TRUMPISM
PART I
Oscar – December 12, 2016 – Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog
The Cult of Trump
Can’t understand why a loved one would vote for Donald Trump? Let the experts who spend their lives studying cults help break it down.
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America was watching, the world was watching, and Donald Trump needed everyone to understand just how dire the straits really were.
“Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation,” he proclaimed ominously as he officially accepted the Republican nomination for president at the party’s convention in Cleveland last month. It was a grim portrait of America, a once-great nation ravaged by terrorism, “poverty and violence” at home, “war and destruction” overseas.
The solution? Not God. Or patriotism. Or casting aside party loyalty to come together as a nation. No, politicians had rallied under those virtuous banners before, and where had it gotten us? Instead, the newly crowned nominee offered a more messianic promise: that Trump—and only Trump—can get things back on track.
That’s the moment, says Rick Alan Ross, America’s leading cult expert, when he realized Trumpism had striking similarities to the fanatical groups he studies.
Like many moderates in the party, Ross, the executive director of the Cult Education Institute and a lifelong Republican, had watched Trump’s rise with mounting distaste. But Trump’s rhetoric at the RNC—“I alone can fix it”—clicked the pieces into place. “That kind of pronouncement is typical of many cult leaders, who say that ‘my way is the only way, I am the only one,’” Ross says. “That was a very defining moment.”
When I called Ross, I cut right to the chase, asking, “Is Trump a cult leader?” I didn’t get more than a few words in for the next 20 minutes as he dove into the evidence: the nominee’s deep-rooted narcissism, his lack of transparency, many of his supporters’ blind, full-throttled adoration. A week later, he left me two voicemails outlining the warning signs of narcissistic personality disorder in the candidate, and a week after that, followed up with another batch of e-mails expounding on Trump’s similarities to the cults he studies. There was a lot to dig into.
gq.com/story/the-cult-of-trump
October 15, 2016
Donald Trump’s Campaign Has Become a Cult
Friday’s rally in Charlotte took Trumpism to a frightening new level.
By Jared Yates Sexton
The Trump campaign has turned into something new: a cult.
The fact hit me a few minutes after I entered the Charlotte Convention Center on Friday night and heard supporters openly blaming the women who’ve recently come forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexually assaulting them. The Trump faithful were more than ready to cut down anyone standing in their leader’s way.
“They’re gold diggers,” I heard an old woman say.
“Let’s call them what they are,” said a woman in a “Proud Deplorable” shirt. “They’re whores.”
Throughout the night there were similar strains of the same conversation. Everyone was in agreement that there was no veracity to the women’s claims, that it was just another dirty trick by “Crooked Hillary” to defeat Trump, a man so good, another woman explained, holding out her quaking hand, “It makes me shake to think they’d hurt a man like that.”
But the questioning of the women’s accounts didn’t stop at skepticism. In a cult, when confronted with conflicting evidence, it’s oftentimes necessary to go to extreme lengths to sustain the shared narrative. Here, in Charlotte, they were more than ready to go to those lengths.
One man noted to his friend that it was suspicious that Trump was accused of sexual improprieties just as former Fox News head Roger Ailes has been. “You reckon Fox is in on it?” he asked aloud.
But the most disgusting suspicion concerned the accusers’ attractiveness.
“Trump dates models,” a woman in a red-white-and-blue blouse said, “Did you see that woman?” she asked, referring to Jessica Leeds, who says Trump groped her on a plane in the 1980s. “You think he was so hard up?”
Trump has continued to feed that same narrative by mentioning how unattractive he finds the women. At a rally in Greensboro earlier on Friday, Trump referred to reporter Natasha Stoynoff’s claim that he assaulted her while she was interviewing him in 2005 for a profile in People magazine. “Take a look. You take a look. Look at her. Look at her words. You tell me what you think. I don’t think so, I don’t think so.”
Trump’s followers didn’t think so, either.
“Women say all the time they’ve been raped,” said a man in a Trump/Pence shirt. “They lie all the time.”
_________________________________
A cult is only as secure as they are willing to isolate themselves from the outside world, and Trump, who has called for a wall along the Mexican border to keep out others, is busy building a metaphorical wall to protect his followers from outsiders who might contradict his message.
“Maybe we should boycott that issue,” Trump said of the new issue of People that details Stoynoff’s claims.
The crowd not only cheered, but they slipped into their now-familiar chant: “Lock them up, lock them up, lock them up.”
The “lock her up” chant, usually reserved for Hillary Clinton, has grown to encompass anybody who threatens the Trump cult.
Last night it was his accusers.
Lock them up, lock them up.
The FBI who chose not to indict Clinton.
Lock them up, lock them up.
The dishonest media.
Lock them up, lock them up.
They were chanting it on the floor before he got there, throughout his speech, on the escalators as they rode their way out of the convention space, and then outside, in the faces of the protestors holding signs reading “Don’t Grab My Pussy,” a reference to Trump’s now-infamous admission of sexual assault.
“You might live in Fairytale Land,” one supporter told a female protestor, “but you aren’t a princess.”
There were confrontations everywhere. Arguments between white supporters and black protestors. Rapid-fire insults. A young man told a black protestor he “still wasn’t free” and that he should have some pride and “at least make the Democrats work for your vote.”
Things reached a fever pitch. A protestor was chased off, tears streaming down his face. “I don’t want to go to jail tonight,” he said, before dodging cars in the street.
“Don’t believe the polls!” the man who’d chased him screamed. “Polls are lies! They’re telling you lies! Polls are lies! Don’t believe the polls!”
_____________________________
Why “Macho” Leadership Still Thrives
Authoritarian, narcissistic leaders are on the rise
By Ray Williams | April 4, 2016
Global economic uncertainty and the spike in terrorism has created a resurgence of the populist attraction to authoritarianism and male “macho” leaders. This trend is evident both in politics and in business.
Narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy, and psychopathy have one thing in common: they are disorders whose primary personality trait is the obsession with control, domination of, and power over others, whether that is people, animals, the environment, systems, or organizations.
Kevin Dutton, author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, argues “Traits that are common among psychopathic serial killers—a grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse and the manipulation of others—are also shared by politicians and world leaders. Individuals, in other words, running not from the police, but for office.” Such a profile allows those who have these traits to do what they like when they like, completely unfazed by the social, moral or legal consequences of their actions.
In their book, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, argue while psychopaths may not be ideally suited for traditional work environments by virtue of a lack of desire to develop good interpersonal relationships, they have other abilities such as reading people and masterful influence and persuasion skills that can make them difficult to be seen as the psychopaths they are. According to their and others’ studies somewhere between 3-25% of executives could be assessed as psychopaths, a much higher figure than the general population figure of 1%.
