the choice of particular energy sources irrelevant. Their whole system is going down across the board!

This happens when you only pursue short-term cost cuts, don’t invest in safety.

February 18th 2021 44 Retweets213 Likes]

Green New Deal-bashing, arguments for human dominion

Here are some other trademark Bongino climate claims that we can expect to proliferate on conservative talk radio and Fox News as his profile continues to rise:

People who compare the challenge of climate change to World War II are participating in the “Moron Olympics.”

The Green New Deal is “outrageous,” “ridiculous,” and “expensive.” It looks “like it was conceived by a high schooler” and “proofread by a bartender.” It’s also not actually about climate change at all. It’s a “bad joke.”

“The climate changes all the time. Temperatures have been flat for 18 years.”

“We should care about the environment. It’s the right thing to do, if you’re really a God-loving person. But God gave us the world, not the other way around.”

“The Left is the one destroying their own credibility. Because ironically there are a lot of Republicans, me included, who are absolutely open to a conversation about a cleaner, better future, just not with a bunch of lunatics telling me the world is going to blow up.”

Moving forward, it’ll be interesting to see which advertisers are willing to sponsor claims like these. Bongino’s interview with Trump airs at noon EST. So, you know. Right now.

Bonus: Gina McCarthy on HBO]

dakota nurse (highest death rate in world 11/20) yelled at till intubated, hoax must be something else killing me

pro-Trump coronavirus truthers try to invade Utah hospital overrun with COVID-19 patients: report

Alex Henderson

November 18, 2020

When President Donald Trump was voted out of office in the 2020 election, one of the top reasons why millions of U.S. residents voted to replace him with former Vice President Joe Biden was his woefully inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scholar-explains-how-the-conservative-movement-transmits-sanitized-versions-of-white-supremacist-ideology/

paul r salon

As the longest sustained period of racial justice protests in American history segues into the heat of election season, dark shadows have appeared, from the vigilante_{killing of protesters}_in Kenosha, Wisconsin — and_{widespread conservative defenses}_of the teenage accused murderer — to ludicrous_{charges against protesters, including "terrorism,"}_to the Trump administration's_{crackdown on federal antiracism training}_, calling it "anti-American," and Attorney General Bill Barr's call for_{protesters to be charged with sedition}_.

So much for the notions that Donald Trump has no ideology, or, for that matter, that getting rid of him will make America great again. In July of 2016, I wrote about _{why such views were myopic}_: "Trump advances core paleoconservative positions," researcher Bruce Wilson told me, including "rebuilding infrastructure, protective tariffs, securing borders and stopping immigration, neutralizing designated internal enemies and isolationism."

Trump's record as president has been surprisingly consistent for such an erratic figure, with his purely rhetorical support for infrastructure as the most notable exception. And therein lies a key to the current moment:With infrastructure removed from the equation — the most broadly popular position Trump's ever embraced — the remaining white nationalism stands out in stark relief, highlighted in the frenzied push toward violent confrontation around the election, and beyond.

Dr. James Scaminaci III has just published a report about the long historical genesis of this recent push forPolitical Research Associates, "_{Battle With Bullets: Advancing a Vision of Civil War}_." Scaminaci has a PhD in sociology from Stanford and has worked as a civilian intelligence analyst with expertise on the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and organized crime. So the spread of social chaos, internecine violence and associated enabling ideologies is a subject he's familiar with.

Scaminaci traces the roots of culture-war and race-war narratives as far back as the Haitian revolution of the early 19th century. He observes that Steve Bannon nurtured those carefully at Breitbart News and they have played a key role in radicalizing Trump's base over the past five years, to the point where some of his supporters are visibly preparing themselves for violence.Some parts of this story have been relatively well covered, but Scaminaci provides a much more integrated and historically extensive account of how we reached our present state. I reached out to him recently for an interview by email to discuss some of his key insights and how they provide us with a much clearer picture of the forces pushing America toward civil war. The following has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

In your article, you write: "Over the last several years, a narrative around the threat of civil war — and more specifically, a racial civil war — has been growing on the Right." You observe that this comes in different versions and has deep historical roots, dating back to the colonial era. Before getting into the details, why is it important to recognize this history and learn about it?

I wanted to convey that what we are seeing now on the right wing has a long history, a history that is either overlooked or ignored. Jill Lepore and other scholars looking at the right have noted that modern day "patriots" cast themselves as lineal descendants of the founding fathers and the American Revolution — that they are revolutionaries against the existing "tyrannical" federal government. But that history is drenched in violence and blood against Black and indigenous peoples. That context cannot be omitted. And the idea that whites are under existential threat from Black folks also needs to be put into historical context.

Second, the right-wing idea that the federal government is "tyrannical" is largely the product of white supremacist politicians, both Republican and Democratic, and intellectuals like William F. Buckley. This was the idea thatpost-World War II federal support for civil rights wasfederal overreach, was unconstitutional, and that it upset allegedly harmonious race relations in the South and eventually in the North.

According to white supremacists, the existential threat to white people in the Jim Crow South came from Black folks, whether children or adults, even touching anything that could be shared with whites. A schoolbook touched by a Black child became a Black textbook. Blacks and whites could not share drinking fountains or sit in the same seats on a bus.

What I wanted to portray in "Battle With Bullets" is that whites have long viewed any expression of nonviolent Black agency as an existential threat to themselves that required whites to resort to a brutal, genocidal racial civil war. One can understand the palpable fear of a slave revolt before 1861. But white supremacists have claimed that registering to vote, voting, moving into a white neighborhood after a history of redlining, moving into managerial or foreman positions in the workplace, or being cast as heroes or superheroes are existential threats.

You write that "The most dangerous versions of that [civil war] narrative come from leaders with paramilitary forces, while other appeals seem intended to generate a heightened sense of crisis." Can you give an example of each and then help us understand how the two are related?

Roger Stone is a political operative who has graduated from ratfucking political operations into calling for a civil war or violence or martial law. He is an ideological chaos agent. He can help set the narrative mood for the right wing.As Chip Berlet has written, elites know how to write the score for scripted violence. Somehow, the gunmen always know who to kill. In a similar category are the numerous Christian right leaders who broadcast the same civil war message to their Christian nationalist supporters and followers. I also quoted [Dallas megachurch pastor] Robert Jeffress in the article.

David Neiwert owns the beat on tracking the transmission of fringe ideas to the conservative mainstream. Even a decade before Trump, the ideological lines were blurring.

In 2008,Michael Savage, a right-wing radio host, said, "[T]he white person is being erased from America's future. ... There is a racial element to the immigration invasion." Then Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly claimed, "So now, it's becoming a race war."The _{Center for American Progress}_ went on to note that O'Reilly claimed that immigration reformers "hate America ... because it's run primarily by white, Christian men" and were seeking "to change the complexion...of America."

That is no different from Jean Raspail's theme in "The Camp of the Saints" or the narrative atThe Social Contract, a white nationalist journalwhich published Raspail's novel.Or Glenn Beck on Fox News in February 2009, airing his _{racial civil war scenario}_ within one month of the first Black president taking office. Or a variety ofChristian Right leaders during the Obama years calling for or suggesting a racial civil war is coming, including_{Tony Perkins}_,_{Larry Klayman}_and_{Rick Joyner}_.

In 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted the "_{symbiotic dance}_" between white supremacist groups and John Tanton's hardline anti-immigration movement, as well as the _{sharing of conspiracy narratives}_ between white supremacists and the "patriot" militia movement.

The conservative movement, both the political and religious wings, transmit sanitized versions of white supremacist ideology. The latter is premised on preparing for, if not instigating, a racial civil war in America.

