DianeR,

Nice pic...it kind of goes with this.....

'Get out': some Mexico border residents reject migrant arrivals

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/mexico-border-residents-reject-migrant-arrivals-164548276.html

Camp Fire Potentially Started By Pacific Gas and Electric Company

California’s resources are not only battling several major destructive fires, but they are also intensely investigating potential causes.

Yesterday, I wrote up an article on potential cause of the Woosely fire, which California denies. Wildfire blame in California can mean billions in litigation. The state doesn’t want to get it wrong, or misplace blame, or even, honestly apply blame. It’s a mess.

Brown Screwed The State (And May Screw It More)

Last September, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that allowed utility companies to increase service costs to customers as a way to make up for likely billion-dollar settlements and judgments resulting from catastrophic wildfires in 2017.

This gets a bit complicated, so allow me to explain deeper.

https://prepforthat.com/pacific-gas-and-electric-company-wildfire-lawsuits/

HotCoffee, more on this creepy porn lawyer character. I am hoping he continues to get the support of the democrat party. That ranks him right up there with the other wife beater the DNC's #2 man, Keith Ellison who just got elected Attorney General of MN proving blue states have no common sense.

Here is a direct quote from the creepy porn lawyer himself. I wonder how low his wife had to go to get the crap beat out of her?

Avenatti pitch in Iowa: ‘When they go low ... we hit harder’

It's a neck and neck between Jim Acosta and the creepy porn lawyer fpr asswagon of the year.

God how I love democrats, they make life so interesting.

"Hey!... hey.. hey.... He's fren, not food." - gray cat.

https://imgur.com/Eu4HwXT

DC Carry Permits Jump Over 1440 Percent Since District Went ‘Shall Issue’

https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/13/dc-ccws-jump-over-1440-percent/

DianeR,

I sure didn't hear Avanatti talking about " women must be believed " at his release presser.

Linsey Grahm has really gone through a transformation, finally, someone that is willing to hold the pants suit lady to the same standards they held Trump to.

Our Temp AG stays....yes, starting out to be a good day!

More later....

HotCoffee, good day to you. Busy yesterday but I also caught the story about the creepy porn lawyer's arrest on suspicion of felony domestic violence. What was interesting was his immediate cry "she hit me first" followed by "I would never hit a woman".

With his great credentials beating women he and Keith Ellison, both darlings of the democrat party, could possibly make a run for president together.

Be around today,

back to you later after I catch up on the news.

truthdig - NOV 14, 2018 - TD ORIGINALS (fair use)

"The Signs of Creeping Fascism Are All Around Us"

By Paul Street:

The talking heads I saw on cable news last week seemed baffled and disgusted by Donald Trump’s response to a black female reporter’s comment during his angry press conference following the midterm elections.

The reporter, the so-called Public Broadcasting Service’s Yamiche Alcindor, stated that the president had called himself a “nationalist” on the campaign trail last month. “Some people,” Alcindor said, “saw that as emboldening white nationalists. Now people are also saying. …”

Before she could finish, the visibly agitated president interrupted her. “I don’t know why you say that,” Trump interjected. “That is such a racist question.”

Alcindor remained cool and continued her question: “Some people say the Republican Party is now supporting white nationalists because of your rhetoric.”

“I don’t believe it,” Trump retorted. Pointing his finger at Alcindor, he said, “Let me tell you, that’s a racist question. …You know what the word is? I love our country. I do. You have nationalists, you have globalists … but to say that, what you said, is so insulting to me. It’s a very terrible thing what you said!”

While I share the talking heads’ repulsion over Trump’s battering of Alcindor, I found his outburst—one of many dark moments in the president’s faceoff with those he calls “enemies of the people” (reporters)—neither surprising nor difficult to understand.

It helped that I’d just finished reading Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley’s new book, “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” a timely study of fascist politics past and present.

Stanley examines how modern authoritarian and nationalist—“fascist,” if you like (Stanley obviously does)—politicos have used and subverted purportedly democratic electoral politics to gain power. He finds 10 common themes animating fascist ideology and propaganda:

