A new book explores how fear, uncertainty, and group psychology lead people to believe leaders who say false things.
.. You write that cults often draw people of above-average intelligence. Why is that?.. a lot of the people who hold some of these beliefs including being easily easily persuaded by charismatic leaders or pulled into cults are actually very intelligent... I think what happens with people who fall into cults and also conspiracy theories, it has more to do with feelings of powerlessness, and especially if you’re very very stressed, you can really be much more susceptible to these ideas. In that way, it’s not as much about your intelligence as it is about your circumstances and feeling like you’ve lost control in some way... the two most strong predictions of who supports Trump were not having a college degree and people who feel voiceless and powerless. So that voiceless and powerless trait looks like it aligns with both supporting Trump and being prone to believing in conspiracy theories... One of the big things for him is that he’s positioned himself as an outsider and being on the fringes. That actually helps him build up his charisma and his identity as a charismatic leader because it creates a very strong sense of him being able to come in and create a totally different order and a revolution. But it also allows him to create a very strong us-versus-them narrative.. once you create a sense of a “them,” you reinforce a strong “us.” And when you reinforce a very strong “us,” a lot of group psychology will sort of kick up. There’s a lot of conformity, there’s a lot of not questioning things because other people seem to be going along with it. It’s harder for individuals who are part of groups to make independent judgments and decisions... Being less specific makes it harder to disagree with them?.. I once heard a speech by Wayne LaPierre, the director of the NRA. And you could insert almost any cause into that speech, because he almost never actually used the word gun... You probably heard if you listened to the VP debate when the moderator said to Pence, “but you know the most recent incidents were all done by American citizens, how do you account for that?” and he ducked that question and went right back to very loaded emotional words — “tragedies occurring to families.”So what he does is deflect attention away from the data onto these base emotions, and then they tell you, “we’re the only ones who can save you.”.. But I would say that Hillary Clinton and also Tim Kaine … both of them have a tendency to try to bring up facts. Tim Kaine especially [at the debate] kept doing that, and you can see how to another scientist like me, that’s extremely refreshing. On the other hand, it comes across as being very flat, and people constantly complain that neither of them is convincing or persuasive or energetic or attractive in the way they talk. And you could see that [in the most recent debate], and that is a difficulty that scientists have in how to get their message across in a way that persuades people while still being true... The point is, those fears that these charismatic leaders arouse are often committed to permanent indelible memory, and they become extremely hard to dislodge, and they are easy to evoke simply by making people scared again. So all that Trump has to do is say “these immigrants are going to kill you,” and his entire message about immigration becomes immediately recalled... It requires a lot more effort to use the reasoning part of the brain. The default is to use the faster parts of the brain. So if you’re in a state of stress or there are too many facts coming at you or too much information, the default mode is to say, “I can’t handle all that stuff, it’s too much, or it’s too frightening, or it’s too complicated. I’m gonna default to the more rapid acting part of the brain, and make immediate decisions.”.. It requires a lot more effort to use the reasoning part of the brain. The default is to use the faster parts of the brain. So if you’re in a state of stress or there are too many facts coming at you or too much information, the default mode is to say, “I can’t handle all that stuff, it’s too much, or it’s too frightening, or it’s too complicated. I’m gonna default to the more rapid acting part of the brain, and make immediate decisions.”.. One of the things you find with the conspiracy theory is that they’re actually very, very fluid. If you’re actually able to disprove one of their tenets, they don’t say, “Oh, guess we were wrong.” They immediately move to another reason to support their original fear... How likely is it really that the groups of people who have been identified as the ones conspiring would really be able to all come together and do this? Someone like Andrew Wakefield’s argument is that every single scientist in every single government agency and the pharmaceutical industry, they’re all together in this conspiracy against him. That just feels very unlikely... [Dealing with someone who believes a conspiracy theory,] you can take their arguments and sort of present them in a very unemotional way, and a very bland way, over and over and over, and just repeat weakened versions of the argument in a flat manner. And that has actually been shown to be somewhat effective in getting people out of the grasp of a charismatic leader or a conspiracy theory... The other thing is, you can engage people on the level of, what are your values? What do you really want? For vaccines, it’s, “I want my child to be safe.” When you get them to rehearse their values, you actually can see a reduction in their willingness to believe crazy ideas… “This is dangerous,” say, “Compared to what?”
Goldberg: Trump’s Nutter News Network (NNN) Strategy
Yes, the media is particularly biased against Donald Trump. But this is not quite the outrage Trump’s spinners want to make it. Not only is Trump an exceptionally unworthy presidential candidate on the merits, but he does everything he possibly can to maximize the endemic problems of liberal-media bias. Thanks to his lizard-brain narcissism, he would rather have awful headlines about himself and be the center of attention than have Hillary Clinton steal the limelight.