John Jackson, a scholar who covers "scientific" racism, in a recent article titled, "_{Going Full Nazi}_,"asked the question: "[W]hat is the point of drawing a line between the 'mainstream' and the 'alt' right? Perhaps there is no useful distinction to be made." The angry white guys with guns are dangerous because they have weapons of war. But the dividing line between them and the "Fourth Generation Warfare" chaos agents creating a crisis of legitimacy is increasingly blurred.

You write that this rhetoric is rooted in a narrative adapted from the1973 French novel you just mentioned, "The Camp of the Saints." Can you explain its basic narrative?

The novel has seven key ideas that its critics and proponents have noted. One, mass migration is an invasion. Two, immigrants and refugees are invaders. Three, the invaders will eventually destroy Western culture and replace Western populations. Four, the West's political elites do not have the moral strength to defend the West. Five, the invaders must be physically removed and/or violently repelled. Six, there is a difference between the "real country" and "real citizens" and the "legal country" and "legal citizens." Seven, multiracial, multiethnic or multi-confessional societies are not only unstable but undesirable, and lead to the "balkanization" of societies — a view also imported from Serbian genocidal propaganda into the American and global right.

The main variations within this "Camp of the Saints" worldview are whether the political elites lack moral strength to resist the invasions ("Great Replacement"), enact immoral policies whichweaken Western societies to invasion ("demographic winter")or actively collaborate with the governments of the invading migrants to facilitate the invasion (as in John Tanton's network). The other variation distinguishes the neo-Nazis from all the other segments: whether or not the Jews are responsible for the destruction of their societies ("white genocide").

You note that for both France and the United States, the historical roots of this narrative go back to the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. In the U.S. this has produced the "white genocide theory" and in France the "great replacement" theory. What distinguishes them and what draws them together?

The "white genocide" theory is premised on the fear of a Black slave revolt against the white slave-owning society. The "great replacement" theory is based on the fear of massive nonwhite immigration coupled with lower white birth rates leading to a "replacement" of the white population with a nonwhite population, and the transformation of the culture.

White supremacists use the more palatable, more sanitized "great replacement" theory interchangeably and conflate them. But they have different causal mechanisms.

On the other hand, the neo-Nazis and other proponents of the "white genocide" narrative consideranyaction by Black people to improve themselves, to gain access to privileged white spheres of social action or to more equitably redistribute power and status as anexistential threat. "Great replacement" proponents do not share this outlook. Nor do "great replacement" proponents, in general, blame Jews for what they consider to be massive immigration.

You write, "It would be a mistake to see these various 'White Replacement' narratives as isolated from mainstream conservative thought in Europe or America." How has their influence spread through terrorist acts?

In the right-wing information sphere, ideas swirl around, mix, recombine and mutate over time to fit changing circumstances. Raspail's "Camp of the Saints" is foundational to this narrative or worldview. Raspail directly influenced the emergence and popularity of the "great replacement" theory, which is the catchall theory cited by white terrorists.

But Bat Ye'or's conception of the problem — that European elites conspire with Arab elites to produce both subservience to Islam and the "great replacement" — directly influenced the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who was motivated to provoke a decades-long civil war to stop the formation of what Ye'or called "Eurabia." Breivik, as well as the "great replacement" narrative, have inspired numerous white terrorist acts around the globe.

Returning to the American context, How did Steve Bannon and Breitbart spread their influence?

Bannon's principal contribution was to use Breitbart News to mix white supremacist ideology into the Republican Party and the Christian Right, and to heavily promote Raspail's "Camp of the Saints." In 2015 and 2016, Breitbart was the largest driver of ideological influence on the right.

How has this spread through the Trump administration?

The "Camp of the Saints" worldview largely shapes Stephen Miller's approach to immigration issues. Raspail's bottom line was that "the barbarians had to be repelled" either by violence or cruelty or both. Trump's _{immigration policy has been cruel}_, and as Adam Serwer noted, "_{cruelty is the point}_."

You also call attention to the Christian right's specific variant called "demographic winter," and argue that this has played a central role in evangelical support for Trump and his wall. What should people know about that?

The term "demographic winter" appears to have come from Don Feder, communications director of the World Congress of Families [a far-right, anti-LGBT Christian group]. He is the most prominent WCF official _{linked to the Tanton}_ _{anti-immigration network}_ and was apparently influenced by Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" ideas, which circulate widely in conservative and right-wing Jewish circles.

In November 2005, Feder's view of Muslims in France reflected the worldview of Raspail and other "Eurabia" writers. Feder blamed the French riots of that year on "_{demographic winter}_," "lax immigration policies" and "brain-dead multiculturalism." Where "demographic winter" differs from Raspail, the "great replacement" and the Eurabia narratives is that liberal elite support for women's reproductive freedom and gay marriage are the principal culprits, in addition to massive Muslim immigration.

What resonates with conservative Christians and Christian nationalists is the idea that Christian (Western) civilization is under threat from nonwhite immigration, Christians are being persecuted in the West and around the world, and _{only a strong, authoritarian leader building a wall can save them}_.

Survey data supports my contention that white evangelical Protestants have a "Camp of the Saints" worldview: Seventy-eight percent favor strict limits on "legal immigration," 76% favor "building a [border] wall," 69% support a "temporary" Muslim ban and, 54% favor "preventing refugees from coming into the United States," according to October 2019 PRRI data.

The last section of your article deals with the emergence of the "Boogaloo boys"during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. How can we better understand them in terms of the longer history you've laid out? What lessons need to be learned?

The first lesson to be learned is that Donald Trump and _{local elected}_ _{Republican}_ _{officials}_, especially the so-called "constitutional sheriffs," have a much closer relationship to the armed wing of the Christian right._{Bruce Wilson}_and_{David Neiwert}_have been_{tracking that}_.

The second lesson is that Trump is openly orchestrating armed demonstrations of force against Democratic Party governors and mayors.

The third lesson is that it is very easy to take off your camouflage fatigues and put on a Hawaiian shirt and pretend you just got concerned — but not before you spent around $2,000 on a rifle, tactical gear and ammunition. Journalists should stop being so credulous.

The last lesson is that claims that the "patriot" militia support Black Lives Matter protests are preposterous. The BLM protests are not simply about wrongful deaths at the hands of law enforcement — something a majority of whites can see and empathize with.

BLM is calling for reckoning, a "Third Reconstruction" of America — politically, economically and culturally — in the context of a deliberate confrontation with that racist, violent history. Even at the intellectual level of the "Never Trumpers," those potentially most sympathetic to BLM, there is a blindness or an inability to confront that larger American history and the smaller Republican Party history regarding racism. To think that "angry white men with guns" have thought it through is absurd.

What's the most important question I haven't asked? And what's the answer?

I do not know the answer to the question: "Why do scholars and journalists not consider the religious basis of America's long-term crisis of legitimacy in terms of politics and science?" But I would suggest that scholars and journalists have glommed on to the least important of Richard Hofstadter's explanations, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," and ignored his more trenchant analysis in "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," which focuses on the epistemological disruption caused by fundamentalist Protestantism. They also ignore Marty Lipset's and Earl Raab's use of the concept of monism in describing the right wing in "The Politics of Unreason." Those old guys were on to something.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/they-just-want-to-watch-the-world-burn-psychological-analysis-reveals-the-14-key-traits-that-explain-trump-supporters/

as hehimself saideven before he won the presidential election in 2016, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Unfortunately for the American people, this wild-sounding claim appears to be truer than not, at least for the majority of his supporters, and that is something that should disturb us. It should also motivate us to explore the science underlying such peculiar human behavior, so we can learn from it, and potentially inoculate against it.

In all fairness, we should recognize that lying is sadly not uncommon for politicians on both sides of the political aisle, but the frequency and magnitude of the current president’s lies should have us all wondering why they haven’t destroyed his political career, and instead perhaps strengthened it. Similarly, we should be asking why his inflammatory rhetoric and numerous scandals haven’t sunk him. We are talking about a man who was caught on tape saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.” Politically surviving that video is not normal, or anything close to it, and we can be sure that such a revelation would have been the end of Barack Obama or George Bush had it surfaced weeks before the election.

