June 8, 2017

Witch hunt not defeated by facts / reason; Must re-frame as attempt to over-turn fair election

A lot of Trump supporters are looking forward to the political theatre du jour starring the former FBI Director, whose prepared remarks are going to clear the President of the charge of trying to shut down some investigation or other. It's going to shut up the Russia conspiracy theorists since the testimony will be coming from a source hostile to Trump and therefore with no motive to lie. So the end result will be to dispel a major part of the conspiracy theory, and let Trump get on to pursuing his agenda in the government.

Right?

We've already heard this naive cheerleader argument before -- after the Pentagon sent missiles into that airfield in Syria two months ago. Remember? -- whatever you though of its military worth, everyone can agree that it finally shuts down the Trump/Russia collusion story, right? If Trump were in league with Putin, or at all sympathetic to him, why would he bomb a client state of Russia's, let alone with real-life Russians there on that very airfield? Checkmate, conspiratards.

I warned at the time that there would be no such shutdown of the Russia narrative:

If you thought the Russia-Trump conspiracy theorists would hang it up after Trump looks tough against Putin, guess again:

https://twitter.com/Lawrence/status/850420599428198400

MSNBC anchor, not even 24 hours after the strike, saying how convenient of Trump to deflect the Russian connections by appearing to look tough.

Commenters are discussing how little damage was done -- true, but they're taking that as paranoid proof that he is soft and cozy with Putin after all!

If he *really* wanted to prove once and for all that he's not controlled by the Kremlin, he has to launch an all-in pre-emptive nuclear strike on Moscow!

These people are paranoid, insane, and will never forgive Trump for anything.

It's a typical witch hunt -- any proof that is offered that the suspect is not a witch, is all the more proof that they actually are! Why are they so desperate to offer proof of innocence? That level of anxiety proves a guilty conscience!

That has proven to be 100% true. The Russia narrative has only grown to encompass more possible "links" and "angles" and "leads" if earlier ones turned out to be dead ends. More Americans now believe that Russian hacking changed vote tallies on election machines -- a majority of Democrats believes this (some poll cited on Tucker recently). And now there has been appointed a Special Counsel whose authority allows for a totally unbounded and never-ending witch hunt.

Why didn't the airstrike on Syria shut down the Russia narrative? Why has the narrative and the witch hunt only grown in intensity?

Quite simply, a witch hunt does not respond to collections of facts, logical coherence, or statistical reasoning. It comes from an emotional urgency to soothe cognitive dissonance in the wake of some event that severely damages a person's ego and worldview.

Trump's victory on Election Day was such an unimaginable shock to the mental schemata of Democrats and liberals, whether on a moral basis ("how can someone win, who stands for those things?") or on an information basis ("how can someone win, who every expert and poll assured us was destined to lose in a landslide?"). With the moral order turned upside-down, and with the most certain of predictions getting things backward, they were wandering around their daily lives literally disoriented.

To restore their familiar sense of order in the world, they needed to invent a story about why the victory wasn't a real shock to their system after all. If the Russians somehow rigged the outcome, then Trump's win would not challenge their sense of moral order -- Americans did not choose someone who "stood for those things," they chose the opposite candidate, but had their vote canceled out by outside interference. Nor would Trump's win challenge their faith in prediction models based on BIG DATA -- the predictions were totally correct, but they could not adjust for the fact that there would be outside interference to flip the outcome from the true one to the rigged one.

Shitlib schemata: intact again. *deep sigh of relief*

That is why there will never be any testimony, reporting, leaks, physical evidence, or mathematical proofs that will cure the Democrats and liberals of their conspiracy obsession. It is holding together their fragile understanding of how the world works, and their place in it all. Giving up the conspiracy would utterly destroy their minds, whereas now they can at least go through their daily lives without constantly contemplating suicide.

If one piece of the narrative is definitively disproven, that's fine -- something else will fill its place. It is shape-shifting and adaptive to whatever facts it is presented with, because the goal of this mental program is not to understand what is actually happening in the world, but to make the facts fit their worldview and allow relatively normal emotional functioning.

We can expect worse developments, based on the decline of the situation over the past two months. At first, the Russia conspiracy was just a way to make themselves feel better after a horrendous loss. Now that their moods have picked up, and now that more and more of them have internalized the narrative to the degree of "changing vote tallies," they will soon shift from defense to offense.

