Category: Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional

World NUT Daily Crazy Called For Political Witch Hunts, Purges and Ultimately, Executions of Liberals if Romney Had Won!

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Reich Wing, Reich Wing Fascists, Religio-Fascism, Religio-Fascists, Religion and State, Religion Breeds Ignorance, Religious Crazies, Religious Credulity, Religious Cretins, Religious Dictatorship, Religious Fascism, Religious Fascists, Right Wing, Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Right Wing Buffoons, Right Wing Clown Car, Right Wing Conspiracies, Right Wing Crackpot, Right Wing Crackpots, Right Wing Crazies, Right Wing Creeps, Right Wing Culture Wars, Right Wing Extremism, Right Wing Fascism, Right Wing Fascists, Right Wing Freaks, Right Wing Kooks, Right Wing Nuts, World Nut Daily

WND Columnist: Prosecute Liberals, Journalists for Treason
Submitted by Brian Tashman

For years, conservatives have claimed that liberals seek to criminalize Christianity and conservative opinions through imaginary hate speech laws. But today, WorldNetDaily columnist Erik Rush writes that the government should prosecute liberals and members of the press… in order to defend freedom, of course. He accuses journalists of “treasonous collusion” with the Obama administration and said the Founders would have wanted journalists to be “found guilty of high crimes.” “Trials for treason and the requisite sentences would apply,” Rush says, “and I would have no qualms about seeing such sentences executed, no matter how severe.” He claims that progressives’ “seditious, anti-American” speech is “excepted from protection under the First Amendment,” hoping that “the political disenfranchisement of liberals, progressives, socialists and Marxists can begin in earnest, and in the open.”

Assuming that all goes well and that we are rid of Obama in January, there will be a nation to repair – but what about the causes for this necessity? Yes, many Americans are now cognizant of the fact that progressives have “progressed” America dangerously close to being a Marxist-socialist nation and that we are collectively responsible for not having checked that progress. But aside from grass-roots efforts toward electoral and political reform, there are other widespread, organized threats to America’s ongoing concern as a representative republic with guaranteed personal liberties, free speech foremost among them.

Here, I am speaking of the press, the conglomeration of national broadcast, digital and print media organizations that has been incrementally packed with ideological liberals and socialists, and so has disqualified itself as the impartial government watchdog it once was. During my lifetime, I have seen the press become an advance force for social engineering and global socialism. The degree to which they have deceived Americans and enabled the agenda of radicals in recent decades is beyond shame. As former Democratic pollster Pat Caddell said recently, the press has become an enemy of the American people. In the matter of this president, the press largely facilitated the ascension of Barack Obama. The instances wherein they have promoted, shielded and aided him are beyond enumeration.

This goes beyond such things as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and his man crush on Obama – I’m talking about treasonous collusion. One particularly scandalous incident occurred during the second presidential debate, when CNN moderator Candy Crowley made an interjection that appeared to have been as spontaneous as Ambassador Chris Stevens’ murder, and which led to a solid point scored for Obama. Most recently, after Mitt Romney brought up Obama’s 2009 “Apology Tour,” the press did their best to support Obama’s claim that this never happened, despite boundless reams of footage that exist chronicling the event.

…

It is improbable that the framers of the Constitution anticipated a situation in which the press were entirely given over to seditious, anti-American policies. If they had, it is likely that their modus operandi would be similar to that for any faction found guilty of high crimes. Trials for treason and the requisite sentences would apply, and I would have no qualms about seeing such sentences executed, no matter how severe.

This is not likely to occur, however. Radio personality and nascent media mogul Glenn Beck has the intention of putting the establishment press out of business. While I wish him every success, it doesn’t seem likely that he will accomplish this through his organizations alone. In addition to the advent of powerful alternative media sources, I believe it will be necessary to codify – or reaffirm – the nature of crimes against the Constitution and the American people. In this manner, we can thwart the designs not only of the press, but all global socialists operating in America.

Those whose speech and actions impinge upon the God-given rights set forth in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution are, by definition, excepted from protection under the First Amendment (as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment). This is a very important concept to consider, because it is based on these presumptions of protected speech and equal protection for all that progressives and socialists have engaged in their predation upon our liberties.