While dozens of psychologists have analyzed Trump, to explain the man’s political invincibility, it is more important to understand the minds of his staunch supporters. While there have been various popular articles that have illuminated a multitude of reasons for his unwavering support, there appears to be no comprehensive analysis that contains all of them. Since there seems to be a real demand for this information, I have tried to provide that analysis below.

Some of the explanations come from a 2017 review paperpublished in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology by the psychologist and UC Santa Cruz professor Thomas Pettigrew. Others have been put forth as far back as 2016 by myself, a cognitive neuroscience and psychology researcher, in various articles and blog posts for publications like Psychology Today. A number of these were inspired by insights from psychologists like Sheldon Solomon, who laid the groundwork for the influential Terror Management Theory, and David Dunning, who did the same for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

this list will begin with the more benign reasons for Trump’s intransigent support, and as the list goes on, the explanations become increasingly worrisome, and toward the end, border on the pathological. It should be strongly emphasized that not all Trump supporters are racist, mentally vulnerable, or fundamentally bad people. It can be detrimental to society when those with degrees and platforms try to demonize their political opponents or paint them as mentally ill when they are not. That being said, it is just as harmful to pretend that there are not clear psychological and neural factors that underlie much of Trump supporters’ unbridled allegiance.

The psychological phenomena described below mostly pertain to those supporters who would follow Trump off a cliff. These are the people who will stand by his side no matter what scandals come to light, or what sort of evidence for immoral and illegal behavior surfaces.

Practicality Trumps Morality

For some wealthy people, it’s simply a financial matter. Trump offers tax cuts for the rich and wants to do away with government regulation that gets in the way of businessmen making money, even when that regulation exists for the purpose of protecting the environment. Others, like blue-collared workers, like the fact that the president is trying to bring jobs back to America from places like China. Some people who genuinely are not racist (those who are will be discussed later) simply want stronger immigration laws because they know that a country with open borders is not sustainable. These people have put their practical concerns above their moral ones. To them, it does not matter if he’s a vagina-grabber, or if his campaign team colluded with Russia to help him defeat his political opponent. It is unknown whether these people are eternally bound to Trump in the way others are, but we may soon find out if the Mueller investigation is allowed to come to completion.

The Brain’s Attention System Is More Strongly Engaged by Trump

According to a study that monitored brain activity while participants watched 40 minutes of political ads and debate clips from the presidential candidates, Donald Trump is unique in his ability to keep the brain engaged. While Hillary Clinton could only hold attention for so long, Trump kept both attention and emotional arousal high throughout the viewing session.This pattern of activity was seen even when Trump made remarks that individuals didn’t necessarily agree with. His showmanship and simple language clearly resonate with some at a visceral level.

America’s Obsession with Entertainment and Celebrities

Essentially, the loyalty of Trump supporters may in part be explained by America’s addiction with entertainment and reality TV.To some, it doesn’t matter what Trump actually says because he’s so amusing to watch. With the Donald, you are always left wondering what outrageous thing he is going to say or do next. He keeps us on the edge of our seat, and for that reason, some Trump supporters willforgiveanything he says. They are happy as long as they are kept entertained.

“Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn.”

Some intelligent people who know better are supporting Trump simply to be rebellious or to introduce chaos into the political system. They may have such distaste for the establishment and democrats like Hillary Clinton that their support for Trump is a symbolic middle finger directed at Washington. These people do not have their priorities straight, and perhaps have other issues, like an innate desire to troll others, or a deranged obsession with schadenfreude.

The Fear-Factor: Conservatives Are More Sensitive to Threat

Science has unequivocally shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fear response when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening. A 2008 study in the journal Science found that conservatives have a stronger physiological reaction to startling noises and graphic images compared to liberals. A brain-imaging study published in Current Biology revealed that those who lean right politically tend to have a larger amygdala — a structure that is electrically active during states of fear and anxiety. And a 2014 fMRI study found that it is possible to predict whether someone is a liberal or conservative simply by looking at their brain activity while they view threatening or disgusting images, such as mutilated bodies. Specifically, the brains of self-identified conservatives generated more activity overall in response to the disturbing images.

These brain responses are automatic, and not influenced by logic or reason. As long as Trump continues his fear mongering by constantly portraying Muslims and Hispanic immigrants as imminent dangers, many conservative brains will involuntarily light up like light bulbs being controlled by a switch. Fear keeps his followers energized and focused on safety. And when you think you’ve found your protector, you become less concerned with offensive and divisive remarks.

The Power of Mortality Reminders and Perceived Existential Threat

A well-supported theory from social psychology, known as Terror Management Theory, explains why Trump’s fear mongering is doubly effective. The theory is based on the fact that humans have a unique awareness of their own mortality. The inevitably of one’s death creates existential terror and anxietythat is always residing below the surface. In order to manage this terror, humans adopt cultural worldviews — like religions, political ideologies, and national identities — that act as a buffer by instilling life with meaning and value.

Terror Management Theory predicts that when people are reminded of their own mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they will more strongly defend those who share their worldviews and national or ethnic identity, and act out more aggressively towards those who do not. Hundreds of studies have confirmed this hypothesis, and some have specifically shown that triggering thoughts of death tends to shift people towards the right.

Not only do death reminders increase nationalism, they influence actual voting habits in favor of more conservative presidential candidates. And more disturbingly, in a study with American students, scientists found that making mortality salient increased support for extreme military interventions by American forcesthat could kill thousands of civilians overseas. Interestingly, the effect was present only in conservatives, which can likely be attributed to their heightened fear response.

By constantly emphasizing existential threat, Trump creates a psychological condition that makes the brain respond positively rather than negatively to bigoted statements and divisive rhetoric. Liberals and Independents who have been puzzled over why Trump hasn’t lost supporters after such highly offensive comments need look no further than Terror Management Theory.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Humans Often Overestimate Their Political Expertise

Some support Donald Trump do so out of ignorance — basically they are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crimeis skyrocketing in the United States, or that the economy is the worst it’s ever been, they simply take his word for it.

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the problem isn’t just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed, which creates a double burden.

Studies have shown that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise.As psychologist David Dunning puts it in anop-edfor Politico, “The knowledge andintelligencethat are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at the task. This includes political judgment.” These people cannot be reached because they mistakenly believe they are the ones who should be reaching others.

Relative Deprivation — A Misguided Sense of Entitlement

Relative deprivation refers to the experience of being deprived of something to which one believes they are entitled. It is the discontent felt when one compares their position in life to others who they feel are equal or inferior but have unfairly had more success than them.

Common explanations for Trump’s popularity among non-bigoted voters involve economics. There is no doubt that some Trump supporters are simply angry that American jobs are being lost to Mexico and China, which is certainly understandable, although these loyalists often ignore the fact that some of these careers are actually being lost due to the accelerating pace of automation.

These Trump supporters are experiencing relative deprivation, and are common among the swing states like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This kind of deprivation is specifically referred to as “relative,” as opposed to “absolute,” because the feeling is often based on a skewed perception of what one is entitled to.

Lack of Exposure to Dissimilar Others

Intergroup contact refers to contact with members of groups that are outside one’s own, which has been experimentally shown to reduce prejudice. As such, it’s important to note that there is growing evidence that Trump’s white supporters have experienced significantly less contact with minorities than other Americans. For example, a 2016 study found that “…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This correlation persisted while controlling for dozens of other variables. In agreement with this finding, the same researchers found that support for Trump increased with the voters’ physical distance from the Mexican border. These racial biases might be more implicit than explicit, the latter which is addressed in #14.