.. Yes, absolutely, the WikiLeaks e-mails provide countless vulnerabilities that might have destroyed Hillary’s candidacy if she were running against any conventional Republican. But it’s not liberal-media bias per se that causes the press to pay outsized attention to tales of sexual misconduct; the press always pays attention to sex. The Lewinsky scandal got a lot of media attention. You could look it up.
.. It was inevitable and obvious that this lecherous adulterer who bragged in print about cheating on his wife would have these skeletons in his enormous, gold-and-velvet-lined closet. But no one needed to be a master sleuth or even a run-of-the-mill opposition researcher to know this. You know why? Because this guy said so! When accused of being a sexual predator by Howard Stern, Trump said, “That’s true!” — and then he laughed (in front of his daughter, whom he has affectionately called “a piece of ass”).
.. But, he also said that he couldn’t run for political office because of his attitude toward women:
“I think women are beautiful — I think certain women are more beautiful than others, to be perfectly honest — and it is fortunate that I don’t have to run for political office.”
.. Even if you wanted to think the best of a man who disparages war heroes but insists that dodging the clap was his “personal Vietnam,” a serious political party would have still demanded that he submit to an internal opposition-research investigation.
.. Trump refused to let his own campaign do an inventory of his skeletons. The guy who hires the best people was implored by thepeople he hired to do this basic form of due diligence and he refused. And now we’re supposed to be shocked that the Clintons found the skeletons in question? Or that the press is eager to report on them?
.. Take for example, the bowel-stewed hysteria over Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” comment. Romney said — and did — exactly what feminists and liberal reporters should applaud. He wanted to hire qualified women. So he reached out to women’s groups for suggestions. They sent him lots of recommendations. Binders full of them. And then he hired many of the women listed in the binders. What a monster!
.. So let’s talk about these allegations against Trump. I think they’re true. Maybe not all of them, but certainly enough of them, not least because they conform to what Trump confessed to in an unguarded moment. But also because we can be sure that at least some of them were given to the media by Democrats who would have made sure to vet them.
.. If you’re looking for a theory to explain what Trump and Campaign CEO Steve Bannon — the former head of Breitbart News —are doing, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than this fanciful notion that he’s trying to become president.
.. Or maybe that’s the rationalization they throw out there to distract from the more realistic goal: the launch of Nutter News Network.
.. Read the transcript of Trump’s speech from Thursday railing about the globalist corporate-media conspiracy. It might as well be the mission statement for Bannon’s new enterprise, a network that stands up to the global cabal
.. Why has Trump done scores of interviews on Fox and virtually nowhere else the last two months? Because he’s not interested in winning over undecideds, independents, or swing voters — you know the sort of thing serious presidential candidates do. No, he’s reselling the same product to people who’ve already bought it so he can take the customers with him after the election.
.. Because he wants the faithful to be permanently alienated from the rest of the political culture and utterly reliant on him. In fairness, it’s also because he can’t tolerate the idea that people will reasonably conclude that he’s a loser and choker so he has to lay the groundwork for the claim the other side cheated. But that narcissistic insecurity just makes him all the more susceptible to Bannon’s manipulation. He was such a Bannon puppet yesterday you could almost see Bannon’s fingers moving in the back of Trump’s mouth.
.. All of the idiotic arguments his cheerleaders made a year ago have been exposed as the magical-thinking B.S. they always were. He can win blue states! Name one. He’s expanding the GOP coalition! Really? Then why are Republican Senate candidates outperforming Trump in almost every battleground state?
Burning Down the House
Here’s his lesson for young minds: If you’re rich and boorish enough, you can get away with anything. Get away with sexual assault. Get away with not paying taxes. Get away with never telling the truth. Get away flirting with treason. Get away with stiffing people who work for you, while you take yours. Get away with mocking the disabled, veterans and families of war heroes.
.. Trump has made compassion suspect. Don’t reach out to starving refugees — they’re killers in disguise. Don’t give to a charity that won’t reward you in some way. Don’t pay taxes that build roads and offer relief to those washed away in a hurricane. That’s a sucker’s game. We’re not all in this together. Taxes are for stupid people.
How Dictatorships Are Born
“Do you really believe the compatriots of Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Beethoven will fall for this rubbish? How dare you insult the memory of twelve thousand Jews who died for our country?”
Germans fell for the rubbish. The Republican Party fell for the garbage.
.. That Trump traffics in violence is irrefutable. His movement wants action — deportations, arrests, assassination and torture have been mooted. The most worrying thing is not that Trump likes Vladimir Putin, the butcher of Aleppo, but that he apes Vladimir Putin.