Manifred Kets de Vries, a distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change at INSEAD has completed some research and published a paper on the subject. He calls the corporate psychopath the “SOB—Seductive Operational Bully”—or psychopath “lite.” SOBs don’t usually end up in jail or psychiatric hospital, but they do thrive in an organizational setting. SOBs can be found wherever power, status, or money is at stake, de Vries says: “They talk about themselves endlessly; they like to be in the limelight. In some ways they are like children, believing that they are the center of the universe, unable to recognize the needs and rights of others. They appear to be charming yet can be covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their “victims” merely as targets and opportunities; like master and slave, they try to dominate and humiliate them. For them, the end always justifies the means.”
Populist authoritarianism can best be explained as a cultural backlash in Western societies against long-term, ongoing social change.
Over recent decades, the World Values Survey shows that Western societies have been getting gradually more liberal on many social issues, especially among the younger generation and well-educated middle class. That includes egalitarian attitudes toward sex roles, tolerance of fluid gender identities and LGBT rights, support for same-sex marriage, tolerance of diversity, and more secular values, as well as what political scientists call emancipative values, engagement in directly assertive forms of democratic participation, and cosmopolitan support for agencies of global governance. This long-term generational shift threatens many traditionalists’ cultural values. Less educated and older citizens fear becoming marginalized and left behind within their own countries. This fear spawns a desire for someone to take control.
In the United States, evidence from the World Values Survey perfectly illustrates the education gap in these types of cultural values. Well before Trump, a substantial and striking education gap can be observed in American approval of authoritarian leaders. The WVS asked whether Americans approved of “having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with congress or elections.” Most remarkably, by the most recent wave in 2011, almost half — 44 percent — of U.S. non-college graduates approved of having a strong leader unchecked by elections and Congress.
Many of today’s challenges are too complex to yield to the exercise of leadership alone. Even so, we are inclined to see the problems of the present in terms of crises and leaders. Our growing addiction to the narrative of crisis has gone hand in hand with an increasing veneration of leadership—a veneration that leaves us vulnerable to the false prophets, the smooth operators, the gangsters, and the demagogues who say they can save us . . .
When Bad Is Good:
Adopting the Psychopathic Lifestyle
The attitudes and behaviors of individuals with many psychopathic features are systemic, a natural and pervasive part of their general lifestyle. In a sense, they are what they are. However, there are others whose nature is less psychopathic than pragmatic; they adopt some of the trappings of a “psychopathic lifestyle” in order to succeed or excel at their work or profession. They are encouraged in this process by all sorts of pop-psych self-help books that promote a philosophy of aggressive greed, self-entitlement, and “looking out for number one.”
In his book What Would Machiavelli Do?, Stanley Bing, perhaps tongue in cheek, tells how to get what you want when you want it whether you deserve it or not. Without fear. Without emotion. Without finger-wagging morality. The following are some of his exhortations:
* Be cold-hearted: Replace decency and thoughtfulness with insensitivity and hardheartedness.
* Work hard to become bad: Most people aren’t naturally horrendous . . . but with work we can improve.
* Be narcissistic: View others solely as a function of your needs . . . You have enormous selfishness within you . . . Let it out.
* Be unpredictable: Very nice. Very mean. Big, big swings. Gigantic pleasure. Towering rage.
* Be ruthless: For your competitors and those who would bring you down. “Crush them. Hear their bones break, their windpipes snap.”
Of course, the more psychopathic one is, the easier it is to follow Bing’s road map to amoral personal and corporate success. For most of us, though, social brutality and predation are somewhat more difficult. Even if Bing’s book is viewed as a satire, it reads like a blueprint for a psychopath.
From Snakes in Suits, Chapter 3: What You See May Not Be What You See (pp. 42-43).
The Psychopath Next Door (2014) Documentary
Machiavellian: Conduct or philosophy based on (or one who adopts) the cynical beliefs of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) whose name (in popular perception) is synonymous with deception and duplicity in management and statecraft. Born in Florence (Italy), Machiavelli was its second chancellor and (in 1513) wrote the book The Prince that discusses ways in which the rulers of a nation state can gain and control power. Although The Prince contains some keen and practical insights into human behavior, it also displays a pessimistic view of human nature and condones opportunistic and unethical ways of manipulating people. One of its suggestions reads: “Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature.”
BusinessDictionary.com
Sex, Power, Money, and All of the Above
Who will win in the search for sex, power, and money?
By Susan Krauss Whitbourne Ph.D.
Psychology Today | Sep 21, 2013
Freud may have believed that all humans are motivated by illicit motives, but research on the “Dark Triad” of personality suggests that some of us have stronger cravings than others. The Dark Triad refers to the set of three personality traits or personal dispositions generally recognized as undesirable – hence the term “dark.”
NATURAL NEWS
Defending Health, Life and Liberty
How to spot a sociopath – 10 red flags that could save you from being swept under the influence of a charismatic nut job
Friday, June 8, 2012
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles…)
Tags: sociopaths, cults, influence
One of the more offensive duties of being an investigative journalist is taking out the trash — exposing liars, fraudsters, con artists and scammers for the people they truly are. Each time we investigate a sociopath, we find that they always have a little cult group following of spellbound worshippers who consider that particular sociopath to be a “guru” or “prophet.”
Sociopaths are masters at influence and deception. Very little of what they say actually checks out in terms of facts or reality, but they’re extremely skillful at making the things they say sound believable, even if they’re just making them up out of thin air. Here, I’m going to present quotes and videos of some legendary sociopaths who convinced everyday people to participate in mass suicides. And then I’m going to demonstrate how and why similar sociopaths are operating right now… today.
Why cover this subject? I’ve seen a lot of people get hoodwinked, scammed or even harmed by sociopaths, and it bewilders me that people are so easily sucked into their destructive influence. I want to share with Natural News readers the warning signs of sociopaths so that you can spot them, avoid them, and save yourself the trouble of being unduly influenced by them.
Much of this information is derived from the fascinating book, The Sociopath Next Door, which says that 4% of the population are sociopaths.
Online LIBRARY OF LIBERTY
A collection of scholarly works about
individual liberty and free markets.
Lord Acton writes to Bishop Creighton in a series of letters concerning the moral problem of writing history about the Inquisition. Acton believes that the same moral standards should be applied to all men, political and religious leaders included, especially since, in his famous phrase, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (1887):
“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, like Ravaillac; but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science.”
About this Quotation:
There is much more to these letters than just the occurrence of Acton’s most famous phrase that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The context is the question of how religious historians should handle the corrupt and even criminal behaviour of many Popes, and the appalling treatment of dissidents and heretics during the Inquisition. This leads Acton to talk about the universal nature of moral principles, the requirement for historians to use such principles in the assessment of historical figures, the tendency of these powerful historical figures to be “bad men”, and that it was the function of historians to “hang them” (whether he meant this literally of metaphorically is not clear). In the third letter to Creighton, Acton quotes with some approval a conversation he had with John Bright, one of the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League, who stated to him that “If the people knew what sort of men statesmen were, they would rise and hang the whole lot of them.”