Trump’s Conspiracy Theories Target the Mentally Vulnerable

While the conspiracy theory crowd — who predominantly support Donald Trump and crackpot allies like Alex Jones and the shadowy QAnon — may appear to just be an odd quirk of modern society, the truth is that many of them suffer from psychological illnesses that involve paranoia and delusions, such as schizophrenia, or are at least vulnerable to them, like those with schizotypy personalities.

The link between schizotypy and belief in conspiracy theories is well-established, and a recent study published in the journal Psychiatry Research has demonstrated that it is still very prevalent in the population. The researchers found that those who were more likely to believe in outlandish conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the U.S. government created the AIDs epidemic, consistently scored high on measures of “odd beliefs and magical thinking.” One feature of magical thinking is a tendency to make connections between things that are actually unrelated in reality.

Donald Trump and his media allies target these people directly. All one has to do is visit alt-right websites and discussion boards to see the evidence for such manipulation.

Trump Taps into the Nation’s Collective Narcissism

Collective narcissism is an unrealistic shared belief in the greatness of one’s national group. It often occurs when a group who believes it represents the ‘true identity’ of a nation — the ‘ingroup,’ in this case White Americans — perceives itself as being disadvantaged compared to outgroups who are getting ahead of them ‘unrightfully.’ This psychological phenomenon is related to relative deprivation (#6).

A study published last year in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found a direct link between national collective narcissism and support for Donald Trump. This correlation was discovered by researchers at the University of Warsaw, who surveyed over 400 Americans with a series of questionnaires about political and social beliefs. Where individual narcissism causes aggressiveness toward other individuals, collective narcissism involves negative attitudes and aggression toward ‘outsider’ groups (outgroups), who are perceived as threats.

Trump Taps into the Nation’s Collective Narcissism

Donald Trump exacerbates collective narcissism with his anti-immigrant, anti-elitist, and strongly nationalistic rhetoric. By referring to his supporters, an overwhelmingly white group, as being “true patriots” or “real Americans,” he promotes a brand of populism that is the epitome of “identity politics,” a term that is usually associated with the political left. Left-wing identity politics, as misguided as they may sometimes be, are generally aimed at achieving equality, while the right-wing brand is based on a belief that one nationality and race is superior or entitled to success and wealth for no other reason than identity.

The Desire to Want to Dominate Others

Social dominance orientation (SDO) — which is distinct but related to authoritarian personality syndrome (#13) — refers to people who have a preference for the societal hierarchy of groups, specifically with a structure in which the high-status groups have dominance over the low-status ones. Those with SDO are typically dominant, tough-minded, and driven by self-interest.

In Trump’s speeches, he appeals to those with SDO by repeatedly making a clear distinction between groups that have a generally higher status in society (White), and those groups that are typically thought of as belonging to a lower status (immigrants and minorities). A 2016 survey study of 406 American adults published last year in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that those who scored high on both SDO and authoritarianism were those who intended to vote for Trump in the election.

Authoritarian Personality Syndrome

Authoritarianism refers to the advocacy or enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom, and is commonly associated with a lack of concern for the opinions or needs of others. Authoritarian personality syndrome — a well-studied and globally-prevalent condition — is a state of mind that is characterized by belief in total and complete obedience to one’s authority. Those with the syndrome often display aggression toward outgroup members, submissiveness to authority, resistance to new experiences, and a rigid hierarchical view of society. The syndrome is often triggered by fear, making it easy for leaders who exaggerate threat or fear monger to gain their allegiance.

Although authoritarian personality is found among liberals, it is more common among the right-wingaround the world.President Trump’s speeches, which are laced with absolutist terms like “losers” and “complete disasters,” are naturally appealing to those with the syndrome.

While research showed that Republican voters in the U.S. scored higher than Democrats on measures of authoritarianism before Trump emerged on the political scene, a 2016 Politico survey found that high authoritarians greatly favored then-candidate Trump, which led to a correct prediction that he would win the election, despite the polls saying otherwise

Racism and Bigotry

It would be grossly unfair and inaccurate to say that every one of Trump’s supporters have prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities, but it would be equally inaccurate to say that many do not. It is a well-known fact that the Republican party, going at least as far back to Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” used tactics that appealed to bigotry, such as lacing speeches with “dog whistles” — code words that signaled prejudice toward minorities that were designed to be heard by racists but no one else.

While the dog whistles of the past were subtler, Trump’s signaling is sometimes shockingly direct. There’s no denying that he routinely appeals to racist and bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” often in a blanketed fashion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a recent study has shown that support for Trump is correlated with a standard scale of modern racism.

Bobby Azarian is a neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyAzarian.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/red-pills-and-radicalization-heres-how-conspiracism-is-overwhelming-us/

america is drowning in conspiracy theories: QAnon cultists are taking over the Republican Party, the occupant of the Oval Office praises them in press conferences, rational COVID-19 pandemic measures are met with armed protests and raging open defiance, and Proud Boys and militiamen are bringing violence to liberal cities while armed vigilantes riled up about nonexistent “antifa arsonists” harass strangers and journalists in fire-stricken rural areas.

So I wrote a book about it. More importantly, it’s a book intended not just to document and explain the phenomenon, but to also be a guide for finding our way out of the morass. It’s titledRed Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us,out this week from Prometheus Books. Here’s an excerpt.

[The following excerpt is from Chapter Seven, “Chaos By Design,” which describes how and why people are effectively radicalized online by conspiracism and its attendant disinformation. It seemed especially appropriate for the current moment.]

It may be the most notorious Google search in history: “black on white crime.” That was the search that sent Dylann Roof down the path that led him to murder nine black parishioners inside a Charleston, South Carolina, church one evening in June 2015. he described this path in a post on the white supremacist website he had created.

The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was.It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens.There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?

From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there.From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.

Roof actually has provided a kind of map of radicalization online. As information scientist Michael Caulfield explains, this whole process is actually produced by a kind of self-contained data spiral that’s based to a large extent on “curation”—that is, the way we collect web materials into our own spaces and annotate them. That curation creates a data feedback for the algorithm that then directly affects what you see. Curations, he warns, can warp reality because of the resulting feedback loop: they “don’t protect us from opposing views, but often bring us to more radical views.”

Caulfield observes that “black on white crime” is a data void—that is, it’s not a term used by social scientists or reputable news organizations, “which is why the white nationalist site Council of Conservative Citizens came up in those results.That site has since gone away, but what it was was a running catalog of cases where black men had murdered (usually) white women. In other words, it’s yet another curation, even more radical and toxic than the one that got you there. And then the process begins again.”

Noble explains that the framing a person brings to his or her Internet experience shapes what kinds of results they see on a search engine, or a video recommendation, or a social media news feed. “In the case of Dylann Roof’s alleged Google searches,” she writes, “his very framing of the problems of race relations in the U.S. through an inquiry such as ‘black on white crime’ reveals how search results belie any ability to intercede in the framing of a question itself. In this case, answers from conservative organizations and cloaked websites that present news from a right-wing, anti-Black, and anti-Jewish perspective are nothing more than propaganda to foment racial hatred.”

The key to this process of radicalization is its incremental nature: people undergoing it don’t recognize what is happening to them, since each step feels normal initially. This is in fact precisely by design by the organizations and ideologues who are trying to recruit people into their conspiracy theories, which are ultimately about belief systems and political movements.

A onetime “red-pilled” conspiracy theorist named Matt described how he became trapped in a curated spiral like this for Kelly Weill ofThe Daily Beast. It began when he innocently watched a video of Bill Maher and Ben Affleck discussing Islam, and at its completion, thealgorithm recommended several much more extreme videosattacking Islam, including some produced by Infowars conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson. One video led to the next and the next.