1. Invocation of a mythic national past marked by racial, ethnic, religious and/or cultural purity—a supposedly glorious history to which the nation needs to return.
2. Propagandistic use of outwardly virtuous ideals (including anti-corruption, democracy, liberty and free speech) to advance abhorrent ends that contradict those ideals.
3. An anti-intellectual assault on education, universities, science, expertise and language, accompanied by charges of Marxism and “political correctness” against liberal and leftist enemies and the advance of simplistic nationalist and authoritarian ideals. This is fertile soil for the deadly denial of climate change that has occurred and for such absurd claims as the notion that whites are now more damaged by racism than are black, Latinx and Native American people in the U.S.
4. An insidious attack on truth and on people’s ability to perceive and agree on truth. Regular and repeated obvious lying is combined with the advance of conspiracy theories and the promotion of “news as sports” and demagogic strongmen as “stars.”
5. An ugly faith in natural hierarchies of worth and a rejection of equality as dangerous, unnatural, Marxist and liberal delusion.
6. An aggrieved and counterfeit sense of victimhood among dominant “us” groups (racial, ethnic and/or religious) that feel threatened by having to share citizenship, resources and power with minority groups (“them”). This ironic victimology feeds an oppressive nationalism devoted to maintaining “natural” hierarchies and uniting “chosen” but supposedly oppressed racial, ethnic, religious groups (whites in the U.S., Christians in Hungary, Hindus in India, and so on.) against the supposedly false claims and unjust demands of “them”—those designated as “naturally” inferior others.
7. A stern embrace of law and order that targets minority others (“them”) as criminal threats to the safety and security of the majority (“us”).
8. Sexual anxiety about the threat supposedly posed by minority, criminal and alien others to “our” traditional male roles, status and family values.
9. A loathing of cities seen as racially and sexually corrupt, ethnically impure, sexually perverse, parasitic criminal zones loaded with a polyglot mass of some inferior, nation-weakening “them.” By contrast, the rural countryside is lauded as the noble wellspring of virtue, strength, self-sufficiency and racial-ethnic purity. The rural heartland/fatherland/motherland/homeland is the sacred and foundational “blood and soil” preserve of “us.” It is the noble native soil of the “volk”—the true ancestral people who embody the spirit of a once-grand nation that needs to be made great again through the defeat of liberal and supposedly leftist elites who have been giving the nation’s resources and power away to naturally inferior others (“them”).
10. A sense of the chosen-people majority (“us”) as hard-working, upright, virtuous and deserving, combined with the notion of demonized minorities and others (“them”) as lazy, dissolute, shifty and undeserving.

Trump’s response to Alcindor was a perfect match for the sixth of Stanley’s 10 fascist leitmotifs. How did the president turn the reporter’s mild query into a shameful expression of anti-white “racism”? Only by the possession or pretense of an oppressor-nationalist worldview that sees any suggestion of white racism as an infuriating affront to the supposed real victims of racism: white Americans. By denouncing Trump’s response to Alcindor as mere nonsense, CNN’s panelists missed the point.

It was just one of many episodes in which Trump has checked the boxes on Stanley’s list of core fascist themes. Consider Trump’s:

• Three-year-old ballcap slogan, “Make America Great Again” (likely lifted from empowered Hungarian fascists’ call to “make Hungary great again”).
• Claim to be “drain[ing] the swamp” while filling his administration with thoroughly corrupt swamp creatures.
• Designation of his authoritarian racist and hate-filled campaign rallies—events where he denounces reporters as “enemies of the people” and even applauds repressive violence against them and others—as “free speech” demonstrations.
• Climate-science denial and taste for conspiracy theories.
• Relentless totalitarian mendacity and endless nonsensical assertions, utterly devoid of evidence.
• Constant leveling of the charge of “fake news” against any reporting or commentary that questions his political agenda and purported greatness.
• Absurd advance-pardon of a racist sheriff who built Nazi-like internment and work camps for Latinx arrestees.
• Savage punitive separation of Central American children from their migrant parents at the southern U.S. border.
• Defense of white supremacists who marched through the University of Virginia campus, chanting “Blood and soil, Jews will not replace us” (Heather Heyer, a young woman protesting the fascists, was killed at that 2017 event).
• Obvious underlying belief that African-Americans, Latinx, Native Americans and women are inherently inferior to white men and unworthy of respect and equality.
• Repeated claims that leading black personalities are “low IQ,” “stupid” and the like.
• Repeated and barely coded racist appeals to “law and order.”
• Repeated false description of immigrants as rapists and other kinds of terrible criminals, not to mention “animals.”
• Mad executive order claiming to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of U.S. citizenship to people born on U.S. soil.
• Clear disdain and distrust of scientists, real expertise, intellectuals and independent judges and lawyers.
• Repeated reference to the predominantly white and agrarian, small-town heartland as the real soul of the nation and his related special taste for holding demagogic, fascist-style rallies in heavily white, rural, red-meat, red state regions.
• Regular false description of centrist and liberal corporate Democrats as “the left” and as “socialists.”