They've defended their worldview enough to get by in daily life -- now they're going to use the narrative to try to get the election result changed to what it "really" ought to be, absent the Russian interference. That will be the ultimate mental satisfaction -- not just feeling better about your worldview, but seeing your candidate in the White House after all, pursuing whatever you sent her there to do.

Worst-case scenario is that the Democrats and Republicans (99% of whom are opposed to a populist and nationalist agenda) team up to remove Trump and strike some kind of grand bargain that puts Hillary and Pence in the White House together. Given the degree that the Democrats and their zealous base are going to, combined with the complicit silence of the Republicans, that is no longer a distant possibility.

Even in the best-case scenario, this witch hunt drags on for the entire term, wasting what precious little time we have to make major sweeping changes. It will make absolutely no difference if the Democrats get punished for this in the mid-term elections -- they are already the loser party in the House, Senate, and White House, and that isn't stopping them or the media or the Deep State. Nor is Republican control over both houses of Congress emboldening Trump's "own" party to defend him and attack and neuter the opposition party.

Only by substituting Trump loyalists for Democrats and cuckservative Republicans will the mid-terms affect the direction the witch hunt takes.

Aside from voting, we need to show that our zealous minority will make life more miserable for business as usual than their zealous minority will. The longer the witch hunt drags on against the people's President, the more likely the elites are to see what happens when it's those on the Right who "become ungovernable".

In any case, Trump does not want to hear any smug rationalizing by happy-go-lucky cheerleaders in this matter. He has always taken a negative view of the witch hunt, not that it presented an opportunity to do even better (4-D chess). He's given up pointing out the actual Russian connections with Clinton, Podesta, etc., because he understands by now that it isn't a factual argument but a plain old witch hunt. It's dead weight on the Trump train, and it needs to be cut loose ASAP.

Trump does not want us to snicker at how the Comey testimony is going to shut down the libtards, because he knows it will do no such thing. And now that their goal has moved beyond feeling better about their worldview, into over-turning the election results, that must be our focus in discussing the witch hunt. It is now a shameless anti-democratic attempt to over-turn the election that the Trump side won fair and square, and Americans should respond to it as an attempted coup -- the plotters in the government, and their propagandists in the media.

Smiling complacently about how "Trump's got this" while his agenda gets consumed by a witch hunt, aided by disloyal Republicans pursuing their own typical bullshit, is leaving your leader wounded on the battlefield.

The first step toward taking the fight to the enemy is re-framing the Russia probe as a witch hunt designed to over-turn a fair election result. That will get more normies on board, at least remaining neutral rather than getting infected by the witch hunt narrative by osmosis. Any response that treats the witch hunt as a sincere endeavor to figure out facts, form logical arguments, or apply statistical reasoning, is conceding ground to the enemy.

They must not only be mocked as sore losers, but must now feel our righteous anger over their attempt to over-turn the fair election. Again, not so much to convince them but to persuade the big middle that ours is the just side and worth joining -- or at least, staying out of the way.

15 comments:

  1. Excellent. I'd add your old advice back when you were examining the cognitive dissonance issue and the burgeoning Russia spectacle: discord in their ranks.

    The Bernie/Stein constituency is also affected by "Russia, Russia, Russia". The ones who are the most populist, who actually are looking into Seth Rich: Goodman, Dore, Black, Johnstone, etc., as well as the lawyers pushing the DNC lawsuit, should be made allies.

    They are incredibly frustrated that their fellow libs are not taking the lesson "Populism is a winner" or "Bernie would have won", but instead are doubling down on "Hillary was fine, just those outside forces cost her!"

    I'm not sure how to use them, but I would guess highlighting and giving them exposure. The neocons/libs often make common cause with each other to the detriment of populists...

    Always and forever: Bernie would have won.

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  2. BTW, this post is an excellent start for explaining why the losing side being mental doesn't mean they are hobbled and will never win again. Otherwise, losers would never come back.

    They have lots of energy and that's worth a lot.

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  3. Excellent post, will be sharing this one with some of the power users on Trump/Alt-Right Twitter.

    Do you have any interest in doing podcast interviews? While I've debated some of the particulars, I think your general thesis about how Dem/Rep = Wall Street/Pentagon and the need to focus on the Pentagon hijacking Trump's administration is a very insightful one, and I'd like to help get it out there in front of a lot more people.