If these truths can be acknowledged and widely accepted as such (as opposed to progressives’ Orwellian interpretations), then the political disenfranchisement of liberals, progressives, socialists and Marxists can begin in earnest, and in the open.

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OBAMA | A Crushing Defeat For Racists, Bigots, Misogynists, Exploiters, Homophobes and Blowhards

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Politics, Racism, Religious Bigots, Right Wing, Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Right Wing Buffoons, Right Wing Clown Car, Right Wing Crackpots

Some thoughts on Obama: A stunning defeat for racists, patriarchs, exploiters, homophobes and blowhards

Sent by Alan Gilbert

I am – and most people I know are – enormously relieved and thrilled at Obama’s victory. These are some thoughts about it.

***

Bill O’Reilly spoke of the defeat of “traditional America” a “white America.” He spoke of the latinos as well as blacks who voted for Obama as just wanting “stuff.”

This is a standard pseudo-tea-party line (the Boston Tea party was an integrated revolutionary crowd…). It is wrong in three ways. First, no “tea party” advocate refuses social security, medicare or veterans benefits. “Keep the government’s hands off my social security” was an early tea-party sign which captures the racist ninnie-dom of its aging, not to say doddering “white” advocates.

That slogan is, of course, against the interests of people who believe it. Fortunately, in Ohio, many working class white people didn’t (even in the South, I suspect, a lot of poorer white people didn’t). And fortunately, fewer unmarried white women – a growing per cent of voters – and married white women didn’t.

Second, nobody gets bigger breaks or more “welfare” from the government than billionaires. They get special deals so they can hide their profits overseas from taxation. They get special tax incentives so the Romneys pay a lower tax rate, if any, on their multimillions than any of the people who clean up their many mansions…

Third, the executives at Goldman Sachs, AIG and Bain, for example, make money largely through speculation and gutting other people’s jobs. They are literally parasites or speculators – the creatures of “derivatives” and “credit default swaps” – who produce nothing and wrecked the world economy to boot.

There is another category of capitalists who produce something (Apple being a leading example). At their plant in China (Foxconn), however, 14 workers threw themselves off the roof this summer…

There is thus exploitation of people who actually work, physically, hard, at little pay, under coercion, often in despair, in the production of bright i-phones and computers. Many ordinary Americans are among their number.

Bill O’Reilly is a blowhard who speaks of others who want “stuff” and gets paid a lot of money for doing very little. His claims are projection, psychologically speaking. For the takers and I mean particularly categories two and three above, rich people, capitalists, bankers (some of whom have some self-possession and decency, but unfortunately not many), what they say of others is who they are.

It was their defeat. It was earned.

***

John Nichols emphasized this morning on Democracy Now that Obama’s victory, likely to be over 3 million votes, was decisive. It was a bigger victory than that of JFK, Nixon, Carter or W in either term. Remember W’s preening agenda – made possible only by the corporate media – to spend his “political capital” by stealing social security.

Obama needs to push decent immigration reform. Legalizing the immigrants who are exploited here, some 11 or more million people, will further shift the electorate over time – move further toward decency – and force the “Republican” party or some successor to stop being the party of bigotry and pseudo-Israeli, pseudo-Berlin “walls” against the world.

As Hurricane Sandy and the Colorado fires this spring underline, the oceans are warming. There is structural causality of climate change, the rising sea levels or increasing droughts – as well as particular causes – to the increasing dangers of nature. Obama needs to act on this.

But Obama will not act on anything without pressure from below. So we need to push hard on these things.

***

Presidential campaigns are always a spectacle. The attention and energy of millions of people is absorbed in them. Doing something about politics from below – as in the social movements like Occupy which made Obama a decent candidate – are temporarily weakened, go by the board. Yet see the bracing efforts of people on Occupy in flooded New York below.

***

After the election, even in victory, people are tired or need to have a life, get back to work.

So fighting for what needs to be done becomes, in this way, more difficult,

***

In his victory speech, Obama spoke of what is supposedly exceptional in America. This is partly true and partly just a de rigeuer politician’s slogan.

***

America has supported and is the biggest arms seller to oppressors abroad. We need a campaign to awaken Americans to the plight of the Palestinians – inside and outside the Occupied territories – by the state of Israel. We need a decent two state solution or a one state solution with human rights for all.