That’s just a short list of how Trump’s rhetoric and conduct has lined up with the noxious politics of fascism, which holds power in a shocking number of nations today. (Stanley might have added a special chapter on hypermasculinist militarism and misogyny, both major Trump themes. Perhaps, too, it is time to start thinking about eco-fascism—the special dedication fascists show for assaulting livable ecology.)

Many U.S. Democrats will read Stanley’s book with a sense of self-satisfied validation over his description of Trump and his party as fascists. That’s a shame, as well as a mistake. “How Fascism Works” should prompt Democrats to take a critical look in the mirror and at their party when it comes to how we got in this hot, neofascistic, political mess. Not content merely to describe fascist politics, Stanley seeks to explain its success, past and present. Fascism’s taproot, he finds, is harsh socioeconomic disparity:

"Ever since Plato and Aristotle wrote on the topic, political theorists have known that democracy cannot flourish on soil poisoned by inequality. … [T]he resentments bred by such divisions are tempting targets for demagogues. … Dramatic inequality poses a mortal danger to the shared reality required for a healthy liberal democracy … [such] inequality breeds delusions that mask reality, undermining the possibility of joint deliberation to sole society’s divisions. …

Under conditions of stark economic inequality, when the benefits of liberal education, and the exposure to diverse cultures and norms are available only to the wealthy few, liberal tolerance can be smoothly represented as elite privilege. Stark economic inequality creates conditions richly conducive to fascist demagoguery. It is a fantasy to think that liberal democratic norms can flourish under such conditions."

Particularly perceptive is Stanley’s intimately related reflection on how the political culture of pseudo-democratic duplicity and disingenuousness that is generated by modern capitalist inequality and plutocracy creates space for fascistic politicians who appear to be sincere and signal authenticity by standing for division and conflict without apology. Such candidates, Stanley writes, “might openly side with Christians or Muslims and atheists, or native-born [white] Americans over immigrants, or whites over blacks. … They might openly and brazenly lie … [and] signal authenticity by openly and explicitly rejecting what are presumed to be sacrosanct political values.” Such politicians, Stanley argues, come off to many jaded voters as “a breath of fresh air in a political culture that seems dominated by real and imagined hypocrisy.” Fascist politicos’ “open rejection of democratic values” is “taken as political bravery, as a signal of authenticity.”

That is no small part of what has opened the door to malevolent far-right figures at home and abroad. The opening is provided by liberals and social democrats whose claims to speak on behalf of the popular majority and democracy are repeatedly discredited by their underlying commitment to dominant capitalist social hierarchies and oppression structures.

He does not say so (this is a problem with “How Fascism Works”), but Stanley surely knows that the neoliberal Democratic Party of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has partnered with Republicans in the creation of a New Gilded Age of spectacular democracy- and tolerance-disabling class disparity. The Democrats have participated for decades in the richly bipartisan making of plutocratic policies that have shifted wealth and income so far upward that three absurdly rich people (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos) now possess as much wealth between them as the poorest half of Americans, while the top 10th of the upper 1 percent has as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent.

The inequality has come with remarkable doses of soul-numbing hypocrisy atop the Democratic Party, as well the Republican Party. Both have helped embody the cold and disingenuous manipulation of populism by elitism that Christopher Hitchens aptly called—in a 1999 study of Bill and Hillary Clinton—“the essence of American politics.”

When it has held significant measures of nominal power in America’s oxymoronic capitalist democracy, the Democratic Party has governed in accord with what David Rothkopf (a former Clinton administration official) once called “the violin model.” Under that model, Rothkopf said, “[Y]ou hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.” In other words, “you” gain and hold office with populace-pleasing, progressive-sounding rhetoric, even as you govern in standard service to existing dominant corporate and military institutions and class hierarchies.

The Obama administration was a graphic violin lesson, to say the least. The first black president’s progressive-sounding “hope” and “change” presidency bailed out and protected the Wall Street financial institutions that collapsed the U.S. and global economy. It offered no remotely comparable bailout for working people and the poor. Barack Obama passed a Republican-inspired version of health insurance reform that only the big insurance and drug companies could truly love and abandoned his promise to pursue legislation to relegalize union organizing. Then he went after entitlements, offering Republicans bigger cuts to Social Security and Medicare than the right-wing part had dared to demand.

It was darkly consistent with the late, liberal-left, Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s 2008 reflection on what he called the “inauthentic opposition party.” “Should Democrats somehow be elected,” Wolin prophesied, they would do nothing to “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts,” Wolin wrote, “points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.”

Wolin called it. A nominal Democrat was elected president, along with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2008. The reigning system of corporate and imperial “inverted totalitarianism,” as Wolin designated it, was given a deadly, fake-democratic rebranding. The underlying rightward drift sharpened, fed by a widespread and easily Republican-exploited sense of popular abandonment and betrayal, as Democrats depressed and demobilized their own purported popular base.