    I do one called Salting The Earth, it's currently on hiatus for a couple more weeks while my co-host is busy. It does get syndicated on Daily Stormer, TRS, etc. so if you're looking for a chance to try and pitch your message to some Alt-Righters, it'd be a good opportunity.

    Anyway, let me know if this sounds like something you'd be interested in doing.

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  4. Thanks for the offer, but I'm not a podcast guy. Everyone says I'm the best teacher they've had, and I can write to explain. More deliberative of a thought process, and not so much riffing in real time.

    As for the power groups that control each party, that's pretty inchoate anyway, and I wouldn't have too much to discuss at length.

    It's probably better for dissemination to go through people who are good back-and-forth hosts and guests. Or just links on Twitter like Ricky Vaughn does.

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    1. I'll try and give your blog a plug anyway when we return, I can send the links along to Ricky Vaughn too.

      One thing to encourage sharing though would be to include a header image with the articles so that Twitter will generate a full image link to your articles.

      Absolutely no one clicks on a bare hyperlink on Twitter. I screenshot portions of the text sometimes to have an image but even that's only a half-effective measure.

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  5. Spot on. I'll be using this argument (Russia conspiracy is a DNC-led antidemocratic effort) from now on.

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  6. Tucker is one of the few who is framing the witch hunt explicitly as an attempt to over-turn the election and kick Trump out.

    I was going to say, "one of the few big names / mainstream voices" doing so -- but actually few among the Trump hardcore are thinking this way either. Either they're literal-minded, and rebutting the allegations du jour, or they're waving the whole thing away as the powerless Establishment failing to score any hits on the God Emperor.

    Well, they fail to score any hits -- until they do. This is a very fat-tailed process, whether impeachment, assassination, etc. Nothing happens, until it does, and then the whole thing is over for the target. That doesn't mean that the target is guaranteed to get hit ultimately -- only that there will be no way to tell until / unless he does, and the absence of hits this day / week / season / year doesn't mean they won't get him.

    Certainly the fact that the attempt to remove Trump is unrelenting, all-in, and across most of the Establishment, does not bode well. Our job is to stop them from keeping the process going -- not to laugh each time they fail to land a direct hit against a person who is manifestly defenseless (otherwise he would have shut this whole witch hunt down before it ever got started).

    By broadcasting the message about "attempt to over-turn election," Tucker's doing a hell of a lot more to help out the leader than those who are treating the ongoing shitshow as entertainment.

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  7. BTW, Tucker also said tonight that he started off literal-minded about the Russian probe, but after he heard about it being a witch hunt that will seize on anything in order to advance some story, any story, he got it and has been calling it out for what it is.

    So don't worry that normal people won't buy the argument. It's pretty straightforward, not a conspiracy theory with 1000 dots.

    And if he heard it from someone rather than coming to it on his own, then we're doing our job right by passing the word along. High-profile people check social media and other sites around the internet, and so do their interns and friends and family.

    Look at how quickly Tucker picked up that story about Kurt Eichenwald looking at hentai and then lying about it being for "demonstration purposes" to convince his incredulous wife. Yeah sure, who hasn't been there before? That came straight from Twitter.

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  8. I don't agree at all. Trump is doing this to trap the leakers and drain the swamp. It's a masterful play, 4d chess is real.

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  9. 4-D chess = stalling your own legislative agenda, pouring blood into the water for impeachers, in an effort you repeatedly refer on Twitter as a "witch hunt" -- all to fire leakers who you already knew were leakers and have the right to fire on the spot w/o accusing them of leaking or proving they're leakers.

    I respond to this obvious troll because it actually is a view held by enough people elsewhere, particularly Boomers at Conservative Treehouse, and worth dispelling for the record.

    Pro-tip to CIA / CTR troll: when you throw too many Trumpian buzzwords together in too few sentences, it is obviously artificial. It's like you're reading off a bullet-point list of "Alt-Right catch phrases". Only an impostor would have such a list, and read from it so blatantly.

    For the use of a shibboleth to convince the listener that you're part of their in-group, you have to pepper it in here and there. Otherwise you sound desperate to prove your membership in the group up front.

    You guys fucked up big-league before when you kept trying to use "cuck" "Jews" "Jared" and "globalist" in a single clause. "Trump has been cucked by the Jews thanks to globalist Jarvanka!"

