First, on the Lincoln Project podcast, we’re joined by special guest Stephen Hassan to talk about his new edition of his amazing book, The Cult of Trump.
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Over at the Enemies List, we’re joined by Jon Michels and David Noll to talk about domestic terror threats in the age of Trump:
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NLP as the 'pedia notes is not any more real than homeopathy as a therapy but it does offer communications strategies. It sounds to me like the psychobabble version of New Age creative visualization. We all know the Trump family was close to Norman Vincent Peale and Trump may have gotten his own variety of the schtick from Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking. You can see it operative in the way Trump justifies himself so much more successfully than other political grifters.
Take, for instance, Mark Robinson's denial of his comically lurid posts on a porn site. He may not be pushed off the ballot, but his candidacy will not survive this scandal. I mean, it's one thing to say that some people need killin'. Quite another to say that you're a black Nazi who'd like to own some slaves ;)
He denied this the way your typical sociopathic politician would deny it. The way George Santos would deny it. He looked straight into the camera, bursting with confidence, and lied to his constituents. He called it an oppo dump by his opponent (it was a carefully researched K-File investigation that sussed out the identity of his nom-de-porn) because Josh Stein is "desperate" and doesn't want to talk about the issues but rather "tabloid trash." When Stein is up in the polls ;)
And he topped it off with an exquisite flourish, likening himself to Clarence Thomas who endured a "high-tech lynching" in his confirmation. Hint to Mark: You ain't gonna win friends and influence people these days by likening yourself to Clarence Thomas for _any_ reason; that ship has sailed, LOL
What Trump does, much differently, is that he implicates his audience. That's the link to what I've gathered to be neuro-linguistic programming (or creative visualization or positive thinking).
If it were Trump instead of Mark, first, he'd launch a broadside attack on the Fake News Media for even reporting it. He'd doubtless personally attack Josh Stein for even imagining he'd have the character to use something like this against Trump. And he might well scoff at the very idea that a mac daddy like himself would ever feel the need to visit a porn site. But what he _wouldn't_ do, unlike Mark Robinson, is to pretend to his audience that he simply doesn't have the character to say such disgusting things.
And _that_ is what his superfans mistake as his "honesty" and his "telling it like it is." He implicates his audience because he knows that these are the things that they wish they could get away with saying.
Earlier this evening I heard a fellow on the news saying that Trump likes to gaslight? To me, that means he likes to lie. According to Hassan that is what woke him up, that Son Young Moon was a liar. Instead of saying gas light we need to say liar! And we need to quit referring to them as Republicans and start calling them rethuglicans. And quit calling them conservatives when they are fascists. We are lying when we call them phony names. They need to be called what they are now not what they used to be, in my humble opinion? I'm sure that, there are more examples, we have to try to snap these bird brains out of it! We could also ask them if they believe "thou shalt not bear false witness", or"It t is easier to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God", or ask them to paraphrase, "The sermon on the Mount". I'm not religious and abhore religious indoctrination. Good luck all!