Then came the Hillary “Goldman Sachs” Clinton campaign, poisoned by the disconnect between her transparent elitist captivity to the nation’s top financial institutions. Clinton’s strikingly tepid populist pretense was undermined further when she called Trump’s “heartland” “flyover country” supporters a “basket of deplorables” in a sneering comment (one that accurately reflected her aristocratic progressive-neoliberal worldview) to rich Manhattan campaign donors.

The inauthentic, fake-progressive opposition problem—critical context for fascist political success—has lived on through the recent U.S. midterm elections. In response to the nativist, white-nationalist and totalitarian, reality-canceling, fascist-style politics of Trump and the ever more openly Orwellian Republicans, Democrats have not seen fit to follow Bernie Sanders’ progressive-populist lead to target the savage economic inequalities that Stanley rightly sees as an underlying cause of global fascism’s electoral march. Democrats’ moderately successful midterm strategy presented no threat to the masters of capitalist inequality. The party remains mired in the centrist progressive neoliberal formula that has reigned atop it since the 1990s: representational racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation diversity combined with an absence of any serious challenge to corporate and financial prerogatives. Its slight nods to populism are little more than calculating teases meant to keep more left-leaning and social-democratic voters on board without scaring off big campaign bankrollers and backers. The incisive leftist money-politics analyst Thomas Ferguson offered a telling reflection on Democrats’ persistent depressing captivity to the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money in a Jacobin interview published the morning of the midterms:

"[T]he existing Democratic Party leadership is plainly trying to find ways to tap the burgeoning energy [provided by the Bernie Sanders democratic socialism insurgency] for purposes of increasing electoral turnout, while playing with the [Sanders] movement’s issues [single-payer and more] like a cat with a ball of yarn. … The hollowness of a much-touted Democratic reform proposal—that candidates should solemnly pledge to refuse corporate PAC money—is patent. It is a sham. … They know very well that big ticket donations from the 1 percent will still roll in, in several forms. … For Democrats to offer real solutions, the party has to break its dependency on big money. … If the Democrats are not to go the way of the social-democratic parties of continental Europe, they need to squarely address this question and offer real solutions."

As Nick Brana, a former Sanders staffer who heads the Movement for a People’s Party, noted one day after the midterms, the results are “a serious wake-up call for progressives” who continue to foolishly dream of gaining power by taking over the Democratic Party. By Brana’s account:

"The four leading progressive organizations that emerged from Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign endorsed Democratic candidates across 46 states. … Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsed a combined 107 candidates for Congress this year. Forty-four of them won their primaries and only 12 won their general elections. Five of those 12 were already incumbents. Five more of them were longtime party politicians in line for higher office, rather than insurgent candidates. Only two of them were actually opposed by the party and unseated establishment Democrats in the primaries—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley. There are 435 members of Congress.

It gets worse. Almost every candidate those groups endorsed for governor, lieutenant governor, and Senate, lost in the primary or the general election. That includes 13 candidates for governor, five candidates for [lieutenant] governor, and seven candidates for U.S. Senate. Incumbents Bernie Sanders and David Zuckerman were the only ones who won. … [T]he blue wave is a corporate wave that has swept in the same kind of Democratic politicians that drove working people into Donald Trump’s arms after eight years of Obama. When Democrats busy themselves serving the wealthy again, the result will be an even sharper lurch to the authoritarian right [emphasis added]."

(Here I caution that Trump didn’t get anywhere near as many proletarian votes as many liberal and left observers keep saying. The main thing the dismal neoliberal Dems did in 2016 was demobilize the progressive base, not just push the white working-class into the arms of Trump.)

The main things distinguishing the new crop of largely moderate Democratic House members is how many of them are women and the remarkable amount of corporate money they raised, and not any noteworthy left progressivism. The centrist New Democrat Coalition endorsed 23 of the 29 Democrats who won in the House race.

The left historian Nancy Fraser’s 2017 argument that Clinton’s 2016 defeat marked “the end of progressive neoliberalism”(basically, corporate neoliberalism with a big overlay of metropolitan and bicoastal identity politics) and provided a great opportunity for anti-plutocratic progressives in the Sanders vein has not been born out. Under the cover of the “Moscow ate my homework” “Russiagate” narrative and the undeniable sheer horror of Trump and his party in power, establishment Democrats in the Clinton-Obama-Pelosi mode have kept the authentically progressive and oppositional insurgency within their own party’s ranks checked and contained.

