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This is your brain on MAGA [1]

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Date: 2023-08-12

I just saw a story in Politico written by Marcel Danesi of the University of Toronto. Here is the link:

What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán Understand About Your Brain

In the article, Danesi outlines the neuro-cognitive actions that explain some of the MAGA mindset and resistance to fact. He supports something that I have thought for some time, that there is some sort of trigger in the brains of too many of us that is easily activated. This helps explain their quick and rabid adoption of the craziest ideas and how they cannot be turned back.

My research shows that this language taps into and “switches on” existing circuits in the brain that link together important and salient images and ideas. In effect, metaphors bypass higher cognitive reasoning centers to make linkages that may not have a basis in reality. And when that happens, a person is less likely to notice the lie, because it “feels” right.

So, what is the method that Trump and the others use and have used? One critical method is dehumanizing language:

My research analyzes real speeches made by politicians past and present, including those of Trump, Orbán and Putin, using cognitive linguistics — a branch of linguistics that examines the relationship between language and the mind. What I have found is that throughout history, speeches by dictators and autocrats have one thing in common: they use dehumanizing metaphors to instill and propagate hatred of others. It is well-documented that for example words like “reptiles” and “parasites” were used by the Nazi regime to compare outsiders and minorities to animals. Strongmen throughout history have referred to targeted social groups as “rats” or “pests” or “a plague.” And it’s effective regardless of whether the people who hear this language are predisposed to jump to extreme conclusions. Once someone is tuned into these metaphors, their brain actually changes in ways that make them more likely to believe bigger lies, even conspiracy theories. (emphasis added)

This ties into other research that I have read about, that conservatives have a greater response to disgusting images and concepts. In addition, Danesi writes that the mind needs to be prepared to become fertile ground for these metaphors and the hate they engender:

In order to hack into the minds of the public, people need to feel fear or uncertainty. That could be caused by economic instability or pre-existing cultural prejudices, but the emotional basis is fear. The brain is designed to respond to fear in various ways, with its own in-built defense mechanisms which produce chemicals in the response pattern, such as cortisol and adrenaline. These chemical responses, which zip straight past our logical brains to our fight-or-flight reactions, are also activated by forms of language that instill fear, either directly (as in a vocal threat) or, more insidiously, by twisted facts which allay fears through lies and deceptive statements.

Gee, I wonder if decades of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and Sean Hannity et al have effected this ground prep? The constant spewing of hate, fear, and victim-hood provided Trump all he needed to reel in his cultist base. Not stated in this article, but something I would find reasonable to assume is that fundamental religion is also good preparation for becoming a conspiracy nut: they are already trained to believe lots of fairly preposterous things that are clearly refuted by facts (Noah’s arc anyone?). The guy in Utah who got killed by the FBI was not going to shoot Biden because he disagreed with say the Inflation Reduction Act, I am pretty sure he was conned into believing that Biden is a pedophile, communist who is bent on destroying America. In a way I feel sorry for him, as his mindset was used to generate massive profits for Fox and others, while they skate away from the results while he dies in a hailstorm of bullets.

How do we deal with this? These authoritarian/fascist rants have an effect beyond what we would normally expect. We cannot reason with these folks and explain how the election was not stolen, how climate change is a crisis, how respect for LGBTQ is respect for everyone. No, they suffer from this, well, brain damage you could say if this research is valid. The only practical way that I can see to do this in our system, is to widen the ability of folks who have been damaged by this rhetoric and its insidious effects to sue for damages in court. For example, those poll workers who have been harassed out of their jobs should be able to sue Fox and Hannity and Carlson and Alex Jones and others, if they can point to a plausible link from their harassers to those rightwing performance artist liars, and the networks that allow it and also profit from it (Comcast, Sinclair etc).

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/12/2185436/-This-is-your-brain-on-MAGA

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