Essay | June 10, 1991
By Lance Morrow
I think there should be a Dark Willard.
In the network’s studio in New York City, Dark Willard would recite the morning’s evil report. The map of the world behind him would be a multicolored Mercator projection. Some parts of the earth, where the overnight good prevailed, would glow with a bright transparency. But much of the map would be speckled and blotched. Over Third World and First World, over cities and plains and miserable islands would be smudges of evil, ragged blights, storm systems of massacre or famine, murders, black snows. Here and there, a genocide, a true abyss.
“Homo homini lupus,” Dark Willard would remark. “That’s Latin, guys. Man is a wolf to man.”
Is The Root of Evil … The Psychopathic Mind?
by Randall Clifford
May 30, 2012
from ActivistPost Website
As such a useful tool of exchange, money is not inherently evil.
Money can be a springboard to such evil as bailout-begging banks too monstrous to fail gambling with taxpayer wealth – you know, private profits, public risk. Casino financing with taxpayers as a backstop. The $700 billion TARP bailout actually being a $23.7 trillion bailout. But the root of all evil is the human brain.
New research has exposed, shall we say, the root of the problem.
Pathocracy is its flower.
Definition: pathocracy (n).
A system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people (from Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, by Andrew Lobaczewski).
A small minority of people are born psychopaths; they inherit a genetic deviance linked to certain structural abnormalities of their social brain.
The physical dynamic that exposes psychopaths is a reduction of gray matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is able to image this deviation fundamental to psychopathy. Potential benefits to humanity are immense; imagine something like a TSA screening (without the bureaucracy, groping and humiliation) to keep psychopaths from boarding the flight to power.
Psychopaths enjoy a perverse advantage over normal people in ascending pyramids of power.
Unfettered by conscience, empathy, morality…some might say, without the weight of a soul, psychopaths readily rise to the top in a society turned upside down by pathocracy. Lying, cheating, stealing, backstabbing – without remorse, psychopaths can claw for power in ways that make a person with a conscience recoil.
It’s not so much that power corrupts as that the corrupt seek power.
Politics and investment banking are prime waters for psychopaths to school. If people enjoying great power over others were screened for social-brain deviations with an MRI scan, and the psychopaths were weeded out, renaissance might occupy Capital Hill and Wall Street.
Judging from our current state of politics and financialization, there certainly would be many vacancies to fill in such a furthering of the humane.
It truly is right in our hands, an opportunity we may never see again.
But… possessing the means of physically detecting psychopathy and correcting the blight of psychopathic “leadership” may be irrelevant in the face of pathocracy fully entrenched. Psychopaths in power would never volunteer to have their social-brain deviations revealed, would never allow legislation regarding a brain MRI as a prerequisite to holding any elective office.
Perhaps it’s true, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”.
Technology offers us the way – the key to identifying the human brain’s physical roots of psychopathy. The question becomes whether or not the American public has the will to force holders of great power over others, and seekers of such power, to bare their soul… or lack thereof.
Legislation requiring some “newfangled, junk-science” brain scan for leaders could only be forced from below. But our influence down here in the 99.99% is withering toward nothing but voting for a red psychopath, or a blue one, in elections controlled by unlimited corporate cash, and fraud.
And there’s: “Either with us, or against us”. Criminalization of dissent is plodding toward any questioning of entrenched pathocracy becoming “domestic terrorism”.
TEDxOrangeCoast
Oct 16, 2013
Daniel Amen: The most important lesson from 83,000 brain scans
Insight SBS
June 3, 2014
Jim Fallon is a US-based neuroscientist. In a weird coincidence at work several years ago, Jim says he accidentally discovered that his own brain scans showed identical activity to that of a psychopath. This week, Jim faces questions from world experts to discuss his self-diagnosis and to broadly discuss empathy (or lack of it).
CNN
April 22, 2015
9 Brainy Facts About the Neocortex
By Jordan Rosenfeld | Nov 17, 2016
The human body is an amazing thing. For each one of us, it’s the most intimate object we know. And yet most of us don’t know enough about it: its features, functions, quirks, and mysteries. Our series The Body explores human anatomy part by part. Think of it as a mini digital encyclopedia with a dose of wow.
The brain is arguably the one organ that makes you who you are—and the largest part of the brain is the neocortex. Taking up a vast amount of space in your skull, the neocortex is what allows you to do many things you take for granted, such as write and speak, have social interactions, and muse philosophically about the meaning of life. But you might not have known these nine crucial facts about this critical part of your brain.
You are the world
Are your decisions made by your brain, or via the experience of the world
relative to your body? A dialogue on consciousness
For any materialist vision of consciousness, the crucial stumbling block is the question of free will. A modern, enlightened person tends to feel that he or she has rejected a mystical, immaterial conception of the eternal soul in exchange for a strictly scientific understanding of consciousness and selfhood – as something created by the billions of neurons in our brains with their trillions of synapses and complex chemical and electrical processes. But the fact of our being entirely material, hence subject to the laws of cause and effect, introduces the concern that our lives might be altogether determined. Is it possible that our experience of decision-making – the impression we have of making choices, indeed of having choices to make, sometimes hard ones – is entirely illusory? Is it possible that a chain of physical events in our bodies and brains must cause us to act in the way we do, whatever our experience of the process might be?
Psychotherapy Networker
Editor’s Note
By Rich Simon
July/August 2016 (excerpt)
If post hoc diagnosis is any indicator, many of history’s most illustrious figures had some version of what we now call obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), including Thomas Jefferson, Ludwig van Beethoven, Charles Darwin, Marcel Proust, Sir Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs even got down on his hands and knees to search for specks of dust on the floor during the rollout of the first Mac computer.
Certainly, in our time, many habits of mind associated with workplace success—single-minded dedication, concentration, persistence, intensity—might appear to have a certain OCD-ish quality. But anybody who’s truly experienced the real OCD, or known someone who suffers from it, realizes just how nightmarish the actual condition can be. It turns people into prisoners of their own minds, locked into an ever-shrinking cell of unwanted mental preoccupations and the frantic desire to escape them—which has the paradoxical impact of strengthening them, thus reinforcing the whole miserable cycle.
Treating Children with OCD
The Essential Component
By Lynn Lyons
Learning to Manage the OCD Bully
A Story of One Woman’s Journey for Help
By Diane Cole
Dissociative disorders – Medscape
Dunning-Kruger effect/impostor syndrome – RationalWiki
15 Common Defense Mechanisms – PsychCentral
You Are Not So Smart is a show about psychology…
By David McRaney
Wikipedia
A common report from those with schizophrenia is some type of religious belief that many medical practitioners consider to be delusional – such as the belief they are divine beings or prophets, that a god is talking to them, they are possessed by demons, etc.
