Trump 2025

[JK22]

Delusion: The mental state that drives Trump's hardcore supporters with scary accuracy | Opinion

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/delusion-the-mental-state-that-drives-trump-s-hardcore-supporters-with-scary-accuracy-opinion/ar-AA1yAGPJ?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=f6305bdb1fe744148733a7fc0e8d2fa0&ei=52

Donald Trump campaigned against consensual reality and won. Every plank of his platform – from the economy to immigration to abortion – was based on easily provable lies.

Despite Trump’s bombastic assertions to the contrary, inflation is down, growth is up, illegal border crossings are down, crime is down, and vaccines work great. Tariffs are taxes on imports and American companies say they’re planning to raise prices.

None of that mattered at the polls because Trump created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore the facts and focus on hate.

Delusion strongly predicted a vote for Trump. An Ipsos poll in the final weeks of the campaign found that voters who falsely believed that we are living through a record-breaking violent crime wave favored Trump by 26 points, while those who knew the truth broke for Harris by 65 points. Those who knew that the inflation rate is back to the historic average favored Harris by 53 points. Respondents who knew that illegal border crossings are down favored Harris by 59 points.

Part of the problem is the media. Certainly, the mainstream media is shy about stating the truth and the rightwing media-influencer complex is dedicated to disseminating lies. Social media barons use algorithms to maximize their profits at the expense of our edification.

But the problem goes deeper than that: You also have to look at the conspiracist mindset that says the mainstream media is the enemy of the people, the government is controlled by the Deep State, and scientists are on the take, because it’s what makes people turn away from consensual reality.

CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl once asked Donald Trump why he constantly attacked the press. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Trump replied.

Trump also discredits the government as a source of information. When the latest statistics showed that crime was down, Trump accused the FBI of making them up. When the jobs report was revised, Trump accused Harris of faking it.

The conspiracist mindset allowed Trump’s followers to reinterpret his 34 felony convictions as evidence of the plot against him, rather than evidence of his terrible behavior.

Once you adopt a conspiracist mindset where you can dismiss any evidence that clashes with your prejudices as part of the conspiracy, you are free to create your own reality. Since it’s a worldview that scapegoats your fellow citizens as diabolical deceivers, that reality is bound to be ugly. Worse still, your willingness to discount mainstream sources of evidence in favor of the outlandish claims of demagogues becomes a badge of ideological purity. You welcome the lies.

This is why social scientists have been warning about the link between conspiracism and totalitarianism for a century. There was never any evidence that the Jews secretly controlled the world – but it didn't matter because lack of evidence was proof that the Jews controlled the press, and the universities, and science and the arts. Jews in pre-war Germany didn't control any of those things – but no evidence to the contrary could penetrate the conspiracy theory. And the complete absence of evidence for their hegemony was just proof of their total domination.

Another reason why conspiracism and totalitarianism are closely connected is that conspiracy theories take away our ability to have good-faith debates. If everything you don't like becomes evidence of your opponent's plot to destroy you, you can't discuss anything rationally. Human-caused climate change is a fact. But conspiracism takes the debate out of the realm of evidence and into the realm of character assassination of scientists and their supporters. It paints us as hoaxers and saboteurs. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives, but instead of debating their merits based on evidence, anti-vaxers portray their opponents as agents of a nefarious coverup to kill children. And it's completely irrefutable within their conceptual framework. When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that's what conspirators to kill our children would say.

There’s a much-needed movement afoot to fix our media ecosystem, but we can’t do that until we address the conspiracist mindset that predisposes people to believe Trump’s lies.

Dette er svært alvorlig, for det utgjør en eksistenstrussel mot menneskeheten og må stanses, for i verste fall kan det lede til katastrofale konsekvenser ved at det kan ødelegge menneskeheten som et sosialt vesen. Konspirasjonsteori GJØR DEG DUMMERE. 

It’s science: Trump voters are dumb (2022)

The United States is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, with leading Republicans and millions of their voters and supporters either tacitly or explicitly embracing authoritarianism or fascism. Democrats, for the most part, have not responded with the urgency required to save America's democracy from the rising neofascist tide.

American society was founded on white settler colonialism, genocide and slavery. This unresolved "birth defect" at the foundation of the American democratic experiment meant that the country was racially exclusionary by design, from the founding well into the 20th century. At present, American politics is contoured by asymmetrical political polarization, in which Republicans have moved so far to the right that the party's most "moderate" members are far more extreme than the most "conservative" Democrats. This makes substantive compromise and bipartisanship in the interests of the common good and the American people almost impossible.

Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Trump supporters and Trump-loathers, increasingly do not live in the same neighborhoods or communities. In all, they largely do not socialize with each other, or have other forms of meaningful interpersonal relationships in day-to-day life.

To the degree that "race" is a proxy for political values and beliefs, the color line functions as a practical dividing line of partisan identity and voting. Religion is also a societal space that is divided by politics. For example, public opinion research shows that white right-wing evangelical Christians have increasingly embraced authoritarian views, conspiracy theories and other anti-democratic and antisocial values.

As the new Faith in America survey by Deseret News & Marist College highlights, the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that religion should influence a person's political values, where as only 28% of Democrats and 45% of independents share that view.

Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, also do not consume the same sources of information about news and politics. Conservatives now inhabit their own self-created media echo chamber, which functions as a type of lie-filled and toxic closed episteme and sealed-off universe. The creation of such an alternate reality is an important attribute of fascism, in which truth itself must be destroyed and replaced with fantasies and fictions in support of the leader and his movement.

America's struggle for democracy and freedom against authoritarianism is taking place on a biological level as well. Social psychologists and other researchers have shown that the brain structures of conservative-authoritarians are different than those of more liberal and progressive thinkers. The former are more fear-centered, emphasizing threats and dangers (negativity bias), intolerant of ambiguity and inclined to simple, binary solutions. Conservative-authoritarians are also strongly attracted to moral hierarchy and social dominance behavior.

Recent research by Darren Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, demonstrates that America's democracy crisis may be even more intractable than the above evidence suggests. In his recent article "Cognitive Sophistication, Religion, and the Trump Vote," which appeared in the January 2021 edition of Social Science Quarterly, Sherkat examined data from the 2018 General Social Survey and concluded that there are substantial negative differences between the thinking processes and cognition of white Trump voters, as shown in the 2016 presidential election, as compared to other voters who supported Hillary Clinton or another candidate, or who did not vote at all.

Sherkat observes that Trump support has been linked to religion and level of education, but until now not to "cognitive sophistication," which was found "to have a positive effect on voting, but a negative effect on choosing Trump." He notes that "philosophers and political elites have debated the potential effects of mass political participation" for generations, concerned "about the unsophisticated masses coming under the sway of a demagogue." In effect, this debate was always about the quality he calls cognitive sophistication, since citizens who lack it "may not be able to understand and access reliable and valid information about political issues and may be vulnerable to political propaganda":

" - Low levels of cognitive sophistication may lead people to embrace simple cognitive shortcuts, like stereotypes and prejudices that were amplified by the Trump campaign. Additionally, the simple linguistic style presented by Trump may have appealed to voters with limited education and cognitive sophistication. Beginning with [T.W.] Adorno's classic study of the authoritarian personality, empirical works have linked low levels of cognitive sophistication with right-wing orientations....

Trump's campaign may also have been more attractive to people with low cognitive sophistication and a preference for low-effort information processing because compared to other candidates Trump's speeches were given at a much lower reading level…. While much of the Trump campaign's rhetoric and orientation may have resonated with the poorly educated and cognitively unsophisticated, those overlapping groups are less likely to register to vote or to turn out in an election - "

As part of his research, Sherkat evaluated the political decision-making and cognition of Trump's voters, using a 10-point vocabulary exam. In a guest essay at the website Down with Tyranny, he explains what this vocabulary test revealed about white Trump voters:

" - Overall, the model predicts that almost 73% of respondents who missed all 10 questions would vote for Trump (remember, that is controlling for education and the other factors), while about 51% who were average on the exam are expected to vote for Trump. Only 35% of people who had a perfect score on the exam are predicted to be Trump supporters.

Notably, this very strong, significant effect of verbal ability can be identified within educational groups. While non-college whites certainly turned out more heavily for Trump, the smart ones did not — only 38% of those with perfect scores are expected to go for Trump, and only 46% of non-college graduates who scored a standard deviation above the mean. The same is true for college graduates — low cognition college graduates were more likely to vote for Trump. ...

What is really depressing isn't just the poles of the vocabulary exam, it's the average. The mean and median of the scale is 6 — so half of white Americans missed 4 of the easy vocabulary questions - "

Sherkat's research also explored how religion impacted support for Donald Trump among white voters: "This study confirms that white Americans with fundamentalist views of the Bible and those who embrace identifications with sectarian Protestant denominations tended to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election."