But Israel plays a destructive flaunter of international law role in the world as well as in American politics, as the Netanyahu-Romney couple showed. This needs to be stopped. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

The settlements need to be challenged and reversed (or integrated – might be nice to trade some of the $3 billion military aid, not just to move settlers back to Israel, but to move Palestinians in…).

As the civil rights delegation of which I was a part saw, it will take a determined anti-aparteid movement from below to change this.

***

Unlike other Presidents running for reelection, Obama did not bomb Iran or support Israeli aggression during the campaign (see my Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?, ch. 1). But the dangers of American/Israeli aggression, too, will take a movement from below to head off.

***

That Obama, as an able African-American and mixed race candidate, weathered this storm – won despite 8% unemployment (15% in real terms, counting those who have given up looking for work or have part-time and would jump at full time jobs) and racism – the heart of the Romney campaign – is startling. The so-called Republican party (the imperial authoritarian party) has been the party of sabotage, of voting no to defeat Obama regardless of a common good.

That was what made Chris Christie’s behavior in the storm, along with Obama’s, exemplary. The Republicans, as Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, has rightly argued recently, are the zealous party of “no” at the expense of a common good, buoyed only by money, lies, the bought press, and of course, the fantasies and fears of many ordinary people.

It comes from what Obama said – standing for opportunity and decency for all Americans, inviting all into the community and from, for the most part, extremely able campaigning. The campaigning is, as the Presidency, during Hurricane Sandy, mainly efficient, doing competently what one might expect someone to do though candidates/politicians often don’t, and also inventive.

Most Americans want decency and opportunity for themselves and their familieis, and see that this is something that needs extension to others. And Americans are tired of imperial aggressions.

***

The Obama campaigns have been memorable for finding many new to politics, lost or forgotten or overlooked, reaching out to them, enabling them to mobilize. Their method reveals a new model of skill in figuring out how to mobilize the vote. Here Obama says some interesting things about himself and to his campaign workers about what they mean to him and about their future. It is pretty good.

The Republicans might catch up technically. But they don’t have the politics to reach voters – “white” land is not a place so many of us want to be. And of course, the spirit that mark the Obama campaigns is absent. Nonetheless, it is only if they and the whole spectrum shifts now to the center (or “left” in American terms) that they will be likely to win national elections.

***

Was Obama a favorite against Hilary Clinton? Against McCain (it took two losing wars and a financial collapse)? Against Romney?

Not a chance.

In terms of ability, this is a once in a lifetime candidate (team) and President.

***

The economy seems to be picking up. Bill Clinton worried that Romney might – if austerity and cutting the throats of poor people who actually spend the money they earn in America and thus exert a multiplier impact on growth (their buying leads to the employment of others who provide them goods) – reap the benefits. He won’t.

But the depression may continue. Obama needs to fight for genuine programs for jobs and using federal moneys to prevent state layoffs of teachers and other public workers.
Whether American capitalism can provide full employment at decent wages – even with a new burst for the green economy – remains to be fought for and, less likely, seen.

***

The movement that brought Obama back to power is not the reality of power in Imperial Washington. The rich, as Barack says, always have a place at the table, the militarists (a trillion dollar war complex) much more.

***

Obama’s speech in Iowa was a bit wistful, looking back on campaigning. His victory speech was generous and large, looking to, once again, lift everyone up.

It was what he had been cautioned against – given the depression – in campaigning. But it is much more who Barack Obama is.

One could hear the relief in his voice as well. It was no certain victory, particularly after the stylistic debacle in Denver. He could have been the one-term African-American president, the results largely erased.

The forces of racism were mobilized against him, baying behind Romney. Listen again to O’Reilly…

He mobilized the people to overcome them.

We overcame them. I join with everyone else in the feeling of relief and being thrilled by his reemergence as someone with a broader and decent vision for America.

***

But Obama is, again, the leader of the empire. If one expects too much from him or the Democrats, one is likely to be disappointed.

Obama is still the man of drones, every one he fires a war crime. As Democratic neo-neo cons blither, he kills less civilians than in neocon-Bush-Cheney-would-be Romney aggressions. He kills many.

He is making new enemies in Pakistan daily – those who hate us because the American President murders children and other innocents – for the United States.