Consistent with Brana’s take, the arch-neoliberal Democratic House leader and vanguard corporate Democrat Nancy Pelosi (regularly and absurdly described as a lead of “the left” in right-wing media) marked the “blue [corporate] wave” by promising Democratic cooperation with the white nationalist fearmonger-in-chief and claiming that it’s “a bipartisan marketplace of ideas that makes our democracy strong.” That’s a standard pragmatic promise of inauthentic opposition, appropriately enough from a leader of a party that has been voting Trump record defense budgets and chilling new surveillance powers even while (accurately) calling him a malignant narcissist, racist, sexist and even a fascist.

Hey, but who cares? The U.S. left media figure and Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara tells his readers and fellow DSA members to fight on trying to form a socialist caucus in the dismal, dollar-drenched Democratic Party. Undeterred by political reality, Sunkara insists that boring from within the Democratic Party is the “most promising place for advancing left politics, at least in the short term.” No wake-up call from Jacobin.

Meanwhile, it seems clear that, as Ferguson says, “[T]he Republican Party is never going back to where it was before Trump, even if the establishment succeeded in putting Pence in his place. In politics, the ‘New Abnormal’ is, alas, the new ‘Normal.’ ” So it will remain, unless and until the creeping fascist party still mostly in power in the U.S. is seriously opposed by an actual and authentic popular opposition that goes after the extreme inequality that provides essential soil for the poisonous new fascist politics of the 21st century.

Contributor

Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,… --->

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-signs-of-creeping-fascism-are-all-around-us/

RAW STORY - COMMENTARY - 12 NOV 2018 AT 15:05 ET (fair use)

"This complete psychological analysis reveals 14 key traits that explain Trump supporters"

By BOBBY AZARIAN:

Whether we want to or not, for the sake of America, we must try to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon, as it has completely swept the nation and also fiercely divided it. What is most baffling about it all is Trump’s apparent political invincibility. As he himself said even before he won the presidential election, “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 paper published 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 will forgive anything he says. They are happy as long as they are kept entertained.

4. “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.

5. 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.

6. 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 anxiety that 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 forces that 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.

7. 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 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. As psychologist David Dunning puts it in an op-ed for Politico, “The knowledge and intelligence that 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

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.

12. 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.

13. 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-wing around 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

14. 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.rawstory.com/2018/11/complete-psychological-analysis-reveals-14-key-traits-explain-trump-supporters/

The Intercept - Glen Greenwald (fair use)

Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9” Aims Not at Trump But at Those Who Created the Conditions That Led to His Rise

By Glenn Greenwald
September 21 2018, 11:08 a.m.

“FAHRENHEIT 11/9,” the title of Michael Moore’s new film that opens today in theaters, is an obvious play on the title of his wildly profitable Bush-era “Fahrenheit 9/11,” but also a reference to the date of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election victory. Despite that, Trump himself is a secondary figure in Moore’s film, which is far more focused on the far more relevant and interesting questions of what – and, critically, who – created the climate in which someone like Trump could occupy the Oval Office.

For that reason alone, Moore’s film is highly worthwhile regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant defect in U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself, as though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom – of decades-old systemic American pathologies.

Personalizing and isolating Trump as the principal, even singular, source of political evil is obfuscating and thus deceitful. By effect, if not design, it distracts the population’s attention away from the actual architects of their plight.

This now-dominant framework misleads people into the nationalistic myth – at once both frightening and comforting – that prior to 2016’s “Fahrenheit 11/9,” the U.S., though quite imperfect and saddled with “flaws,” was nonetheless a fundamentally kind, benevolent, equitable and healthy democracy, one which, by aspiration if not always in action, welcomed immigrants, embraced diversity, strove for greater economic equality, sought to defend human rights against assaults by the world’s tyrants, was governed by the sturdy rule of law rather than the arbitrary whims of rulers, elected fundamentally decent even if ideologically misguided men to the White House, and gradually expanded rather than sadistically abolished opportunity for the world’s neediest.

But suddenly, teaches this fairy tale as ominous music plays in the background, a villain unlike any we had previously known invaded our idyllic land, vandalized our sacred public spaces, degraded our admired halls of power, threatened our collective values. It was only upon Trump’s assumption of power that the nation’s noble aspirations were repudiated in favor of a far darker and more sinister vision, one wholly alien to “Who We Are”: a profoundly “un-American” tapestry of plutocracy, kleptocracy, autocracy, xenophobia, racism, elite lawlessness, indifference and even aggressive cruelty toward the most vulnerable and marginalized.

This myth is not just false but self-evidently so. Yet it persists, and thrives, because it serves so many powerful interests at once. Most importantly, it exonerates, empowers, and elevates the pre-Trump ruling class, now recast as heroic leaders of the #Resistance and nostalgic symbols of America’s pre-11/9 Goodness.