“Delve into [Watson’s] channel and start finding his anti-immigration stuff which often in turn leads people to become more sympathetic to ethno-nationalist politics,” Matt said. “This sort of indirectly sent me down a path to moving way more to the right politically as it led me to discover other people with similar far-right views.”

Now twenty, Matt has since exited the ideology and built an anonymous Internet presence where he argues with his ex-brethren on the right.

“I think YouTube certainly played a role in my shift to the right because through the recommendations I got,” he said, “it led me to discover other content that was very much right of center, and this only got progressively worse over time, leading me to discover more sinister content.”

“The thing to remember about this algorithmic–human grooming hybrid is that the gradualness of it—the step-by-step nature of it—is a feature for the groomers, not a bug,” says Caulfield. “I imagine if the first page Roof had encountered on the CCC page had sported a Nazi flag and a big banner saying ‘Kill All Jews,’ he’d have hit the back button, and maybe the world might be different. (Maybe.) But the curation/search spiral brings you to that point step by step. In the center of the spiral you probably still have enough good sense to not read stuff by Nazis, at least knowingly. By the time you get to the edges, not so much.”

Peter Neumann, of theU.K.’s Centre for the Study of Radicalisation,identifies six steps on the ladder of extremist belief.“The first two of these processes deal with the consequences of being exposed to extremist content,” he writes. “No single item of extremist propaganda is guaranteed to transform people into terrorists. Rather, in most cases, online radicalization results from individuals being immersed in extremist content for extended periods of time, theamplified effects of graphic images and video, and the resulting emotional desensitization.”

Beheading videos, photos of corpses, suicides, and mass murders, all these things are part of these first two steps in the immersion process. Neumann calls this mortality salience—material intended to create anoverpowering sense of one’s own vulnerability to death, as well as to heighten the viewer’s moral outrage.

The next two steps are also key to the process—namely, immersion in extremist forums, where deviant and extremist views are normalized, and online disinhibition, wherein people lose their normal inhibitions about violence because of their relative anonymity online. “Some of the participants get so worked up that they declare themselves ready to be terrorists,” notes psychologist Marc Sageman. “Since this process takes place at home, often in the parental home, it facilitates the emergence of homegrown radicalization, worldwide.”

The final stages occur when online role-playing occurs—the kind in which new recruits more or less practice their ideology in gaming situations, often in the context of modern video games. The participants project themselves into their gaming avatars, giving themselves traits that they usually do not possess in real life. After a while, this divide becomes noticeable and drives further radicalization: “[A]fter recognizing the gap between their avatar’s mobilization and their own physical mobilization, many online participants begin taking steps to reconcile the gap,” observe researchers Jaret Brachmann and Alex Levine. This is when they take the last step: using the Internet to connect directly to terrorist infrastructures that then begin to mobilize them.

Caulfield believes one of the keys to preventing this kind of radicalization lies in establishing “digital literacy” programs wherein young people new to the Internet can learn how to confront, cope with, and overcome the challenges they will be forced to navigate there. And it all begins with the curation process, how we accumulate the materials for our personal spaces.

“So, the idea here is that you might start in a relatively benign space with some kind of ideological meaning, and then someone uses this term ‘black on white crime,’” Caulfield says. “It’s probably a stretch to call the Google search results a curation, but you can think of it along the same lines. You put in a term, and Google is going to show you the most relevant, not necessarily the best, but the most relevant results for that term.And now you have a set of things that are in front of you. Now, on each of those pages, because you picked ‘black on white crime,’ if you click into that page that has ‘black on white crime,’ there are going to be other phrases on there.”

Even people with normal levels of skepticism can find themselves drawn inside.“So you go, and you do the Google search, and you’re like, ‘You know what? I can’t trust this page. I’m going to be a good info-literacy person, and what I’m going to do is, I’m going to just check that these crimes really happened.’ OK, so what do you do?You pull these crimes and what you find is that these crimes did happen, and the pages they’re going to are more white supremacists talking about how these are actually black on white hate crimes.And now they’re mentioning more things, and they’re mentioning more terms, and they’re mentioning changes in law that now make it easier for black people to kill white people.

“So you’re like ‘Oh, well, I’ve got to Google this change in the law.’ But who’s talking about this thing that’s broadly made up, or it’s a heavy misinterpretation of something? Well, again it’s white … So you keep going deeper and deeper, and every time you’re pulling out something to investigate on that page, it’s pulling you into another site, and that other site of course is covering a bunch of other events and terms and so forth. And you end up going deeper and deeper into it.”

Caulfield argues that educators need to help their students develop better informational literacy, including learning how to recognize when they are being recruited into a radical belief system or cult or are being manipulated for either financial or political motivations.

“My contention is that the students are practicing info-literacy as they’ve learned it,” he says. “And as a matter of fact, this approach to researching online is what they have learned from a fairly early age in terms of how to approach sources and information on the web.

“I think a lot of academics and teachers would say, ‘but that’s not what we’re teaching,’” he adds. “Let’s just put that whole argument aside because it doesn’t matter. Whatever we’re teaching, these are the lessons they take away from it. So they are practicing info-literacy as learned, and through either chance or through engineering or through fate, whatever it is, these techniques plug really well into radicalization.”

Sometimes the people who fall down the rabbit holes and are recruited into communities organized around conspiracy theories would have ended up in a similar situation regardless. But people are also being actively recruited for a combination of political, ideological, and financial/economic motivations. And they are being actively deceived.

“We are all targets of disinformation, meant to erode our trust in democracy and divide us,” warns University of Washington information scientist Kate Starbird.

She came to this stark conclusion while conducting a study at the University of Washington involving the evolution of the discussion about the Black Lives Matter movement on social media—and found herself walking into the unexpected realization, supported both by data and a raft of real-world evidence, that the whole discussion was being manipulated, and not for the better. The more the team examined the evidence, the clearer it became that this manipulation was intended to fuel internal social strife among the American public.

The study quickly morphed into a scientific examination of disinformation—that is, information that’s intended to confuse and distort, whether accurate or not—which exists on all sides of the political spectrum. One of their key studies focused on Twitter to see how bad information immediately follows major crisis-type events such as mass shootings and how those rumors “muddy the waters” around the event, even for people who were physically present, and in particular how such rumors can permanently alter the public’s perception of the event itself and its causes.

Consider exhibit A: the nearly instantaneous claims by Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists that the Las Vegas mass shooting of October 1, 2017, was a false flag event and the ensuing swirl of confusion around it, which eventually permanently obscured the public’s understanding that the man who perpetrated it was unhinged and at least partially motivated by far-right conspiracy theories about guns. Police investigators avoided the evidence that this had been the case as well.

The chief reason we perceive stories, whether real or not, as “true” depends in large part on our unconscious cognitive biases, Starbird says—that is, when our preexisting beliefs are confirmed along the way. We’ve seen how these biases can be targeted by technology companies. Well-equipped political organizations can manipulate disinformation in much the same way.

“If it makes you feel outraged against the other side, probably someone is manipulating you,” she warns.

The main wellspring of the disinformation Starbird dealt with in her study was Russia and its “troll farms” that introduced industrial-strength data pollution into the American discourse via social media during the 2016 election campaign and afterward. However, she says that the disinformation can be, and often is, run by anyone sophisticated enough to understand its essential principles. These include white nationalists, a number of conspiracy-oriented campaigns involving vaccines and other health-related conspiracies, and in recent years, QAnon.

The strategy, she says, is not just consistent, but frighteningly sophisticated and nuanced. “One of these goals is to ‘sow division,’ to put pressure on the fault lines in our society,” she explained in her findings. “A divided society that turns against itself, that cannot come together and find common ground, is one that is easily manipulated. . . . Russian agents did not create political division in the United States, but they were working to encourage it.”