***

Obama is still the man of state secrets. The Canadian government can pay damages to Maher Arar, the Syrian-Canadian engineer kidnapped by Bush from Laguardia and sent to be tortured in a coffin like cell in Syria, released when the Syrian authorities told the US monsters that he knew nothing). But Obama’s government will not allow him to sue for damages in the United States. The “Courts,” too, squeak “state secrets.”

***

There will be no hearings about torture. American war criminals like Richard Cheney and Condoleeza Rice strut around – inside the United States. But they and Bush can not go abroad (except for Bush’s recent visit, carefully planned, well guarded, to the Cayman islands to speak to the rich on how exploiters can shift their gains to avoid taxation…)

***

The victories of Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin and the “amazons,” as Rachel Maddow put it, in New Hampshire are a heartening rejection of the disgusting patriarchy of the “Republican” party.

Warren stood up to Wall Street. The bankers wanted her, above others, gone.

For all our problems (I lived for many years in Massachusetts and much of my family does still), the people of Massachusetts are not fools. Elizabeth Warren is the successor of Ted Kennedy.

Warren (though not on foregin policy yet) is a voice for the future.

***

Gay marriage was, for the first time, upheld in two elections. There isn’t a single person in my class at Metro who has the slightest sympathy for bigotry. Obama is the first President to stand against homophobia and to include gay people in his victory speech.

America is changing before our eyes.

(Karl Rove’s explosion on Fox News was a wonderful revelation of this – the moneyman of evil and epistemogical closure was unable to deal with the shattering of his demented universe, telling the peons who was boss…)

***

Marijuana legalization won in Colorado. Three notes on this. First, tobacco, still pushed by the US government in Spain and China, inter alia, is lethal to people’s lives in a way that grass is not.

Alcoholism in America is also a far more startling danger than weed. We once had real prohibition – an abomination – for a reason. Drunkenness has always been a favorite drug for many people against a feeling of misery and oppression, generated by capitalism and by the amazing difficulties of family life.

Second, Tom Tancredo, a leading racist and an odious human being, is completely right about this. It is a matter of individual liberty whether one smokes marijuana. The prohibition against it has resulted in a pseudo- and failed “war” on drugs (i.e. a lot of violence comes into our lives from this attempted prohibition).

More importantly, as Michalle Alexander underlines in The New Jim Crow, America had 300,000 in jail in the 1970s. With the segregationists moving to the Republican party, the Congress passed mandatory sentencing. An 8 fold increase in prisoners to 2.3 million, 25% of the world’s prisoners, occurred.

Many people, particularly teenagers are in jail for possession of marijuana (80% of the increase is for victimless drug “crimes”).

The police permitted by the Supreme “Court” routinely violate the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures by stopping cars in largely black or chicano neighborhoods, searching them, and doing drug busts on the 5% with some marijuana. If they did it in Boulder or Cherry Creek or Scarsdale, they would be halted by middle class outrage.

It is despicable that Democrats like Michael Hancock blither about “gateway” drugs. It is now the time to push against the Obama administration’s crackdown on marijuana, to cut down the jails, and to restore hope i.e. chances for education and jobs for people to whom what is basically an American police state (the prison-industrial complex, nurtured in racism and affecting many whites as well) has denied it.

***

The choice in this election was between decency – this kind of democratic evolution, marked by protest movements from below – and an increasing police state of the .0001% (clinging to the older presudo-America by aggression, racism and repression). There is not much future, not just for the United States but for the existence of humans on this planet, in the second course.

That was what was in the balance. It will be still for many years.

Nonetheless, our reelection of Obama was a blow for decency.

***

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The Endless Republican Sludge | Mike Coffman Another Crackpot Republican

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Religious Cretins, Religious Crooks, Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Right Wing Buffoons, Right Wing Clown Car, Right Wing Conspiracies, Tea Baggers, Tea Party

The Endless Republican Sludge | Mike Coffman Another Crackpot Republican

In May, Coffman drew national attention when he made birther comments about Obama, saying that “that in his heart, he’s (Obama) not an American. He’s just not an American.”

The release of the audio clip comes on the same day Coffman released his first TV ad touting his military background.

