Trump Derangement Syndrome behavior

 cartoon credit here 

So many of my friends and relatives seem to live rational lives, yet when it comes to politics, their emotions take over. That makes it next to impossible to apply critical thinking to a discussion of issues of concern. But it’s not a new phenomenon.

Paul Murphy just published a column at the American Thinker website, provocatively titled “Democrats in the Cesspits of Despair.” He goes into the theory of cognitive dissonance and applies it to what we’ve seen with Bush or Palin Derangement Syndrome, and now, Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Murphy’s analysis won’t make hard left liberals (and that’s most of the media) more honest or less destructive, but at least it explains the behaviour. (Another article on the related topic of “The Obama Cult” is here).

Anyway, here are a few take-aways from Murphy’s column (and the entire article is here):

When Leon Festinger and his associates undertook the work leading to their widely misunderstood and maligned theory of cognitive dissonance, their ultimate goal was to understand how forty million decent Germans and tens of millions in the rest of Europe could so enthusiastically support Nazi methods -- and it's their research on how cult members react to the unequivocal disproof of some central belief that's important today -- because the increasing calls among Democrats for violence shows that same process at work here as in Germany of the 1930s.

In brief, what happens when events disprove a cult's major belief is that some adherents drop out; a majority first reshape their vision of reality to accommodate both their belief and an edited version of reality and then either gradually fade out of the cult or double down on their efforts to find confirmatory opinion by compromising others; and, a few set out to force others to act as if the belief stands unchallenged.

. . .

The key elements that have to be in place for the true believers to slide toward dishonesty and violence are personal commitment to the belief, undeniable disproof, and enough rationality for the person to know that the belief has been disproven.

That two of these are in place with the Trump victory deniers is obvious: most of the journalists and others now attacking Trump in particular and Republicans in general have overwhelming and long term commitments to the progressive cause. This despite the fact that every major attempt to act on those beliefs, whether by Uncle Joe, Chairman Mao, the Kim Dynasty in North Korea, or that great hero and champion of the poor, Hugo Chavez, has turned into a murderous regime corrupting everyone and everything it touched.

. . .

Thus the behavioral explanation for the fact that conservatives will generally accept electoral defeat gracefully whereas Democrats eagerly embrace hypocrisy, corruption, dishonesty and even violence to continue the fight by any means necessary is simply this: reality supports conservative belief, but pushes leftists down the slippery slope to the insanity of Trump derangement syndrome.  Reality forces them to continually choose between recognizing the emptiness and historical absurdity of their core beliefs or holding themselves hostage to those beliefs by escalating their commitment, no matter what foul means may be required to make reality conform to their fantasy.

The few times that I have had any success in persuading someone who leans liberal to reconsider their worldview, it’s been because I kept suggesting that they expand their sources of news. Most of the time, the person had at least heard of the Drudge Report or Yahoo News, but otherwise didn’t know about other alternative news aggregators (such as Real Clear Politics, or two of the conservative aggregators, PolitiPage and Lucianne). In other words, accessing more news has on occasion led to someone dropping out of the cult.

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How To Steal Elections

Photo credit: allenbwest.com

Over the past several weeks, several commentators have been analyzing the prospects for a November election decided by fraud. The potential for fraud and a stolen election this year is yuge, and one of the first articles that caught my eye was at American Thinker. Here’s an excerpt from Paul Murphy’s July 19 column, “How Democrats Steal Elections”:

The reality is that in the 2016 election it now takes more than a majority for a Republican to win. Romney, for example, won about two thirds of all precincts nationwide and probably got in the range of 55% of the verifiable vote, but lost the election to nearly unanimous Obama support from nearly 100% turnout of potentially eligible voters in inner city precincts in key states like Ohio, where the certainty of being accused of racism for even thinking you couldn't get that level of turnout for a week of free pizza and beer prevented any form of verification.

Electoral cheating has probably existed since the second election ever held, but cheating by American Democrats has now reached levels never seen before in a major democracy. Basically what seems to have happened to electoral integrity is akin to the fate of the legendary frog in water slowly brought to a boil with conservatives only marginally aware that a a lot of small battles are being lost and the Democrats relentlessly pursuing four closely linked, long term, and deeply dishonorable, national policies:

Democrats hide the extent of fraud by combining a line of patter denying the existence of voter fraud while accusing Republicans of it with media blitzes publicizing and denigrating isolated, and often not very credible, claims like those that some voting machine somewhere mis-recorded a few conservative votes as liberal.

This is stagecraft 101 for magicians and propagandists alike: focusing audience attention on the insignificance of the occasional process failure in elections where millions of votes are counted while simultaneously raising emotional and credibility barriers against those who might otherwise get people to look a bit more carefully at what other members of the Democrat team are doing.

. . .

The Secretary of State Project, (apparently originally funded by George Soros) which seeks to put Democrats in charge of both the voting, and the vote counting, processes has now succeeded to the point that a majority of American voters are affected.

Key strategies implemented by these apparatchiks include:

Fighting the use of voter id and/or voter list verification though any means possible including slow walking legislated implementations, lawfare, inviting federal intrusion into state matters, and directing state and local authority funds aimed at remediation toward the acquisition and use of dysfunctional technologies with long histories of delay, uncontrolled cost escalation, and eventual failure;

Developing and perpetuating utterly ineffective processes for delivering or counting military ballots (which tend to favor Republicans);

Refusing to reform equally incompetent and ineffective processes for preventing felons, illegals, or the dead (all of whom tend to vote Democrat) from swaying elections; and,

Extending the duration of, while weakening eligibility and verification criteria for, all forms of advance voting.

Using litigation, and the threat of litigation, to sway electoral process decisions in favor of Democrats and against Republicans.

. . .

In particular abuse of the Help America Vote Act (2002) has enabled Democrats to insert significant new opportunities for voting fraud into the system.

. . .

Read the rest of Murphy’s column here. More blogs on this subject coming soon.

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