Late in the composition of last week’s post, I came across an unexamined feature of Trump’s sway over the nation’s soul.
Emotions come first. Ideas come later.
Related: Why feelings count first
NOTE: I have basically quit following endsandbeginningsblog because almost every post is a venomous attack on 45 and the people who make up his “base.”
Advertisements generally appeal to specific emotions, that is, seek to evoke those feelings, to get the listener emotionally involved.
Sandals Resorts commercials, like Cialis commercials, are all about romance.
A current car commercial begins with a couple adopting a dog from an animal shelter, so folk can feel warm fuzzies.
Current commercials for CareFirst begin with a child’s voice asking, “When’s the last time you felt — free?” There are clips of a Down’s Syndrome child dancing, an amputee with a prosthesis climbing a rock wall, a person with a seriously deformed right leg diving and swimming. The child’s voice concludes, “Live fearless.” I don’t know what this has to do with health insurance.
Once the emotion takes effect, the listener is prone to credit and adopt anything the speaker says.
What emotions do Trump’s — advertisements, in effect — evoke? What affects predominate at his rallies?
Hate and anger. He models these things, and the people respond. Hate and anger at what, aside from immigrants (and, formerly, Muslims), isn’t very clear. One can evoke the feelings first, and then fill in the blanks as to ideas later.
This is exactly what the Russians sought in their dissemination of the real fake news.
Those, including 45 himself, who refer to the Mueller investigation as a “soft coup,” ignore the vigor of Russian efforts to stir up hatred of one American for another. There were actually teenagers in Macedonia enriching themselves publishing pro-Trump misinformation.
Related: Wikipedia – Fake news Related: Wikipedia – Internet Research Agency Related: BBC – The city getting rich from fake news Related: NBC – Fake News: How a Partying Teen Earns Thousands Publishing Lies
From last week’s post:The notion that Hilary Clinton assassinated Jeffrey Epstein pleases those who want to hate her. In the face of all life’s uncertainties, they’re certain of her malice. Likewise the Obama-enriched-Iran notion: it pleases those who want to hate him, certain of his malice. Whether it’s the President’s place to encourage such hatred is a question.
Anger at what, hatred of what or of whom, may be open questions. The fact remains that these are the emotions Trump evoked.
I know one thing about which many of his supporters were very angry.
Yes, we were offended.
Don’t call me white. To me, the word is a racial slur.
The racial dynamic of the Trump election reflected a response to the relentless demonization of white people in the mainstream media from 2014 to 2016. We had no respite. No mainstream media personality ever reported, nor expressed, any dissent.
It was not a reaction against Barack Obama. There is a mathematical necessity that many who voted for Trump had previously voted for Obama — twice. That the mainstream media have never examined this, speaks again of the leftist insistence that we NOT know ourselves.
It began with Concerned Student 1950 at the University of Missouri. Following a number of frankly trivial racial incidents on campus — The feces swastika may have been a hoax. — graduate student Jonathan Butler blamed not the individual perpetrators, but the university administration, and went on a hunger strike demanding that the president resign. He later amended his agenda to include changes to the health insurance the university provided graduate students. I would think that’s an unrelated issue.
Unrest spread from one campus to the next, as students saw that tantrums are more fun than homework. One administration after another capitulated to protesters’ demands. Some of the most outrageous incidents occurred here:
Harvard — Google “Reclaim Harvard Law.” This group strangely fell silent at the end of the school year — that is, I gather, when they saw their grades.
In the end, officials at Oberlin College, Ohio State and the University of Chicago asserted their adulthood, and the children began to chill.
Off campus, the ideology personified in Anshu Wahi prevailed. Until this writing, I did not know of her doctrine that white newborns are racist, that is, racial bigots. The more traditional interpretation of systemic racism would say that the white person is inextricably so located that the System continuously profits him or her at the expense of people of color (POCs). In that sense, she or he is racist. By rights, in the absence of other evidence, this should exonerate the white individual of malice, since individual bigotry is immaterial. White = racist and racist = white. In practice, the label of “racist” against any individual remains an attribution of malice.
Microaggressions were all the rage. A microaggression is any expression a white person may think is harmless, that in fact inflicts wounds upon POCs that can never possibly heal; for example, referring to America as a “land of opportunity.” White people really need to watch their mouths: there’s no end to the malice they’re accused of.
Colorblindness, a trait many people strove for decades to develop, is now held to be sin. See, for example, “6 ways allies still marginalize people of color — and what to do instead.” “Martin Luther King’s statement, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” is now quoted only by individuals regarded as racist. Political correctness insists that character means nothing; skin color is all.
“Whiteness studies” proliferated. “Whiteness” refers to any and all things that make people white: their culture, their body language, their values, ideals, hopes and dreams. In whiteness studies, every single attribute of the white person stands condemned.
Tens of millions of white Americans want to see themselves as people of goodwill, who have never sought anything but the best for all people. Political correctness insists instead that every white person’s heart is malicious to the core. It mandated the violation of every white person’s naivete, the loss of his or her innocence, the offending of each and every one. And it worked. We were offended.
Again and again throughout the campaign, Trump said, “I will not be politically correct.” Support for Trump was, for tens of millions, a matter of putting the lie to political correctness, of asserting one’s humanity.
Terms that abruptly disappeared from the mainstream media coincident with Trump’s inauguration:
microaggressions
whiteness
political correctness
There are fewer references to racism as systemic.
Today, the media preoccupies itself instead with Trump’s own offenses.
What the world needs now
The 2020 Presidential campaign is in full swing. We need a candidate who will unify the country; who will appeal to the nobler features of the American personality.
The second commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.
Do it.
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