The lie-fueled destruction of Vietnam and Iraq, the worldwide torture regime, the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent bailout and protection of those responsible for it, the foreign kidnapping and domestic rounding up of Muslims, the record-setting Obama-era deportations and whistleblower prosecutions, the obliteration of Yemen and Libya, the embrace of Mubarak, Sisi, and Saudi despots, the years of bipartisan subservience to Wall Street at everyone else’s expense, the full-scale immunity vested on all the elites responsible for all those crimes – it’s all blissfully washed away as we unite to commemorate the core decency of America as George Bush gently hands a piece of candy to Michelle Obama at the funeral of the American War Hero and Trump-opponent-in-words John S. McCain, or as hundreds of thousands of us re-tweet the latest bromide of Americana from the leaders of America’s most insidious security state, spy and police agencies.

Beyond nationalistic myth-building, there are substantial commercial, political and reputational benefits to this Trump-centered mythology. An obsessive fixation on Trump has single-handedly saved an entire partisan cable news network from extinction, converting its once ratings-starved, close-to-being-fired prime-time hosts into major celebrities with contracts so obscenely lucrative as to produce envy among most professional athletes or Hollywood stars.

Resistance grifters exploit fears of Trump to build massive social media followings that are easily converted into profit from well-meaning, manipulated dupes. One rickety, unhinged, rant-filled, speculation-driven Trump book after the next dominates the best-seller lists, enriching charlatans and publishing companies alike: the more conspiratorial, the better. Anti-Trump mania is big business, and – as the record-shattering first-week sales of Bob Woodward’s new Trump book demonstrates – there is no end in sight to this profiteering.

All of this is historical revisionism in its crudest and most malevolent form. It’s intended to heap most if not all blame for systemic, enduring, entrenched suffering across the country onto a single personality who wielded no political power until 18 months ago. In doing so, it averts everyone’s eyes away from the real culprits: the governors, both titled and untitled, of the establishment ruling class, who for decades have exercised largely unchecked power – immune even from election outcomes – and, in many senses, still do.

The message is as clear as the beneficial outcomes: Just look only at Trump. Keep your eyes fixated on him. Direct all your suffering, deprivations, fears, resentments, anger and energy to him and him alone. By doing so, you’ll forget about us – except that we’ll join you in your Trump-centered crusade, even lead you in it, and you will learn again to love us: the real authors of your misery.

THE OVERRIDING VALUE OF “FAHRENHEIT 11/9″ is that it avoids – in fact, aggressively rejects – this ahistorical manipulation. Moore dutifully devotes a few minutes at the start of his film to Trump’s rise, and then asks the question that dominates the rest of it, the one the political and media establishment has steadfastly avoided examining except in the most superficial and self-protective ways: “how the fuck did this happen”?

Knowing that no political work can be commercially successful on a large-scale without affirming Resistance clichés, Moore dutifully complies, but only with the most cursory and fleeting gestures: literally 5 seconds in the film are devoted to assigning blame for Hillary’s loss to Putin and Comey. With that duty discharged, he sets his sights on his real targets: the U.S. political establishment that is ensconced within both parties, along with the financial elites who own and control both of them for their own ends.

Moore quickly escapes the dreary and misleading “Democrat v. GOP” framework that dominates cable news by trumpeting “the largest political party in America”: those who refuse to vote. He uses this powerful graphic to tell that story:

2016 General Election

• Trump Voters: 63 million
• Clinton Voters: 66 million
• Non-voters: 100 million

[Go to the Intercept website page for the imbedded graphics related to this article]

It’s remarkable how little attention is paid to non-voters given that, as Moore rightly notes, they form America’s largest political faction. Part of why they’re ignored is moralism: those who don’t vote deserve no attention as they have only themselves to blame.

But the much more consequential factor is the danger for both parties from delving too deeply into this subject. After all, voter apathy arises when people conclude that their votes don’t change their lives, that election outcomes improve nothing, that the small amount of time spent waiting in line at a voting booth isn’t worth the effort because of how inconsequential it is. What greater indictment of the two political parties can one imagine than that?

One of the most illuminating pieces of reporting about the 2016 election is also, not coincidentally, one of the most ignored: interviews by the New York Times with white and African-American working-class voters in Milwaukee who refused to vote and – even knowing that Trump won Wisconsin, and thus the presidency, largely because of their decision – don’t regret it. “Milwaukee is tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway,” the article quotes an African-American barber, justifying his decision not to vote in 2016 after voting twice for Obama.