List of people claimed to be Jesus
This is a partial list of notable people who have been claimed, either by themselves or by their followers, in some way to be the reincarnation or incarnation of Jesus, or the Second Coming of Christ.
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964) is a book-length psychiatric case study by Milton Rokeach, concerning his experiment on a group of three patients with paranoid schizophrenia at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The book details the interactions of the three patients, Clyde Benson, Joseph Cassel, and Leon Gabor, who each believed himself to be Jesus Christ.
A god complex is an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility. A person with a god complex may refuse to admit the possibility of their error or failure, even in the face of irrefutable evidence, intractable problems or difficult or impossible tasks. The person is also highly dogmatic in their views, meaning the person speaks of their personal opinions as though they were unquestionably correct. Someone with a god complex may exhibit no regard for the conventions and demands of society, and may request special consideration or privileges.
A cult of personality, or cult of the leader, arises when a country’s regime – or, more rarely, an individual – uses the techniques of mass media, propaganda, the big lie, spectacle, the arts, patriotism, and government-organized demonstrations and rallies to create an idealized, heroic, and worshipful image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. A cult of personality is similar to apotheosis, except that it is established by modern social engineering techniques, usually by the state or the party in one-party states and dominant-party states. It is often seen in totalitarian or authoritarian countries.
The ABC of Sycophancy. Structural Conditions for
the Emergence of Dictators’ Cults of Personality
Dissertation presented to the faculty of the graduate school of
The University of Texas at Austin
By Adrian Teodor Popan | August 2015
Rachel Bernstein
Narcissists and Cult Leaders: Are You Being Controlled by One?
June 2016
THE MIND OF DONALD TRUMP
Narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity — a psychologist investigates how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency.
By Dan P. McAdams
In 2006, Donald Trump made plans to purchase the Menie Estate, near Aberdeen, Scotland, aiming to convert the dunes and grassland into a luxury golf resort. He and the estate’s owner, Tom Griffin, sat down to discuss the transaction at the Cock & Bull restaurant. Griffin recalls that Trump was a hard-nosed negotiator, reluctant to give in on even the tiniest details. But, as Michael D’Antonio writes in his recent biography of Trump, Never Enough, Griffin’s most vivid recollection of the evening pertains to the theatrics. It was as if the golden-haired guest sitting across the table were an actor playing a part on the London stage.
“It was Donald Trump playing Donald Trump,” Griffin observed. There was something unreal about it.
The same feeling perplexed Mark Singer in the late 1990s when he was working on a profile of Trump for The New Yorker. Singer wondered what went through his mind when he was not playing the public role of Donald Trump. What are you thinking about, Singer asked him, when you are shaving in front of the mirror in the morning? Trump, Singer writes, appeared baffled. Hoping to uncover the man behind the actor’s mask, Singer tried a different tack:
“O.K., I guess I’m asking, do you consider yourself ideal company?”
“You really want to know what I consider ideal company?,” Trump replied. “A total piece of ass.”
July 2016
Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All
By Jane Mayer
“The Art of the Deal” made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that myth—and regrets it.
Tony Schwartz: The Truth About Trump | Oxford Union Q&A | Nov 4, 2016
“I wasn’t much older than most of you are today when I wrote The Art of the Deal. At the time I told myself that doing it wasn’t that big a deal and wouldn’t have any enduring consequences. Ha.
The truth is, that decision – the book and my association with Trump – has quietly haunted and dogged me for thirty years.”
Democracy Now!
January 17, 2017
Matt Taibbi Chronicles Election of “Billionaire Hedonist” Trump
As a new study by Oxfam finds the world’s eight richest men control as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity, the group says it is concerned that wealth inequality will continue to grow following the election of Donald Trump, whose Cabinet members have a combined wealth of nearly $11 billion. We look at the rise of Trump, and those joining his administration, with award-winning Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. His new book comes out today, titled Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus.
When they have a problem, they focus on making it an opportunity to do more evil to as many people as possible.
I’ve noticed that psychopaths rarely have just one goal. They layer their goals. The first step is always to gather minions who will do their bidding. Whether the psychopath wants sex, money, power or just needs drama, he will bring his players together like a conductor at a symphony.
It’s not uncommon for psychopaths to bond their minions by polarizing all their hatred on a scapegoat.
Most all organic disorders that do not involve deliberate choices of actions and behaviors, or wanton depraved indifference (in regards to the legal definition) can actually be managed. Schizophrenia, BiPolar Disorder, and others can be successfully managed through medication + counseling.
Psychopathology, on the other hand, cannot be managed in any capacity. There is no medication, treatment, therapy, surgery, herbal remedy, or spiritual epiphany that can effect a meaningful change in the ways that these individuals process the world around them. In “Their World,” they are the only occupant – they are the emperor/empress, citizen, dungeon-master, judge, jury, and executioner. All other human beings that travel through their Universe are seen as tools or objects, literally.
Loaded Language
There’s no denying President Trump repeatedly uses his words to convey powerful messages. Take a scroll through his 20 Most Frequently Used Words.
23 things Donald Trump has actually said about women
The US President, ladies and gentlemen…
cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/news
August 23, 2017
What Mental Health Experts Can Say About The Presidency
By Bandy X. Lee, M.D., Contributor
Co-authored by Dee Mosbacher, M.D., Ph.D. and Nanette Gartrell, M.D.
“Now that he has won the presidency, why wouldn’t he just ‘pivot’ and become more normal?” Why would he say things in public that are destructive to him and the nation?” Why stir things up unnecessarily?” “The chaos and incoherence are much worse than expected.”
These are some of the questions and concerns that have been raised about President Trump by persons who are untrained in how mental impairment can manifest. Indeed, the vast array of healthy human behaviors makes it difficult for the ordinary person to detect disability other than in the most obvious cases. Further, the more impaired the individual, the more likely he or she is to deny pathological behavior and insist that it is by choice. In our culture, mental impairment, unlike other medical illnesses, still connotes a moral failure—leading to its denial or use only in epithets. Yet it can afflict anyone, it is nonpartisan, and we can identify it through objective criteria.
The Goldwater rule, which specifies that psychiatrists cannot diagnose a public figure without a face-to-face evaluation, has contributed to the lack of discourse and education about Mr. Trump. An expansion of the rule by the American Psychiatric Association in March 2017 further compromised that possibility.
DAILY NEWS | Jan 20, 2017
Manipulative, dishonest and lacking in empathy – the traits that describe a psychopath aren’t particularly pleasant. But the idea that they are also fiendishly clever – as often portrayed in films and TV – isn’t quite true. In fact, in general, psychopaths seem to have below-average intelligence.