Belief that the Bible is the literal "word of God" also impacted Trump voting: "Viewing the Bible as a book of fables is also significantly predictive of vote choice, with secular beliefs reducing the odds of a Trump vote by 80 percent when compared to literalists, and reducing the odds of a Trump vote by 52 percent when compared to respondents who view the Bible as inspired by God."

In an email to Salon, Sherkat offered additional context and implication on the relationship between white Christianity, American neofascism and cognition:

" - The problem of the contemporary American fascist right is rooted in education and information. And this problem is not simply about attainment of some quantity of education, but of the quality and content of education, how that leads generations of white Christian Americans to process information about a wide range of issues. The segregation academies that proliferated in the mid-1960s and accelerated in the 1970s have taught millions of Americans a radically skewed version of American and world history and encouraged a continued segregated society. The homeschooling movement augmented this division, and further denigrated the value of knowledge.

White fundamentalist Christians have always segmented their communities from the rest of America, and even exert considerable control over public educational institutions, particularly in rural areas and in the states which embraced slavery. White fundamentalist Christians distrust mainstream social institutions like education and print media, and they actively seek to eliminate public education and to provide alternative sources of information. As a result, people who identify with and participate in white Christian denominations and who subscribe to fundamentalist beliefs have substantial intellectual deficits that make them easy marks for a wide variety of schemes — from financial fraud to conspiracy theories.

If you can't read the New York Times, you're going to believe whatever you hear on talk radio or on television. It's simply impossible for people with limited vocabularies and low levels of cognitive functioning to make sense of the complex realities of the political world. And we now have a population where for 55 years substantial fractions of white people have gone to private fundamentalist Christian schools that leave them both indoctrinated in Christian nationalism and ill-prepared to process any additional information. Worse, we now have over a million children in a given year who are homeschooled by parents who are uneducated white fundamentalists — and that total has been pretty constant for three decades since the homeschooling movement blossomed - "

What does this mean for the present and future of American democracy in this time of crisis? Sherkat cited the "disturbing ... influence of anti-intellectualism on American public life," which lends "performative power to ignorant elites":

" - Spouting off obvious untruths is no longer a mark of shame, because even basic historical and contemporary truths are not recognized. We seem to have a stable set of about 30% of Americans, 35% of white Americans, who are oblivious to political realities and incapable and unwilling to come to terms with any of our key social problems. The increasing control over public education by right-wing fanatics is entrenching ignorance and intellectual laziness in future generations. It does not bode well for the future of American democracy - "

Donald Trump and his movement did not create all these American authoritarians and aspiring fascists. Such people have long been a feature of American society. What Trump and have accomplished in recent years is to empower and normalize a dangerous set of antisocial, anti-human, retrograde and anti-democratic values and beliefs.

Saving America's democracy will require a moral and political reckoning and acts of critical self-reflection on a nationwide scale about the American people's character and values, and about how their leaders and governing institutions have failed them.

Changes in laws and institutions are necessary. But on their own, such interventions will not stop the spread of fascism. A lasting remedy will demand that the country's political, cultural, and educational institutions be renewed, re-energized, and reimagined. The questions Americans must ask themselves are simple yet enormous: Who are we? What are we to become? How can we unite in defense of democracy, the common good and the general welfare? Without real answers to those questions, there will be no democratic renewal in the 21st century -- and fascism wins.

Denne artikkelen er veldig viktig fordi dette kan skje her i Norge, det er tydelig at manglende kognitive egenskaper er et langt større problem enn antatt - ikke fordi man er dummere eller sløvere, men fordi man ikke var gitt gode oppvekstforhold for å opparbeide seg kognitive sofistikerte egenskaper med hensyn til helse, sosial utvikling og utdanningsform - det er mulig at problemene med norsk ungdom i dag skyldes to faktorer; sosial stress pga. innvandring med identitetskonflikt og politisk innblanding i skolevesenet som i tretti år har ikke gått bra som ønskelig - spesielt siden 2011. 

Alle i prinsippet er smart; men man kan bli hemmet og dermed fordummes uten at det er deres feil, selv om disse må i slutten gjøres ansvarlig for disses handlinger. Polariseringen, den republikanske kontrarevolusjonen som svekket demokratstyret i USA og økonomiske motsetninger samt sterk sosial og økonomisk stress paret med en politikerforakt som ikke har minsket selv etter Trump kom inn i politikken, har skapt et meget alvorlig befolkningsproblem som kan lede til USAs ruin. Og da har man ennå ikke nådd fasen hvor man kan ende opp med å bli en meget alvorlig trussel for alle og i slutten seg selv. 

