Beto O’Rourke is correct: Trump’s immigration rhetoric is straight out of the Third Reich | Salon.com

mmmhmm

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.

…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. 

…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.

…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 to portray Muslims and Hispanic immigrants as imminent threats, 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.

…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. 

…Not only do death reminders increase nationalism, they may influence 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 forces that could kill thousands of civilians overseas. Interestingly, the effect was present only in conservatives.

By constantly emphasizing existential threat, Trump may be creating a psychological condition that makes the brain respond positively rather than negatively to bigoted statements and divisive rhetoric.

…Some who support Donald Trump are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crime is 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. 

…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.

…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.

…Where individual narcissism causes aggressiveness toward other individuals, collective narcissism involves negative attitudes and aggression toward ‘outsider’ groups (outgroups), who are perceived as threats.

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. 

…Authoritarian personality is characterized by belief in total and complete obedience to authority. Those with this personality often display aggression toward outgroup members, submissiveness to authority, resistance to new experiences, and a rigid hierarchical view of society. Authoritarianism 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-wing around the world. [Trump’s] speeches, which are laced with absolutist terms like “losers” and “complete disasters,” are naturally appealing to those with such a personality.

..The Republican party, going at least as far back to Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” has historically 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.

A Complete Psychological Analysis of Trump’s Support | Psychology Today

hmmmm

Trump is a master at branding. He knows how to affix a defining label and make it stick. There’s virtually no truth in any of them, and are usually projections of his own crimes. (Everything he’s falsely accused Hillary Clinton of he is actually guilty of himself. And “fake news” — his branding of the “lying liberal media” — accurately describes virtually everything he says and tweets.)

…The GOP would seize on anything that didn’t “look quite right” or could be made to appear that way, begin a major investigation, and announce their suspicions to the press in a way that emphasized (or concocted) potentially “criminal” or “unethical” behavior. The press, doing what they believe is their job and getting a good story in the process, take it all straight to the headlines as “breaking news,” at which point it’s on every ticker and hotly discussed on every major show. When no damning facts are found to confirm the stories, they may (or may not) be retracted…but by then, the story is already circulating “in the air.” 

…People have an investment in being “in the know” when it comes to the common wisdom developed through that density of repetition. It makes them feel “informed,” part of an engaged community that’s on top of things. 

…Sexism may have provided the fertile soil and the GOP may have planted the seeds and helped them to take root through their endless attacks, investigations, and hearings — but it took the media’s continual harping on Hillary’s “trust issues” to turn them into the (pseudo) realities that they became. It was so easy: present every charge of the GOP as “breaking news,” report every new email find as a potential treasure trove of hidden secrets, remind viewers that “people don’t trust her” every chance you get, and of course by the time a pollster calls and asks, the “trust problem” shows up as a documented “fact.”

…“The inevitable result,” as television historian Steven Stark remarks in Glued to the Set, “was a thinner line between fact and rumor.”

…First, “Bad Optics” became a prominent topic of political punditry, and eventually began to be discussed as though it were a crime in itself. Case in point: the August 30 New York Times editorial, recommending that the Clinton Foundation be shut down immediately. It’s a prime example of how the pseudo-issue of Clinton’s “trust problem” was perpetuated through the authority of appearances rather than facts. 

…The question as to whether this “batch” “proves” that “Big-money donors…got special favors from Mrs. Clinton” is–note carefully–“Not so far.” A simple “No” would have proved sufficient, and would be completely factual. But the Times couldn’t resist adding that loaded, suggestive “so far,” implying that perhaps–indeed, perhaps likely–something suspect will show up later. There’s no reason to suspect this, as nothing had shown up of significance. It’s pure insinuation. 

…Having established (again, through insinuation) that “special favors” may yet be discovered, the Times can then go on to speak as though their own speculation has the weight of proven fact. 

…For many journalist, such “balancing” of the scales — what Paul Krugman has called “bothsidesism” — came to be seen as “objective” reporting during the election.

“Yes, Trump is a raving lunatic, but what about those emails?“

…It may also be, dictionary be damned, that saying whatever you feel like without regard for fact had come to be equivalent to “telling it like it is” — which in turn was conflated with “honesty.” So “straight-shooter” Trump, who (unlike the circumspect, cautious Clinton) “told it like it is” without regard for political correctness, people’s feelings, or factual evidence, was for that reason seen as more honest. Hillary Clinton, who rarely lost her cool and only got truly aggressive with Trump after months of “lock her up!” was seen, in contrast, as “inauthentic” and therefore “untrustworthy.” We heard it virtually every day, not only from her political enemies, but from news commentators on every channel, who simply could not resist raising the issue no-matter how irrelevant it was to the main story they were reporting. We heard it in casual comments and jokes told by neighbors, as if it were an accepted scientific fact that needed no proof. 