You have probably met a psychopath at some point in your life. They make up around 1 per cent of the population, says Brian Boutwell at St Louis University in Missouri. A person is classified as a psychopath if they achieve a certain score on a test of psychopathic traits, which include callousness, impulsiveness, aggression and a sense of grandiosity. “Not all psychopaths will break the law or hurt someone, but the odds of them doing so are higher,” says Boutwell.
Because many psychopaths are charming and manipulative, people have assumed they also have above-average intelligence, says Boutwell. Psychologists term this the “Hannibal Lecter myth”, referring to the fictional serial killer, cannibal and psychiatrist from the book and film The Silence of the Lambs.
But Boutwell wasn’t convinced. “Psychopaths are impulsive, have run-ins with the law and often get themselves hurt,” he says. “That led me to think they’re not overly intelligent.”
Not so smart
To investigate, Boutwell and his colleagues analysed the results of 187 published studies on intelligence and psychopathy. These papers included research on psychopaths in prison as well as those enjoying high-flying careers. They also included a range of measures of intelligence.
Overall, the team found no evidence that psychopaths were more intelligent than people who don’t have psychopathic traits. In fact, the relationship went the other way. The psychopaths, on average, scored significantly lower on intelligence tests. “I think the results will surprise a lot of people,” says Boutwell.
Matt DeLisi at Iowa State University hopes that the findings will help put the Hannibal Lecter myth to rest. “The character promulgated the notion that psychopaths were highly intelligent, and there were real offenders that embodied this, like Ted Bundy,” says DeLisi. “But I have interviewed thousands of offenders, some of which are very psychopathic, and I have found that the opposite is true.”
March 6, 2017
Towards A General Theory of Trump
Paul Mason
At a postgraduate seminar at the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney (6 February 2017), we discussed the outlines of a “General Theory of Trump”. Students and staff submitted 10 Talking Points Towards a General Theory of Trump as a result and here is my response, which moves from analytical points towards outlining the need for a global Progressive Alliance – of social democracy, left-liberals, greens and radical leftists.
Don’t Be Trumped by Doppelgängers
By Paul Morantz | May 26, 2017
Author of Escape: My Lifelong War Against Cults (with Hal Lancaster) and From Miracle to Madness.
“A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence…anyone who wishes to produce an effect upon it needs no logical arguments; he must paint in forcible colors, must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing again and again…(The group) wants to be ruled and impressed, and to fear its masters … And, finally, groups have never thirst after truth… They are almost as influenced by what is not true as by what is true… A group is an obedient herd, which could never live without a master. . .”
– Sigmund Freud
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
– George Orwell
All that Freud and Orwell asserted about groups and political language has been proven anew with the improbable ascendancy of Donald Trump to President of the United States, an apparent doppelgänger of Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard—from his hair to flair for revenge.
In a few short months of campaigning and governing, the pride of Mar-A-Lago has seemingly wiped out the last vestiges of civility, honesty and common sense in presidential politics and turned the Oval Office into a Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey side show.
And yet, after all the lies, position flip-flops, erratic behavior, brazen conflicts of interest, childish, thin-skinned attacks on the media, offensive comments about minorities, women and the entire Middle East, not to mention the investigations into his curious relationship with Russia that has led to the doorstep of impeachment, many of those who voted for him still maintain their unflagging support.
For the love of sanity, how is this possible?
I’ve been repeating that phrase for many months now, after each unconscionable act, events that would have torpedoed any other political campaign. And yet, here we are, on the precipice of calamity, with Trump eviscerating regulations that will loose the beasts of Wall Street and the energy industry, threatening to build a wall that will waste billions of dollars, spreading chaos in health and education, proposing massive cuts to programs that benefit the poor and promising to shut down any program or agency that could protect us from climate change and environmental abuses. Do you remember the megalomaniacal general played by Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove? Don’t look now, but he’s President and commander-in-chief, the man with his finger on the button. Isn’t that a sobering thought?
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee | National Geographic
August 16, 2017
What Science Tells Us About Good and Evil
After a killing and a violent neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the nation wrestles with why we commit such unspeakable acts.
The horrific footage of a car plowing into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend—a purposeful attack that killed one person and injured many others—has sparked a national conversation about the roots of evil. The victim was protesting a rally by white supremacists, including neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. “We should call evil by its name. My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home,” tweeted Orrin Hatch, a Republican senator from Utah. Hostility and hatred have fueled unspeakable evil, including genocides such as the one engineered by Nazi Germany. But humankind also is capable of astonishing acts of kindness.
We at National Geographic have been working on a story about what science tells us about good and evil. Given last weekend’s events, we’ve decided to publish the story now. A version will also appear in a future issue of the magazine.
December 8, 2017
Is Donald Trump’s mental health becoming dangerous?
By Bandy X. Lee, Forensic psychiatrist, Yale School of Medicine
Medical experts weigh in.
Medicine is an equalizer, and the president may find that he cannot outrun his own condition.
A group of us put our concerns into a book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. That book became an instant New York Times bestseller. Within days, it was out of stock at the big outlets and sold out in bookstores around the country. One of the nation’s largest publishers could not keep up with the demand for weeks. Clearly, our concerns were resonating with the public.
December 8, 2017
Bella Depaulo
I study liars for a living. I’ve never seen one like President Trump.
I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Donald Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s.
In research beginning in the mid-1990s, when I was a professor at the University of Virginia, my colleagues and I asked 77 college students and 70 people from the nearby community to keep diaries of all the lies they told every day for a week. They handed them in to us with no names attached. We calculated participants’ rates of lying and categorise each lie as either self-serving (told to advantage the liar or protect the liar from embarrassment, blame or other undesired outcomes) or kind (told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else).
At The Washington Post, the Fact Checker feature has been tracking every false and misleading claim and flip-flop made by Trump this year. The inclusion of misleading statements and flip-flops is consistent with the definition of lying my colleagues and I gave to our participants: “A lie occurs any time you intentionally try to mislead someone.” In the case of Trump’s claims, though, it is possible to ascertain only whether they were false or misleading, and not what the president’s intentions were.
By telling so many lies, and so many that are mean-spirited, Trump is violating some of the most fundamental norms of human social interaction and human decency. Many of the rest of us, in turn, have abandoned a norm of our own – we no longer give Trump the benefit of the doubt that we usually give so readily.
The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
By Charles C. Dike, Madelon Baranoski and Ezra E. H. Griffith
In this article, we revisit the concept of pathological lying and explore how it has been discussed in psychiatric literature.