Moore develops the same point, even more powerfully, about his home state of Michigan, which – like Wisconsin – Trump also won after Obama won it twice. In one of the most powerful and devastating passages from the film – indeed, of any political documentary seen in quite some time – “Fahrenheit 11/9″ takes us in real-time through the indescribably shameful water crisis of Flint, the criminal cover-up of it by GOP Governor Rick Snyder, and the physical and emotional suffering endured by its poor, voiceless, and overwhelmingly black residents.

After many months of abuse, of being lied to, of being poisoned, Flint residents, in May, 2016, finally had a cause for hope: President Obama announced that he would visit Flint to address the water crisis. As Air Force One majestically lands, Flint residents rejoice, believing that genuine concern, political salvation, and drinkable water had finally arrived.

Exactly the opposite happened. Obama delivered a speech in which he not only appeared to minimize, but to mock, concerns of Flint residents over the lead levels in their water, capped off by a grotesquely cynical political stunt where he flamboyantly insisted on having a glass of filtered tap water that he then pretended to drink, but in fact only used to wet his lips, ingesting none of it.

A friendly meeting with Gov. Snyder after that – during which Obama repeated the same water stunt – provided the GOP state administration in Michigan with ample Obama quotes to exploit to prove the problem was fixed, and for Flint residents, it was the final insult. “When President Obama came here,” an African-American community leader in Flint tells Moore, “he was my President. When he left, he wasn’t.”

Like the unregretful non-voters of Milwaukee, the collapsed hope Obama left in his wake as he departed Flint becomes a key metaphor in Moore’s hands for understanding Trump’s rise. Moore suggests to John Podesta, who seems to agree, that Hillary lost Michigan because, as in Wisconsin, voters, in part after seeing what Obama did in Flint, concluded it was no longer worth voting. As Moore narrates:

The autocrat, the strongman, only succeeds when the vast majority of the population decides they’ve seen enough, and give up. . . . . The worst thing that President Obama did was pave the way for Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump did not just fall from the sky. The road to him was decades in the making.

The long, painful, extraordinarily compelling journey through Flint is accompanied by an equally illuminating immersion in West Virginia, one that brings into further vivid clarity the misery, deprivation, and repression that drove so many people – for good reason – away from the political establishment and into the arms of anyone promising to destroy it: from the 2008 version of Obama to Bernie Sanders to Jill Stein to Donald Trump to abstaining entirely from voting.

We meet the teachers who led the inspiring state-wide strike, some of whom are paid so little that they are on food stamps. We hear how their own union leaders tried (and failed) first to prevent the strike, then prematurely tried (and failed) to end it with trivial concessions.

We meet Richard Ojeda, an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran, Democratic State Senator, and current Congressional candidate, who tells Moore: “Our town is dying. One out of every four homes is in a dilapidated state . . . . I can take you five minutes from here and show you where our kids have it worse than the kids I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Needless to say, all of that began and took root long before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015.

To Moore’s credit, virtually no powerful U.S. factions escape indictment in “Fahrenheit 11/9.” The villains of Flint and West Virginia are two Republican governors. But their accomplices, every step of the way, are Democrats. This, Moore ultimately argues, is precisely why people had lost faith in the ability of elections generally, and the Democratic Party specifically, to improve their lives.

And in stark and impressive contrast to the endless intra-Democrat war over the primacy of race versus class, Moore adeptly demonstrates that the overwhelmingly African-American population of Flint and the largely white impoverished West Virginians have far more in common than they have differences: from the methods of their repression to those responsible for it. “Fahrenheit 11/9″ does not shy away from, but unflinchingly confronts, the questions of race and class in America and ultimately concludes – and proves – that they are inextricably intertwined, that a discussion of (and solution to) one is impossible without a discussion of (and solution to) the other.

No examination of voter apathy and the perceived irrelevance of elections would be complete without an ample study of the 2016 Democratic Party primary process that led to Hillary Clinton’s ultimately doomed nomination. And this is another area where Moore excels. Focusing on one little-known but amazing fact – that Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties over Clinton in the West Virginia primary, beating her by 16 points in a state where she crushed Obama in 2008, yet, at the Democratic Convention, somehow ended up with fewer delegates than she received – Moore interviews a Sanders supporter in West Virginia about the message this bizarre discrepancy sent.

Moore asks: “This just tells people to stay home?” The voter replies: “I think so.” Moore offers his own conclusion through narration: “When the people are continually told that their vote doesn’t count, that it doesn’t matter, and they end up believing that, the loss of faith in our democracy becomes our deathknell.”