These outside organizational entities make full use of a preexisting media ecosystem featuring “news” outlets that claim to be “fair” and “independent,” but which are in fact only propaganda organizations, nearly all of them right-wing. As Starbird explained in one of her studies:

This alternative media ecosystem has challenged the traditional authority of journalists, both directly and indirectly. . . . Its development has been accompanied by a decreased reliance on and an increased distrust of mainstream media, with the latter partially motivated by a perception of widespread ethical violations and corruption [METOO?] within mainstream media. . . . Indeed, many view these alternative news sites as more authentic and truthful than mainstream media, and these effects are compounding—as research has found that exposure to online media correlates with distrust of mainstream media.

False information renders democratic discourse, which relies on factual accuracy, impossible, and as Starbird notes, “with the loss of commonly-held standards regarding information mediation and theabsence of easily decipherable credibility cues, this ecosystem has become vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and propaganda.”

Because it’s actually a fairly closed, self-contained, and narrow ecosystem, it becomes a real echo chamber, with stories being repeated among the various “independent” news sites, even if they seem not to show up on the major networks (Fox being the most common exception). After a while, the repetition acts as a kind of confirmation for the stories—if people keep seeing different versions of the same headlines, they’ll start thinking the information has been confirmed by a “variety” of sources.

“The tactics of disinformation can be used by anyone,” Starbird says. “The Internet seems to facilitate access towards targets of different kinds, and we are definitely seeing disinformation from multiple sets of actors, including from the U.S., including foreign actors and domestic actors as well. There’s a certain flavor of Russian disinformation that is perhaps different from some others, but the tactics are known and they are easily learned and portable.”

Unwinding the relationship between authoritarian governments like Russia—which has been promoting far-right political movements around the world, particularly in Europe—and white nationalists trying to “red-pill” vulnerable young people is complicated. “There are some movements, particularly these far-right movements, whose disinformation aligns neatly with Russian disinformation as well,” Starbird observes.

“It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The current manifestation of the far right or alt-right or whatever we want to call it, the information systems and some of the mechanisms for information flow all seem to have Russian disinformation integrated into them. It’s hard to know what’s cause and what’s effect, but they seem to be intertwined. In a similar way, we can see far left ecosystems around things like Syria and Venezuela are integrated with Russian disinformation as well… . We don’t know how causal that is versus opportunistic.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/american-rage-is-fueling-political-campaigns-and-tearing-us-apart/

as the 2020 presidential election draws near, one thing is clear: America is an angry nation. Fromprotests over persistent racial injusticetowhite nationalist-linked counterprotests, anger is on display across the country.

The national ire relates to inequality, the government’s coronavirus response, economic concerns, race and policing. It’s also due, in large part, to deliberate and strategic choices made by American politicians to stoke voter anger for their own electoral advantage.

Donald Trump’s attempts to enrage his base are so plentiful that progressive magazine The Nation called him a “merchant of anger.” Meanwhile, his opponent, Joe Biden, elicits anger toward the president, calling Trump a “toxic presence” who has “cloaked America in darkness."

anger-filled political rhetoric is nothing new.From Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon to Newt Gingrich, politicians have long known thatangry voters are loyal voters. People will support their party’s candidates locally and nationally so long as they remain sufficiently outraged at the opposing party.

While inciting voter anger helps candidates win elections, research from my book, “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics,” shows that the effects of anger outlast elections. And that can have serious consequences for American democracy’s long-term health.

Trust in government

Political anger lowers citizens’ trust in the national government, causing people to view it with hostility, skepticism and outright contempt. Due to the increasingly national focus of politics, that anger is often directed squarely at the federal government, not state or local officials.

That creates a governance problem. As previous scholars have demonstrated, trust facilitates bipartisan lawmaking and support for social welfare programs that seek to make society more equitable, among other policies.

Americans’ trust in government has been declining for six decades.

Scholars have argued that party affiliation determines trust in government. When one’s preferred party controls government, that trust is high; when the opposing party has power, it’s low.

While partisanship does affect people’s trust in various political institutions, it cannot explain why overall faith in the U.S. government has been dropping for decades. After all, party control of Washington switches frequently.

My research finds sustained anger is a more likely suspect for Americans’ diminished trust in government.

Though American political anger has many sources, it was Ronald Reagan’s 1981 assertion that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” that really began to solidify Republicans’ anger at the federal government.

This statement, rooted in the conservative preference for individualism and free markets over government intervention, crystallized latent Republican anger with what many considered to be an activist federal government. That anger is in full bloom today.

Anger with the government is not simply a conservative phenomenon. Liberals are mad, too – usually because they believe the government is not doing enough to address racial and social inequalities. That anger, too, is in full bloom today.

Angry people tend to negatively judge the source of their anger. So when politicians continually label each other with crude epithets and infuriate people by taking – or not taking – certain actions, the public responds by lowering their evaluations of Washington.

Eventually, they question what government is even capable of.

Health of American democracy

Anger causes Americans to adopt attitudes that run contrary to the democratic ideals of the nation, my research shows.

It makes Americans see supporters of the opposing political party as less intelligent than themselves. Arguably more harmful for democracy, anger also makes people see supporters of the opposing political party as a threat to the country’s well-being.

These findings help explain why both Democrats and Republicans tend to hold a dim view of each other. Recent polling data finds that nearly two-thirds of Republicans see Democrats as “closed-minded,” while approximately half of Democrats see Republicans as “immoral.” In 2016 only half of Republicans and a third of Democrats held these views. Partisan antipathy is rising.

Angry people generally want to blame somebody – or some group – for their problems, whether they are the real or perceived cause. Political campaigns, logically, work to elicit anger at the opposing party. This means that their supporters are quick to blame those who disagree with them for the country’s shortcomings.

Consequently, voter anger causes politics to move beyond a competition of ideas and philosophies and into a zero-sum game in which each side’s gain is the other’s loss. That weakens people’s commitment to the democratic norms and values that have long been the linchpin of the U.S. political system, such as tolerance and a respect for minority opinions.

In 2018 the Pew Research Center found that 40% of Americans believed democracy was working “not too well” or “not at all well.” This year 62% of Americans surveyed by Pew agreed that the structure of the U.S. government needs “significant changes.”

Democracy may not disappear because candidates keep stoking Americans’ ire at each other and at the political system. My work finds that discontented Americans don’t want an entirely different form of government, despite global concerns that the U.S. is “backsliding” toward authoritarianism.

But anger is corrosive. It diminishes the quality of American democracy well after the politicians who used anger as a campaign strategy have won and left office.

Steven Webster, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Indiana University

mma 920

fox News prime-time shows spent over 3 hours displaying violent imagery in August

Fox’s prime-time evening shows -- Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, and The Ingraham Angle -- spent more than 3 hours displaying violent imagery throughout August, often using images that were days or months old, as they discussed the ongoing protests against police brutality across America.

In Fox News’ 3 hours and 15 minutes barrage of violent imagery the network included images of looting, crime scenes, acts of violence, fires, and the aftermath of violence or destruction. Of the 252 instances of violent imagery, 81 instances included images of burning objects.

At least 50 times, Fox displayed images or videos that were over five days old. And on more than 20 occasions, the images or videos shown in August were from May or June.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/facebook-thrives-on-the-virality-of-hate/

a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, “Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide With Indian Politics,” has blown the lid offFacebook’s unholy alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the right-wing ruling party in India.

In the August 14 article, WSJ reporters Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz detail howAnkhi Das, Facebook’s high-flying public policy director for India and South and Central Asia, blocked action against the ruling BJP party leaders.Facebook had tagged these leaders internally as promoting “hate speech” and “dangerous” and with the potential to cause, as Purnell and Horwitz write, “real-world violence.” The reason Das reportedly gave for letting these violations of Facebook’s policy go unpunished was that such action would harm Facebook’s business in India.