PEOPLE OF THE LIE: The Hope For Healing Human Evil, by M. Scott Peck, M.D. (1983)
From Chapter 2 – A LIFE-AND-DEATH ISSUE – pp. 42-43
It is a reflection of the enormous mystery of the subject that we do not have a generally accepted definition of evil. Yet in our hearts I think we all have some understanding of its nature. For the moment I can do no better than to heed my son, who, with the characteristic vision of eight-year-olds, explained simply, “Why, Daddy, evil is ‘live’ spelled backward.” Evil is in opposition to life. It is that which opposes the life force. It has, in short, to do with killing. Specifically, it has to do with murder – namely, unnecessary killing, killing that is not required for biological survival.
Let us not forget this. There are some who have written about evil so intellectually that it comes out sounding abstract to the point of irrelevancy. Murder is not abstract. Let us not forget that George was actually willing to sacrifice the very life of his own child.
When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is also that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life – particularly human life – such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may “break” a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head. Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others – to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredictability and originality, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a “biophilic” person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a “necrophilic character type,” whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity.*
Evil, then, for the moment, is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.
* Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (Harper & Row, 1964)
Feb 27, 2018
Lindsay Dodgson
Narcissists often recruit people called ‘apaths’ to help with their games – here’s why they’re dangerous:
People with Dark Tetrad personality traits — sadism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism — play games with their partners to break down their self-esteem. To succeed, they sometimes recruit helpers to help control and manipulate their partners. Apaths fit this role very well.
Shannon Thomas, author of “Healing from Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse,” told Business Insider an apath is someone who is apathetic to the harm in their social circle, particularly if someone is being manipulative, hurtful, or abusive. Their role, she said, is critical to the narcissist’s game.
“An apath is the wing-person to a narcissist and plays a key role in normalising the toxic individual and their harmful behaviors towards others,” she said. “A narcissist must have apaths in their life to keep the facade of social normalcy going. Apaths create the illusion that a narcissist has friends, is well-liked and can get along with everyone, except the target of abuse.”
Rather than standing up for the victim, or giving them support in the fact they are being mistreated, the apath will instead be completely indifferent to their suffering. When challenged, they come up with excuses and say things like “It’s not my battle,” or “well, they don’t treat me that way.”
By minding their own business, they are effectively being a pawn on the narcissist’s gameboard, making the victim believe they must be going crazy.
In some online forums, apaths are known as “flying monkeys,” like the Wicked Witch’s helpers in “The Wizard of Oz.” They do all the narcissist’s dirty work behind the scenes while the narcissist can sit back and watch.
“Many apaths are also hidden abusers themselves and they will cluster together in family and friend groups to keep each other’s secrets,” Thomas said. “Another type of apath believes it is better to join the abuser in their games than ever run the risk of becoming a future target of the narcissist.”
Salon | June 25, 2018
News & Politics
Is Donald Trump truly incompetent? Not nearly as much as liberals hope.
Liberals keep underestimating Trump, but he’s been effective at enacting his racist agenda and trolling the left.
By Amanda Marcotte
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but unfortunately it must be said: Donald Trump knows exactly what he’s doing.
To be clear, I’m not saying the man is a super-genius or even particularly intelligent. By most measures, Trump is likely of below-average intelligence. He’s incurious, half-literate and would almost certainly be flummoxed by a basic math problem or a grade-school reading comprehension test. He ran his business into bankruptcy multiple times because his sense of his own talents grossly outstripped what nature had given him. None of this is in dispute.
But when it comes to Trump’s true passion in life — being an abusive, bigoted bully and troll — he is highly competent and extremely successful. As I argue in my book, Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself, Trump’s voters elected him to do two things: 1) Impose his white supremacist vision on America and 2) Troll liberals into madness.
A year and a half into his presidency, we can say that by those measures, the Trump presidency has been a smashing success.
For some reason, there’s widespread resistance among progressives to the proposition that Trump might actually be competent, at least at the goals he set out to accomplish, i.e., liberal tears and white supremacy. New York Times reporters like Maggie Haberman keep portraying him as a dim-witted and lazy old man, not a person who has become an accomplished sadist after a lifetime of practice. Many liberals are eager to buy into that because the idea that the orange moron in the ill-fitting suit might actually be getting over on us is painful to accept.
So liberals keep chalking up certain horrors of the Trump administration to incompetence, when the likelier explanation is that Trump and his cronies are doing these things by design.
I usually agree with Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton, but her recent piece on this topic misses the mark by ascribing the fallout from both the Muslim travel ban and the family separation policy to incompetence. I would argue instead that things rolled out exactly how the administration wanted.
Digby writes that the administration “hadn’t thought through the logistical ramifications” of the Muslim travel ban, “resulting in confusion and chaos everywhere.” Similarly, she argues that a plan “for clear identification of the children and their parents, so they can easily be tracked and identified for reunification at the end of the process, was overlooked.”
She also argues for political incompetence, writing, that Trump officials “failed to anticipate how people would react” to “taking babies from their mothers.”
Michelle Goldberg, writing for the New York Times, makes a similar argument, writing that there’s “a multiplier effect” to “Trump’s incompetence and malevolence,” crediting that combination as the cause of “the White House’s catastrophically inadequate response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico” and “the cavalier way the administration took thousands of children from migrant parents with no process in place to reunite them.”
From where I’m sitting, there’s no reason to assume incompetence in any of this. Trump is a racist and a sadist, and both have been well-documented for decades. What more could a person with those qualities want than trapping Muslims in airports, destroying the lives of Puerto Ricans, separating Latino immigrant children from their parents and then “losing” the paperwork necessary to reunite them? This is the Trump who talks about immigrants from “shithole countries” being “animals.” Using assumed ineptitude as pretext for dishing out pain sounds about right to me.
• abusive and violent partners and family members
• abusers of people in care
• bullying neighbours, landlords, authorities, etc
• confidence tricksters and swindlers
• (religious) cult leaders
• child bullies who are impervious to corrective action
• racial and sexual harassers
• sexual abusers and pedophiles, especially operating
from a position of trust or untouchability
• rapists
• stalkers
• arsonists
• violent offenders, including serial killers
The common objective of these offenders is power, control, domination and subjugation, the only difference being the way they express their violence. Offenses committed by people in this list are typically regarded as criminal and arrestable.
One possible explanation for investigators and fellow managers being so easily manipulated by a serial bully appears in the research paper by Clive R Boddy, entitled “Corporate Psychopaths, Bullying and Unfair Supervision in the Workplace” (2011):
“The cold-heartedness and manipulativeness of the psychopath are reported to be the traits that are the least discernable to others and this allows them to gain other people’s confidence and facilitates their entry into positions where they can gain most benefit for themselves and do harm to others (Mahaffey and Marcus, 2006).”
The Gentle Souls Revolution Blog
The Trump Cult
If you can defend ripping kids from parents, you are in a cult.
In May, 2017, I posted this: Gaslight, USA! Today’s Trouncing –Your Healthcare.