With all of this harrowing and depressing evidence compiled, it becomes easier and easier to understand why Americans are either receptive to anyone vowing to dismantle rather than uphold the system they have rightly come to despise, or just abstain altogether. And it becomes even easier to understand why the guardians of that system view Trump as the most valuable weapon they could have ever imagined wielding: one that allows them to direct everyone’s attention away from the systemic damage they have wrought for decades.

BROADLY SPEAKING, there are three kinds of political films. There are those whose filmmaker fully shares your political outlook, mentality and ideology, and thus produces a film that, in each scene, validates and strengthens your views. There are those by filmmakers whose politics are so anathema to yours that you find no value in the film and are only repelled by it. Then there are those that do a combination of all those things, causing you to love parts, hate other parts, and feel unsure about the rest.

Without doubt, “Fahrenheit 11/9″ falls into the latter category. It’s literally impossible to imagine someone who would love, or hate, all of the scenes and messages of this film.

Indeed, for all the praise I just heaped on it, there were several parts I found banal, meandering, misguided and, in one case, downright loathsome: a lurid, pointless, reckless, and deeply offensive digression into the long-standing, adolescent #Resistance theme that Trump wants to have sex with, if he has not in fact already had sex with, his own daughter, Ivanka. What makes the inclusion of this trash all the more tragic is that it comes very near the beginning of the film, and thus will almost certainly repel – for good reasons – large numbers of people, including more reluctant and open-minded Trump supporters, who would be otherwise quite receptive to the important parts of the film that constitute its crux.

Then there is the last 20 minutes, devoted to a direct comparison between Trump and Hitler. I am not someone who opposes the use of Nazism as a window for understanding contemporary political developments. To the contrary, I’ve written previously about how anti-intellectual and dangerous is the now-standard internet decree (inaccurately referred to as Godwin’s Law) that Nazi comparisons are and should be off-limits.

As the Nuremberg prosecutors (one of whom appears in the film) themselves pointed out during the post-war trial of Nazis: those tribunals were not primarily about punishing war criminals but about establishing principles to prevent future occurrences. There are real and substantive lessons to be drawn from the rise of Hitler when it comes to understanding the ascension of contemporary global movements of authoritarianism, and this last part of “Fahrenheit 11/9″ features some of those in a reasonably responsible and informative manner.

Ultimately, though, this last part of the film is marred by cheap and manipulative stunts, the worst of which is combining video of a Hitler speech overlaid with audio of a Trump speech, with no real effort made to justify this equation. Comparing any political figure to someone who oversaw the genocide of millions of human beings requires great care, sensitivity, and intellectual sophistication, and there is sadly little of that in Moore’s invocation (which at times feels like exploitation) of Nazism.

There are, without doubt, people who will most love the exact parts of the film I most disliked. And those same people will likely hate many of the parts I found most compelling. But that’s precisely why Moore’s film is so worth your time no matter your ideology, so worth enduring even the parts that you will find disagreeable or even infuriating.

Because – in contrast to the endless armies of cable news hosts, Twitter pundits, #Resistance grifters, and party operatives, all of whom are vested due to self-interest in perpetuating the same deceitful, simple-minded and obfuscating narrative – Moore, for most of this film, is at least trying. And what he’s trying is of unparalleled importance: not to take the cheap route of exclusively denouncing Trump but to take the more complicated, challenging, and productive route of understanding who and what created the climate in which Trump could thrive.

Embedded in the instruction of those who want to you focus exclusively on Trump is an insidious and toxic message: namely, removing Trump will cure, or at least mitigate, the acute threats he poses. That is a fraud, and Moore knows it. Unless and until the roots of these pathologies are identified and addressed, we are certain to have more Trumps: in fact, more effective and more dangerous Trumps, along with more potent Dutertes, and more Brexits, and more Bolsonaros and more LePens.

Moore could have easily made a film that just channeled and fueled standard anti-Trump fears and animus and – like the others who are doing that – made lots of money, been widely hailed, and won lots of accolades. He chose instead to dig deeper, to be more honest, to take the harder route, and deserves real credit for that.

He did that, it seems clear, because he knows that the only way to move forward is not just to reject right-wing demagoguery but also the sham that masquerades as its #Resistance. As Moore himself put it: “sometimes it takes a Donald Trump to get us to realize that we have to get rid of the whole rotten system that gave us Trump.”

That’s exactly the truth that the guardians of that “whole rotten system” want most to conceal. Moore’s film is devoted, at its core, to unearthing it. That’s why, despite its flaws, some of them serious ones, the film deserves wide attention and discussion among everyone across the political spectrum.

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/michael-moores-fahrenheit-119-aims-not-at-trump-but-at-those-who-created-the-conditions-that-led-to-his-rise/

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The Thom Hartmann Program 11/14/18 First Hour

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