Facebook also has recently invested $5.7 billion in leading Indian telecom company Reliance Jio for 9.99 percent of its shares—one of the largest investments ever by any tech company for a minority stake.The largest number of Facebook and WhatsApp users in the world are from India, with Facebook having more than 300 million and WhatsApp in excess of 400 million users. Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014 and has business offerings on this platform, whose rules of engagement are completely opaque. Even more than Facebook, WhatsApp has been the major social media platform for the BJP and its troll army to spread disinformation, as it was for President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

On August 21, Horwitz and Purnell wrote that Facebook has subsequently come under attack internally for its failure to address violations of its hate speech policy in India: “Facebook employees are pressing the company’s leadership to review its handling of hate speech in India, saying [in a letter addressed to ‘FB Leadership’ that] the company has tolerated toxic content by prominent political figures."

this is not the first time Facebook’s sheltering of hate speech and divisive right-wing figures has been exposed. In a 2017 article for Bloomberg, Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier wrote thatFacebook “actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of ‘troll armies’ that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.”They also wrote that“a little-known Facebook global government and politics team… led from Washington byKatie Harbath,a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign,” has helped specific political parties “from India and Brazil to Germany and the U.K.—the unit’s employees have become de facto campaign workers.” In 2018, afive-article seriesfor Newsclick by Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta ahead of India’s 2019 general elections investigated the close ties between Facebook executives and the BJP, particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s team, and found that the ties went far beyond Facebook’s relationships with other political parties in India.

The August 14 WSJ article identified three prominent BJP figures whose Facebook posts included hate speech: T. Raja Singh, a state legislator from Telangana, had threatened to kill Muslims who ate cows and to shoot Rohingyas, Muslim refugees fleeing Myanmar; Anantkumar Hegde, a member of Parliament from Karnataka, posted cartoons and essays on Muslims spreading “Corona Jihad.” (The WSJ reported that after it asked Facebook about some of Singh’s and Hegde’s posts, “Facebook deleted some of… them” and “said Mr. Singh no longer is permitted to have an official, verified account, designated with a blue check mark badge.” Similarly, “Facebook took no action until the Journal sought comment from the company about… [Hegde’s] ‘Corona Jihad’ posts.”) Kapil Mishra, a former Delhi legislator, played an active role in inciting violent riots earlier this year in New Delhi, for which he has been widely condemned by opposition parties, independent groups, the press, and even (though not by name) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. These three were among BJP figures flagged internally by Facebook’s team implementing its policy on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” as worthy of a permanent ban, as was done in other countries including the United States.

The WSJ coverage may make us believe that the problem in Facebook is an individual’s fault, that of Ankhi Das, its policy head for India. The real issue goes far deeper. The power of digital monopolies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—is not merely determined by their wealth.The social media platforms—Google and Facebook—have taken over the media space, not only in terms of advertising revenue, the lifeblood of the media under capitalism, but also in terms of influence.The greater the engagement that you can generate,the greater the likelihood of gaining a significant viewership and following. Purnell and Horwitzreportedthat “within two months of the video of the speech” by Kapil Mishra—in which he incited physical violence in clearing protesters—“being posted, the engagement for Mr. Mishra’s Facebook page grew from a couple hundred thousand interactions a month to more than 2.5 million.”

Earlier, it was widely accepted that the press—what Thomas Carlyle had called the Fourth Estate in a democracy—has a social role and therefore needs to be regulated for public good.The Press Council of India, however weak it might be in actual practice, has a code that the press is expected to follow. In the U.S., cross-holdings between different kinds of media are regulated.

There are two issues we need to recognize. The first is that the media is not just any other business but is important for democracy. And the second is that monopoly by itself is also a danger to democracy. U.S. Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis is widely quoted to have said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

More than 75 years after Brandeis lived, his words on monopoly were cited in the congressional hearing in July with the CEOs of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. The combined market value of the four companies is nearly $5 trillion. If we compare this to the GDPs of entire countries, they come out above Germany, and behind only the U.S., China and Japan. It is this market power that gives them the ability to bend, or in the case of weaker economies, twist out of shape, their legal and regulatory structures.

Unfortunately, the interests of tech companies with this much capital are less and less often aligning with the interests of society.This is becoming clearest with the case of Facebook, as 98.5percentof its income is from advertisements. Advertisements depend on the number of views, and the virality of posts and engagement are the main drivers of Facebook’s revenue model. Facebook has discovered, as MIT researchers did, thathate and fake news posts drive virality, and therefore it has no incentive to curb such posts.While it has professed lip service for community standards and healthy discourse, the driving force of its business empire comes from its need to have more eyeballs, and therefore itfeeds off hate and fake news. An internal study had found that64percentof members who had joined extremist groupsdid so thanks to Facebook’srecommendation tools.

This pathology of social media is not limited to Facebook. Google’s search engine has shown similar problems, as has its image recognition algorithms. But undoubtedly, Facebook has been the leader in spreading hate politics and fake news in the world.

What Trump, Bolsonaro and Modi have in common, apart from their right-wing politics, is their reliance on Facebook and WhatsApp in their campaigns.Though we have seen the phenomena of troll TV—Fox News in the U.S. and Republic TV in India—penetrating the traditional media space, WhatsApp and Facebook have been the primary playground of trolls, aided by Facebook’s algorithms. While it may seem that the right understands digital platforms better than others, and that is why it has had so much success with them, there is increasing evidence that the support that Facebook provides to various right-wing figures and hate speech is not an accident but a part of its strategy.

In the language of new tech, hate speech is not a bug in the systems of social media but a basic feature. The problem of hate speech cannot be solved by politely petitioning the Zuckerbergs of digital monopoly platforms to behave more responsibly. It needs, at the very least, breaking up their monopolies and regulating them as public utilities.

Prabir Purkayasthais the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.

This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

guys generally angry for a while at loss of status [but anger by ppl more generally to McC for no aid bill covid 3?]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/columnist-explains-how-the-rnc-dressed-up-the-fury-smoldering-at-the-center-of-the-populist-republican-party/

alex h

during the 2020 Republican National Convention last week, it was painfully clear that President Donald Trump was emphasizing white grievance along with fear-mongering. Some of the speakers tried to soften Trump’s image and show empathy, including First Lady Melania Trump and White House Senior Adviser Ivanka Trump (the president’s daughter). But journalist David Ignatius, in his Washington Post column, stresses that Trumpism continues to be a very bitter and angry ideology.

Republicans, Ignatius writes, “dressed up their rage in prettier colors at this year’s convention.”

“Speakers from First Lady Melania Trump to Vice President Pence tried to make the GOP sound like a party of healing and tolerance,” Ignatius explains. “But smoldering at the center of the populist Republican Party, there’s still the bright orange ball of fury that is Donald Trump — wounded and angry and promising white men in his trademark, code-worded slogan that he’s going to ‘Make America Great Again.’”

The United States, Ignatius stresses, is a very “wounded” country in the Trump era. But he applauds former Vice President Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, for calling out Trump’s racism as well as violence at protests. And he warns that Trumpian rage is as strong now as it was four years ago.

"When historians try to understand what happened to the United States in these years, they will study what spawned the Trump spasm of rage,” Ignatius argues. “Perhaps the most striking demographic change in the years preceding his election was the catastrophic decline in the health, income and cohesion of white men without college educations. That group voted 64% for Trump in 2016, making it one of his largest voting blocs,according to the Pew Research Center. The best account of this white collapse is ‘Deaths of Despairand the Future of Capitalism,’ published this year by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.”

Research by Case and Deaton showed how high suicide rates have become, in recent years, among whites who lack a college degree. And Ignatius cites “the loss of income and respect for working-class white men” as one of the things that fuels the anger and bitterness of Trumpism.