In the post, I quoted cultic studies guru, Robert J. Lifton: cults see themselves as “…agents ‘chosen’ to carry out the ‘mystical imperative’ … which must supersede all decency or immediate human welfare. Similarly, any thought or action which questions the motives of the higher purpose is considered … backward, selfish and petty in the face of the great overriding mission.“
Today, the Daily KOS posted this: Trumpism is a Cult. You may be interested in reading it. I suspect it will ring familiar.
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
July 2, 2018
Margaret Talbot
The Trump Administration’s Family Values
ZERO TOLERANCE
FRONTLINE investigates how President Trump turned immigration into a powerful political weapon that fueled division and violence. The documentary goes inside the efforts of three political insurgents to tap into populist anger, transform the Republican Party and crack down on immigration.
Do Democrats really believe that Russia influenced Americans to vote for Trump?
Lee Thé, works at Retired/working on a Novel
Answered on Quora May 19, 2018
I worked as an advertising copywriter and account executive for six years. During that time I studied the profession, and one thing I found was that the people most influenced by advertising sincerely believed—and with absolute certainty—that they weren’t affected by advertising in the slightest.
Republican voters have been proven to be highly susceptible to propaganda—just as the teens of Veles, Macedonia, could tell you. They make their living from fake news websites, but found that for Americans only the sites aimed at Republicans made them money. Reputable pollsters have found the same thing. Republicans will believe anything bad about Clinton and anything good about Trump, no matter how preposterous.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Does Trump act like a president, or does he act like a cult leader?
Edward Donner, Concerned Citizen
Answered on Quora Sep 15, 2018
Below is a list of fifty characteristics of cult leaders taken from “Dangerous Cult Leaders”. Read ‘em. Keep track of how many apply to Trump, then answer the question for yourself.
See: POLITICAL PONEROLOGY: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes, by Andrew M. Lobaczewski
Mari Konnikova
Baudolino Aulari
Useful Idiots – Part 1 & Part 2
Former KGB Agent, Yuri Bezmenov
Malcolm Nance
How Russia Is Destroying Democracy
Andrew Cooper-Sansone
Meeting Our “Enemies” Where They Are
Bill Press
Ronan Farrow
Agents of Chaos
The attack on the 2016 election
THE CHOICE 2020
Trump vs. Biden
The Social Dilemma
“Nothing vast enters the world of mortals
without a curse.” – Sophocles
This 2020 documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.
SKEPTICISM 101 LECTURES
Michael Shermer on Cults, Myths, and Religion
April 3, 2020
Dr. Michael Shermer considers the characteristics of cults, how they differ from sects, religions, and myths, the role that myths and religions play in culture and people’s lives, and what Scientologists really believe.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pathways to Evil, Part 2
May 15, 2020
Dr. Shermer fleshes out the themes of Part 1 by exploring how the dials controlling our inner demons and better angels can be dialed up or down depending on circumstances and conditions.
The Atlantic
June 2020 Issue
American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.
By Adrienne LaFrance
This article is part of “Shadowland,” a project about conspiracy thinking in America.
If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan. You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.
You know all this because you believe in Q.
VII. APOCALYPSE
WATCHKEEPERS FOR THE End of Days can easily find signs of impending doom—in comets and earthquakes, in wars and pandemics. It has always been this way. In 1831, a Baptist preacher in rural New York named William Miller began to publicly share his prediction that the Second Coming of Jesus was imminent. Eventually he settled on a date: October 22, 1844. When the sun came up on October 23, his followers, known as the Millerites, were crushed. The episode would come to be known as the Great Disappointment. But they did not give up. The Millerites became the Adventists, who in turn became the Seventh-day Adventists, who now have a worldwide membership of more than 20 million. “These people in the QAnon community—I feel like they are as deeply delusional, as deeply invested in their beliefs, as the Millerites were,” Travis View, one of the hosts of a podcast called QAnon Anonymous, which subjects QAnon to acerbic analysis, told me. “That makes me pretty confident that this is not something that is going to go away with the end of the Trump presidency.”
QAnon carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of years. It offers a polemic to empower those who feel adrift. In his classic 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the historian Norman Cohn examined the emergence of apocalyptic thinking over many centuries. He found one common condition: This way of thinking consistently emerged in regions where rapid social and economic change was taking place—and at periods of time when displays of spectacular wealth were highly visible but unavailable to most people. This was true in Europe during the Crusades in the 11th century, and during the Black Death in the 14th century, and in the Rhine Valley in the 16th century, and in William Miller’s New York in the 19th century. It is true in America in the 21st century.
The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence.
Posted by u/geekyproducer on reddit.com/r/cults
The “Cuties” Controversy Explained for People Who Aren’t Members of an Online Cult
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Douchebag Cinema | Oct 5, 2020
As the culture wars in America continue to accelerate, more and more unexpected targets are met in the crossfire. Most recently, Netflix’s controversial release of the French coming-of-age-film “Cuties”, which centers on an 11-year-old aspiring dancer who has to balance growing up among her conservative Muslim family, and her more liberal western classmates. The uncomfortable images of the young cast performing suggestive dances inspired countless Americans to pour their outrage into comment sections all over the internet, campaigning to boycott the film’s distributor and calling for awareness to hashtag SaveTheChildren. An appeal for a universally accepted cause on the surface… that is, until one follows the hashtag down a digital rabbit hole only to find a barrage of imaginative conspiracy theories fueled by a growing movement of self-identified “free thinking American patriots” known as: Q Anon.
A PRESIDENT LOOKS BACK ON HIS TOUGHEST FIGHT
June 4, 2012
How Mark Felt Became ‘Deep Throat’
By Bob Woodward
June 20, 2005
In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and assigned to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.
One evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House, where there was a little waiting area near the Situation Room. It could be a long wait for the right person to come out and sign for the material, sometimes an hour or more, and after I had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly combed gray hair came in and sat down near me . . .
September 4, 2018
President Trump and his administration have been unsettled by Bob Woodward’s book Fear, which will be published next Tuesday. Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Mark Landler and
WASHINGTON — President Trump so alarmed his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, during a discussion last January of the nuclear standoff with North Korea that an exasperated Mr. Mattis told colleagues “the president acted like — and had the understanding of — a ‘fifth or sixth grader.’”
At another moment, Mr. Trump’s aides became so worried about his judgment that Gary D. Cohn, then the chief economic adviser, took a letter from the president’s Oval Office desk authorizing the withdrawal of the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Mr. Trump, who had planned to sign the letter, never realized it was missing.
These anecdotes are in a sprawling, highly anticipated book by Bob Woodward that depicts the Trump White House as a byzantine, treacherous, often out-of-control operation — “crazytown,” in the words of the chief of staff, John F. Kelly — hostage to the whims of an impulsive, ill-informed and undisciplined president.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
James Devlin
Nothing more than most people expected. Yet to read it from a world-renowned journalist of Bob Woodward’s caliber makes it all the more unsettling. The republicans are selling out America to get court picks. They well know Trump is insane, and yet are willing to play along with this lunacy of a presidency based upon lies so long as they get their agenda rammed through. That’s not politics, that’s shameful and morally and criminally corrupt.