USA har aldri klart å lege sårene fra sin fortid, og republikanerne river dem opp så meget, at det truer med å oppsluke landet helt og fullstendig. 

[RoyPåTur]

Hva er det du mener kan skje i Norge? Artikkelen går i alle mulige retninger av meninger. Det ser ut til at hovedbudskapet er at "dumme" stemmer på Trump. Det er nok ganske likt hvordan "dumme" stemmer på FrP allerede i dag. Det betyr ikke at de "dumme" stemmer rett eller galt.

[Zork]

3 hours ago, Mr.M said:

det er uansett sykt av en voksen kvinne å begrunne sin egen sterilisering med denne lovgivningen, -det fremstår først og fremst som et vikarierende motiv/politisk demonstrasjon. Er nok helt andre grunner til at hun valgte det.

Det som er sykt er at USA er på vei tilbake til middelalderen med religiøse fanatikere som, i sitt grunnleggende tankesett, hører mer hjemme i et kalifat enn i et oppegående vestlig samfunn.

Naturligvis bruker denne kvinnen dette som et poeng i debatten. At det i det hele tatt skal være mulig/nødvendig er det absurde her. Det er ikke handlingen hennes her som er poenget, men årsakene hun peker på.

Disse årsakene er høyst reélle uavhengig av hennes spesifikke situasjon.

Å late som om dette er et problem som en kan bagatellisere ved å fokusere på denne kvinnen, eller noen enkeltperson, er i beste fall ekstremt naivt. I de fleste fall så er det forsøk på å legitimere barbarismen som store deler av USA forsøker å utsette kvinner for.

[Neptun1]

Markiii skrev (3 timer siden):

Påstand? Jeg påpekte at påstanden din var latterlig siden straffetoll ikke automatisk er bra eller dårlig.

Eller påstår du at det alltid enten må være bra eller dårlig? At det aldri avhenger av omstendighetene og hvordan det brukes?

Da skal jeg forsøke å hjelpe deg (og andre) tilbake på sporet igjen.
Jeg har ikke påstått annet enn at vestlige media (og tilhengerne deres bl. a i denne tråden) utviser stor dobbelmoral når de angriper Trump - men ikke andre som bygger tollmurer.

Ref.
Så må jeg nevne vestlige mediers dobbeltmoral.
Trump/USA har planlagt 10% (straffe)toll på kinesiske varer og det blir stor oppstandelse..
EU innførte i høst straffetoll på 35,3% på kinesiske biler uten at de samme mediene fant det verdt å kommentere. Fra før har EU toll for alle land utenfor unionen.
Norge må ikke bare betale mangfoldige milliarder i "toll" for å handle med EU vi må også innføre deres lover som setter våre til side. Uten at noen medier finner dette kritikkverdig.
 

Din kommentar: Om det er dobbeltmoral eller skamløshet vet jeg ikke, men argumentasjonen din her er fullstendig skivebom.

- uten å begrunne hva som er "skivebom". 

[fredrik2]

15 minutes ago, Neptun1 said:

Da skal jeg forsøke å hjelpe deg (og andre) tilbake på sporet igjen.
Jeg har ikke påstått annet enn at vestlige media (og tilhengerne deres bl. a i denne tråden) utviser stor dobbelmoral når de angriper Trump - men ikke andre som bygger tollmurer.

Ref.
Så må jeg nevne vestlige mediers dobbeltmoral.
Trump/USA har planlagt 10% (straffe)toll på kinesiske varer og det blir stor oppstandelse..
EU innførte i høst straffetoll på 35,3% på kinesiske biler uten at de samme mediene fant det verdt å kommentere. Fra før har EU toll for alle land utenfor unionen.
Norge må ikke bare betale mangfoldige milliarder i "toll" for å handle med EU vi må også innføre deres lover som setter våre til side. Uten at noen medier finner dette kritikkverdig.
 

Din kommentar: Om det er dobbeltmoral eller skamløshet vet jeg ikke, men argumentasjonen din her er fullstendig skivebom.

- uten å begrunne hva som er "skivebom". 

Skulle si att den allra mesta oppstandelsen om tollen handlade om de 25% för naboländerna Mexico och Canada. Usikker på hvis jag ens hört noen kritisera de 10% för Kina.

[Neptun1]

fredrik2 skrev (3 minutter siden):

Skulle si att den allra mesta oppstandelsen om tollen handlade om de 25% för naboländerna Mexico och Canada. Usikker på hvis jag ens hört noen kritisera de 10% för Kina.

Og den forstår jeg. (som nevnt)
Men nå var det nevnte sitat jeg ble anklaget for.