…Trump is indeed outrageously scornful of evidence or argument. But we would make a big mistake to not recognize that disdain for fact has been creeping up on us for some time, preparing our receptivity to the Big Con that so many Americans fell for.

…I remember during the O.J. Simpson trial, for example, being astounded when one juror dismissed the DNA evidence as “just a waste of time. It was way out there and carried no weight with me.” Impressionist snapshots, in contrast, did carry weight. Detective Philip Vannnatter, as one juror explained, didn’t look jurors in the eyes and thus couldn’t be trusted. The accuracy of criminologist Henry Lee’s findings, however, were certified for another juror by the warm smile he directed at the jury as he approached the witness stand to testify. Simpson himself was declared innocent by one of my students at the time because “he’s a football hero, and handsome, and seems nice and friendly, and, well, I just sort of see it that way.” [Agggh, people are so, so fucking stupid!]

…In this world of optics and appearances, pundits stopped wondering about who the“real” Trump was, and became more interested in charting or predicting “reboots,” “resets,” and “pivots.” 

…That should have been the “story” all along. Instead, we were distracted and deceived by a steady stream of “suspect” optics, misleading polls, and pseudo-crimes — the “email scandal” being the paradigm, but not the only, illustration — that made Hillary out to be “just as bad” as Trump. 

…I’ve yet to see a panel discussion — not even on those shows anchored by commentators that I respect and enjoy — about the role the mainstream media (not the right-wing press, not Facebook, not the Russian infiltration) played in the electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton. Instead, the journalistic community has collectively branded itself as the heroic, fact-finding free press versus the truth-stomping Godzilla that is Trump. To be sure, they have often come through in that role as Trump’s lies and crimes have come to be the target of their reporting. But they didn’t play that role during the election, and until they acknowledge their own culpability and vulnerability, a version of it is likely to happen again.

…Actually, it already is happening again, for example, in the premature labeling of “front-runners” and “rock stars” and by the media’s latching onto Bernie Sanders’ conveniently self-serving division of Democrats into “progressives” and “establishment” and imbedding it in reporting about current candidates and elections. The words themselves are ill defined and malleable, and the differences among Democrats are far less extreme than such a dualistic construction would suggest.

IT WASN’T JUST RUSSIA: THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND THE 2016 ELECTION

Yup.

The existence of a Russian disinformation campaign that could make Americans hesitant to vaccinate their children highlights something important about the Kremlin’s information war on the United States.

…it is after a far bigger prize: the exacerbation of Americans’ distrust of one another and, in turn, the erosion of their confidence in society and the US government.

…After combing through nearly 2 million tweets recorded between 2014 and 2017, the researchers found that Russian troll accounts were significantly more likely to tweet about vaccination than general Twitter users. They had turned to vaccines as a wedge issue in an effort to ramp up social discord, erode trust in public health institutions, and exacerbate fear and division in the United States.

…The study suggested that by giving the illusion of a grassroots debate, complete with content pushing both for and against vaccination, Russia could better tap into the fears and divisions among Americans — and exploit them.

…Russian trolls’ contemporary messages were crafted with key terms like “freedom” and “constitutional rights,” which were often absent from other anti-vaccination tweets. One Russian disinformation account captured the style of this approach in just 13 words and two hashtags: “Apparently only the elite get ‘clean’ #vaccines. And what do we, normal ppl, get?! #VaccinateUS.”

…Another source of US vulnerabilities that Russian disinformation campaigns are looking to take advantage of centers on the country’s foreign policy.

…Although the specific messaging used to engage different audiences varied, the overall Russian narrative appears to be one built around US incompetence and malfeasance. Its messaging aligned clearly with Russia’s foreign-policy objective of limiting US involvement in Syria.

…Russia isn’t interested in the final outcome of US partisan struggles. It is interested in identifying, targeting, and amplifying any vulnerabilities of the United States. Efforts to use vaccination as a wedge issue demonstrates just how well Russian information operations can take any issue, identify how it may engage or divide Americans, and manipulate social media discourse to meet Russian ends.

Russian trolls are spreading misinformation in the US about vaccines – Business Insider

The tweets, memes, etc. involved are so obvious. There is something obviously off about them. Every single time. Yet people who are smart enough to know better eat that shit up. Stupid sheeple.