    So fake-sounding. Your bosses would slash your pay by half for being such obvious fakes, if they were actually concerned with winning a propaganda war rather than hoovering up those donor dollars and giving meaningless progress reports.

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  10. I think Trump is doing great. I agree with PMan and Bixxy over at MPC in that he's not playing 4D chess, but rather is just rolling on instinct against the faggot striver bugmen in Washington. I'm willing to give Trump some space and time to get his agenda going since he's doing the unprecedented. After this week I have more confidence than ever in him and his people.

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  11. "Look at how quickly Tucker picked up that story about Kurt Eichenwald looking at hentai and then lying about it being for "demonstration purposes" to convince his incredulous wife. Yeah sure, who hasn't been there before? That came straight from Twitter."

    Of all things, we ought to not concern ourselves with what people beat off to. The culture war is over, and after all, did moralizing Silents and Boomers in the 80's/90's/2000's ever even come close to repairing the damage they inflicted on society? Yes, I understand the temptation to make fun of Eichenwald for embarrassing stuff, but what he (legally) beats off to is his business and has little to nothing to do with his professional behavior and persona.

    The mountains of weird crap on the internet is the consequence of the decadence that's gathered momentum since the late 60's. Basically, the generations that created an awakening era (Silents and Boomers in the late 60's-early 80's) and an unraveling era (Boomers and X-ers in Reagan's 2nd term-Bush's two terms) have heavily corroded standards of taste and conduct. Much like how Missionaries and Losts had to clean-up their act in the 30's/40's and inspire younger people to the idea of a better future, Boomers and X-ers now are having their leadership and maturity challenged by a crisis of their own making. If they can rise to the occasion, the next several generations will get the lion's share of the rewards. But there's no guarantee that'll happen.

    One time in our history, a prophet generation and it's shadow generation failed to heed the call of responsibility and humility in a crisis situation. That was, of course, the civil-war and it's aftermath. The continuing rampant narcissism of Boomers and continuing signs of Gen X apathy/detachment so far don't inspire much confidence. Particularly unsettling is the growing invective thrown at Millennials. Boomers can't have it both ways. They had so much profound influence on society, so much power and privilege, that their song and dance throughout life of blaming others is getting really trite and divisive.

    Perping a coup against Trump would likely be a lasting and stinging indictment of Boomer zeal and delusion. Pence would be a more taciturn update of Bush (pandering to Judeo-Christian values and massive war mongering). The Dems would be guaranteed a '20 victory (no way is Trump's northern base going to vote for the GOP after fucking Trump over), with our next Dem pres. probably being a non-white but light skinned/softer featured elite (Kamala Harris, The Rock, etc.) who would be under great pressure to keep it real with hardcore cultural Marxism. Whereas a David Clarke or Wilt Chamberlain is so BLACK that they don't feel the same kind of insecurity as mullato elites.

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  12. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/style/anxiety-is-the-new-depression-xanax.html?_r=0

    There's references to the 1950's being a period of high anxiety too. Also points out the bummed out vibe of the 90's.

    Is this a cocooning issue? Perhaps in the last decade of a cocooning period (like the 50's or 2010's), people start to feel like they're out of touch, like they're missing out but can't quite put their finger on why they feel like that. Conversely, depression rises in the first decade of cocooning (like the 30's and 90's), as people feel overwhelmed by the sheer activity of the previous decade.

    The article author tries to pin the 90's on Gen X; like Boomers arrogantly claiming that every phenomenon of the 60's was created by them (when the oldest Boomers were 14 at the beginning of the decade). it never makes sense to give any decade to one generation.

    For all the idealism, technoworship, and superficial comfort cocooners ostensibly enjoy, perhaps deep down inside they eventually start to feel something gnawing away at them. Why do I spend so much time fixing my hair? Why do I find strangers threatening? Why do I idolize conceited elites like Obama and Steve Jobs? Is life really worth living when music is terrible, when actors are monotone or shouty, when people tint car windows, wall off their yards, hiding behind opaque window and door blinds?

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  13. "More deliberative of a thought process, and not so much riffing in real time."

    Probably back-brain dominant according to Niednagel's braintypes system - since only "introverts"(not necessarily socially awkward) can do the kind of analysis you do here. Need an existing template to come up with new ideas.

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