“For white men without a college degree,” Ignatius explains, “their ‘median earnings lost 13% of their purchasing power between 1979 and 2017,’ even as per capita national income rose 85%,write Case and Deaton….A freewheeling democracy that prizes individualism is our great American gift. But it’s also why we need good leaders so badly — to hold together and avoid the abyss of social disintegration.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/experts-explain-the-4-main-psychological-factors-that-drive-trumps-rabid-fan-base/

no lnx

a looming question in today’s political climate is: Why do Donald Trump’s devotees continue to support him despite the carnage of his well-documented failures? Although we are in the middle of a deadly pandemic that is surging and not contained, Trump seems to maintain a base support of 35% to 40%. What are the psychological factors that influence or underpin his supporters’ attraction to him? And might this provide some perspective on how to change these supporters’ minds?

Multiple psychological factors seem to influence and explain his supporters. We have divided these factors into four major categories: Rebelliousness and Chaos; Shared Irrationality; Fear; and Safety and Order.

Rebelliousness and Chaos [DISRUPTOR? BROWNSHIRTS HOODLUMS?]

Some Trump supporters have a strong desire for rebelliousness and chaos, and view Trump as the perfect vehicle for achieving their personal goals. These supporters tend to become “anti-establishment and anti-government,” even when it is against their best interest. Many are unhappy with their station in life and believe chaos in the political system will bring them important gains. They seek immediate and sweeping changes and believe a rebellious attitude and rebellious behavior are what is necessary. They would rather have chaos, even dangerously or regressively so, than the status quo.

These supporters believe in Trump’s professed anger and rebelliousness, while often ignoring the content of the issues at hand. Trump’s talk of “draining the swamp” [SHORTHAND FOR DESTROY DC POWER PPL? NEWT CALLED DISEASE?] and of eschewing “political correctness” is attractive to them. They react emotionally and irrationally in embracing Trump’s decisions to create chaos, such as by sending federal troops into American cities to provoke hostile conflict with protestors. They enjoy and thrive upon Trump disavowing norms, rules, and laws. Rebelliousness and chaos can be a major psychological influence, but it can have serious negative consequences such as undermining the chance for real change.

Shared Irrationality

The Dunning-Kruger effect. Some people are under-informed and misinformed and are completely unaware of their lack of information. They tend to overestimate their level of knowledge and hold onto that position. They develop “illusory superiority” from their inability to recognize their true lack of knowledge. In other words, some people think they know more than they do and hold firmly to their opinions. These people are resistant to change their political thinking because they believe they are the knowledgeable ones. Trump and some of his supporters have this psychological phenomenon in common; they are unable to remedy their own limitations of knowledge and their inaccurate thinking.[QANON?]

Magical thinking. This is the belief that one’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, or words can bring about effects in the world. Or, similarly, that one’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, or words can cause something to happen. Magical thinking presumes a causal link between one’s internal, personal experience and the external physical world. This often emerges from an inability to distinguish fully between emotions and logical thoughts. Relying totally on emotion or “gut reactions” results in magical thinking. Trump engages in magical thinking almost constantly. This is especially dangerous regarding the pandemic: “It will disappear very quickly,” “We have it under control,” “We may have some embers or some ashes…” Many supporters engage in magical thinking and are encouraged and validated by Trump, leading them to align strongly with him.

Obsession with celebrity. Some people are obsessed with celebrities and reality television. Trump entertains them and amuses them. Some supporters are always waiting to see what outrageous thing he says or does next. These supporters are happy as long as they are being entertained by him. They act as if life is a “game” or a “show” that is somehow disconnected from the difficult realities of everyday life, but it is not.

Shared omnipotence. This is a fantasy based in childhood experiences during our earliest years–due to our complete dependency upon parenting persons–that if one can find the “right” leader, then everyone can live harmoniously together forever. While this dynamic is often seen in romantic relationships, especially during the early infatuation period, this exact same dynamic can be seen in political relationships as well. In this case, some people believe that Trump is the “right” leader who can take them to a place of harmony and never-ending happiness and success. This is an infantile fantasy that is unrealistic and unachievable because it is not rooted in the real world of adult life. Even so, a childhood fantasy can be intense and not easily given up.

Fear

Brain reactivity to threats. Research shows that some people have an exaggerated fear response to threats. When presented with specific perceived threats–immigrants, democrats, protestors, socialism–conservatives’ brains light up in activity and experience a need to seek safety. Trump actively encourages his supporters to experience exaggerated fear responses, such that their brains remain energized.

Fear mongering. Terror management theory explains why fear mongering works. When people are reminded of their mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they reflexively defend those who share their world view and their natural and ethnic identity. Tribal identification is an outgrowth of fear mongering. Racism and bigotry are related to fear. Trump appeals to racist and bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrants “rapists and murderers.” This fear mongering by Trump is aimed at supporters who are vulnerable to racist and bigoted thinking because it fits with their world view. Another major fear among Trump supporters is falling behind financially and losing the economic capacity to control their lives and protect themselves. A third major fear among Trump supporters is of socialism and believing that capitalism is being threatened and even destroyed. Trump is very adept at focusing on these specific fears among his supporters, using key words and names to trigger and stoke their emotional concerns NEWT]. Trump supporters believe that he is capable of protecting them from their fears. And when they feel protected, they overlook his offensive and outlandish behavior.

Conspiracy theories. Certain people are attracted to conspiracy theories because of their vulnerable personalities and even by mental illness. Life is complex and perplexing and at times dangerous. It is not simple or safe. Research shows that feelings of anxiety make people think more conspiratorially. A conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem much more straightforward and controllable. Fantasies that remove fear and doubt can be especially attractive, even if they are unrealistic and irrational. People who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events, to attribute intentionality where it is unlikely to exist, and to have lower levels of critical thinking. Trump has voiced many conspiracy theories: Spygate, Obamagate, Deep state, Trump Tower wiretapping, and others.

Security and Order

Social dominance orientation. People who score high on social dominance orientation prefer an established societal hierarchy. They are attracted to Trump because he promotes and normalizes the belief that high-status people and groups should be dominant over low-status people and groups. Trump’s clear distinction between groups on top of society (Whites) and those “losers” on the bottom (immigrants, Blacks, and Latinos) is a classic social dominance view. Individuals who are high on social dominance orientation are typically domineering, tough-minded, disagreeable, and relatively uncaring seekers of power. As such, these individuals have an attraction to authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism. Several traits characterize authoritarianism: deference to authority, aggression toward outgroups, a hierarchical view of the world, and the belief that the world is dangerous and threatening. Some people believe in having an authoritarian leader because they feel protected and safe by a strong, powerful presence. Trump’s authoritarian leanings are highly attractive to these supporters. Interestingly, research studies have shown the joint power of authoritarianism and social dominance orientation to predict far-right-wing voting in the United States and Europe.

How To Change Supporters’ Minds

Based on our understanding of these psychological influences, each Trump supporter must be considered individually. Not all supporters are connected to Trump in the same way or for the same psychological reasons. For each Trump supporter, an individual assessment is required as to whether it might be best to address rebelliousness and chaos; shared irrationality; fear; and/or security and order. Rational arguments aimed at each of these categories, separately or in some combination, might be most effective.

Trump supporters are tied to him based on multiple and complex psychological principles and phenomena. To continue to respond to them as if they are psychotic or evil is a grave mistake and will not lead to change. Identifying the category or categories of psychological influence for each person can be a much more productive strategy.

There are three months to go before our presidential election. Let us use this time to focus our energies on changing minds based on an understanding of psychology. Name-calling and dismissive statements will not work. Lumping all supporters together will not work. Psychology holds the answer.

Alan D. Blotcky, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in Birmingham, Alabama.

David M. Reiss, MD, is a psychiatrist in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/heres-your-field-guide-to-the-5-main-types-of-pandemic-deniers/