Beware the insidious nature within.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.” — Cicero
August 23, 2018
What is Truth?
An overview of the philosophy of truth.
By Neel Burton M.D.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. –Thoreau
When Truth Isn’t Truth
Today, God may be dying, but what about truth? Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, claimed that “Truth isn’t truth,” while Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s counsellor, presented the public with what she called “alternative facts.” Over in the U.K. in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, Michael Gove, then Minister of Justice and Lord Chancellor, opined that people “have had enough of experts.”
One way to understand truth is simply to look at its opposites, namely, lies and bullsh*t. The liar must track the truth in order to conceal it. In contrast, the bullsh*tter has no regard or sensitivity for the truth, or even for what his or her audience believes.
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” — Abraham Lincoln
July 24, 2018
Trump Card Cults
By Jeremy Sherman Ph.D.
Winter of ‘78: Jim Jones and his cult followers had just drunk their poison Kool-Aid in Guyana– 900 dead. And I was off to Guatemala with my spiritual commune to do poverty relief work. My family was worried.
They were also annoyed by what I had become, a know-it-all, confident that I could beat any challenge to my smug, all-knowing spiritual truths. I had fallen for the cult mindset, that heady sense that you hold all the cards, a high so self-aggrandizing that people are willing to drink the Kool-Aid.
Aid is the operative word. Though my commune was wholesome, I pretended it fool-proofed my life, like it had issued me a deck of trump cards to trump all challenges to my humble spiritual authority, the greatest aid any of us could ever crave.
Life is an anxious affair. We all fear failure and therefore might be tempted by the fake trump-card aid that cults provide – I once was lost but now I’m found instead of I once was lost and could be still.
Today we wonder whether the GOP has become the Trump cult. All cults are trump-card cults, issuing to members the same deck of fake get-out-of-fail-free cards. Cults don’t brainwash, they head swell. People throw all in to cults so they can keep all self-doubt out.
September 5, 2018
Michael Moore Plays His Trump Card:
A New Movie, Modern Fascism and a 2020 Prediction
By Gregg Kilday
He’s America’s most successful documentarian and one of the few on the left who predicted the 2016 election upset. Now, as Moore readies his anticipated polemic ‘Fahrenheit 11/9’ for its Toronto film festival debut, he takes aim at Trump (and Nancy Pelosi … and Harvey Weinstein …) and those actually responsible for the president’s rapid rise to power (hint: Gwen Stefani).
The first time Michael Moore encountered Donald Trump, the filmmaker uncharacteristically held his tongue. The two had been booked as guests in 1998 on Roseanne Barr’s afternoon talk show, The Roseanne Show, taping at New York’s Tavern on the Green. Trump’s The Art of the Deal had been published in 1987 while Moore had already earned a reputation as a cheeky provocateur out to puncture capitalism’s balloon with his 1989 doc Roger & Me, and so when Trump spotted Moore, he threatened to walk.
All Things Considered
September 27, 2018
NPR’s Audie Cornish talks to Joanne Freeman about her new book The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War.
CORNISH: You spent years researching this book. How did you start to see this history in a new light as attention focused more intensely on how polarized Washington is today?
FREEMAN: Right. I do think there are a number of different moments in American history when we’re particularly polarized, when the American public becomes particularly distrustful of national institutions like Congress and of each other. Part of what I saw in working on the book was that pattern. Given what we know of what happened in the past with these kinds of incidents, it makes me want to keep telling people, wait; be careful. You don’t want to be that divisive with your rhetoric.
At the end of the book, there are a lot of people saying, be careful with your words because words could cause bloodshed in the House. And I sometimes feel the same way. Not that we’re on the cusp of a civil war, which I don’t believe. But I suppose the part that doesn’t feel reassured is the part that realizes the implications and the impact of a divisive America much like the one that we’re looking at now.
Salon | Nov 13, 2018
Psychiatrist Justin Frank on Trump’s “God complex”: He is “erotically attached to violence”
By Chauncey DeVega
Donald Trump is an authoritarian in waiting who acts as though he believes himself to be God. How does he convince himself that the rules do not apply to him? What is the role of violence in Trump’s appeal and power? Is Trump responsible in some ways for the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre and the other hate crimes and acts of violence which have taken place during his campaign and now presidency? What role does violence play in Donald Trump’s cult of personality? How do his apparent mental pathologies help him to manipulate his supporters and the American people at large?
In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Dr. Justin Frank.
From Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us, by Dr. Robert D. Hare
Psychopathic Violence – Cold-blooded and “Casual”
Even more troubling than their heavy involvement in crime is the evidence that both male and female psychopaths are much more likely to be violent and aggressive than are other individuals. Of course, violence is not uncommon in most offender populations, but psychopaths still manage to stand out. They commit more than twice as many violent and aggressive acts, both in and out of prison, as do other criminals.
Troubling yes, but not surprising. While most of us have strong inhibitions about physically injuring others, psychopaths typically do not. For them, violence and threats are handy tools to be used when they are angered, defied, or frustrated, and they give little thought to the pain and humiliation experienced by the victims. Their violence is callous and instrumental – used to satisfy a simple need, such as sex, or to obtain something he or she wants – and the psychopath’s reactions to the event are much more likely to be indifference, a sense of power, pleasure or smug satisfaction than regret at the damage done. Certainly nothing to lose any sleep over.
Psychopaths often come across as arrogant, shameless braggarts – self-assured, opinionated, domineering, and cocky. They love to have power and control over others and seem unable to believe that other people have valid opinions different from theirs. They appear charismatic or “electrifying” to some people.
Psychopaths have a narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance, a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the center of the universe, as superior beings who are justified in living according to their own rules.
Psychopaths are seldom embarrassed about their legal, financial, or personal problems. Rather, they see them as temporary setbacks, the results of bad luck, unfaithful friends, or an unfair and incompetent system.
Psychopaths feel that their abilities will enable them to become anything they want to be. Given the right circumstances – opportunity, luck, willing victims – their grandiosity can pay off spectacularly. For example, the psychopathic entrepreneur “thinks big,” but it’s usually with someone else’s money.
. . . the psychopath carries out his evaluation of a situation – what he will get out of it and at what cost – without the usual anxieties, doubts, and concerns about being humiliated, causing pain, sabotaging future plans, in short, the infinite possibilities that people of conscience consider when deliberating possible actions.
Rape provides a good example of the callous, selfish, and instrumental use of violence by psychopaths.
The Gray Rock Method of Dealing With Psychopaths
With the recent elections and Trump’s behavior this past week, is there any indication that his solid support might be waning?