Democratic State Rep. — and a pair of third party candidates — is challenging Coffman in the Aurora-based 6th Congressional District.

“Mike Coffman’s pattern of bringing up extremist conspiracy theories shows a high level of disrespect for our Commander-in-Chief and his commitment to the safety of our troops. He owes people an explanation,” said Ryan Hobart, a spokesman for Miklosi.

Follow Kurtis on Twitter: @kurtisalee

Coffman says his “fundamental concern” is Obama might use military for political gain

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Further Revelations of Hypocrisy By “Family Values” Manslut Dinesh D’Souza | Pathetic Right Wing Two-Faced Deceiver Dinesh D’Souza

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Dinesh D'Souza, Family Values Hypocrite, Family Values Hypocrites, Family Values Whores, Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Right Wing Buffoons, Right Wing Crackpot, Right Wing Nuts, Wingnuts

D’Souza Accused Obama of ‘Attacking the Traditional Values Agenda’ Just Before Sex Scandal Revelations
Submitted by Ariella

Last week, conservative pseudo-intellectual Dinesh D’Souza was featured on a conference call for Rick Scarborough’s 40 Days to Save America. D’Souza said Obama is “attacking the traditional values agenda” by supporting marriage equality and abortion rights, arguing that “Obama doesn’t like traditional Christianity because he identifies it with colonialism.” However, D’Souza’s rhetoric about “traditional morality” may be undermined by the fact that at a recent conference he reportedly shared a hotel room with a woman other than his wife, whom he introduced as his fiancée. D’Souza later admitted to getting engaged to his girlfriend even though he is still married, but denies sharing a hotel room with her at the conference.

Why is Obama on the social issues — and I’m thinking here of abortion, I’m thinking here of gay marriage — why is Obama so aggressive in attacking the traditional values agenda? I think the reason for it is because when Obama thinks about colonialism, about the British and the French who went abroad to conquer other countries, or earlier the Spanish and the Portuguese, I come from a part of India that was a Portuguese colony at one time, I think for Obama colonialism is identified not just with the soldiers but also with the missionaries. Remember it’s the missionaries that went alongside the conquerors, the conquistadors, came to the Americas and worked on converting the Indians and later missionaries went to China, India and Japan. So I think this is the problem, Obama doesn’t like traditional Christianity because he identifies it with colonialism. Obama’s own Christianity is more of a Third World liberation theology, a very different kind of Jeremiah Wright type philosophy, summarized in the idea that America is the rogue nation in the world.

Later, D’Souza said that politics are driven by a moral and spiritual divide that only God can change, grateful that we don’t have “an absentee God like Obama’s dad.”

Ultimately there’s a political divide in this country but underneath that is a moral divide, and underneath that is a spiritual divide. I think that the deepest problems facing America and the West in the end are not political, they are spiritual. This is why it makes sense even as we debate policy issues, even as we debate moral issues, to turn to the maker of the universe, this maker of the universe that isn’t just an absentee God like Obama’s dad, a kind of absentee father who got things going and then took off but a God who cares about each one of us and certainly about our country.

Update: In a recent interview with pastor Jack Hibbs, D’Souza reiterated his theory that Obama supports abortion rights and marriage equality because he has a “pathological hatred for traditional Christianity” because it is a symbol of colonialism and that Democrats are eager to discredit his film because if Obama’s worldview is understood, nobody will vote for him:

Update II: The Daily Beast is now reporting that D’Souza has resigned as president of The King’s College, the evangelical school he has led since 2010.

It was not immediately clear whether the board’s decision was driven by the allegations of the affair, or by dissatisfaction with D’Souza’s leadership that had been building at the college for months. At the meeting Thursday, [Chairman of the Board of Trustees Andy] Mills did not discuss the board’s conversation about D’Souza or give reasons for his departure. Representatives for the college did not respond to requests for comment.

According to several sources at the college, members of the King’s faculty and board alike had grown hostile to D’Souza’s presidency over what they saw as a failure to earn his reported million-dollar salary. D’Souza has spent much of the past few months promoting his documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, and his high profile in the media was seen as rarely benefitting the college. It may even have been seen as a detriment: According to a former staffer familiar with the college’s public relations, King’s employees have been explicitly tasked with disentangling D’Souza’s extracurricular activities from the college’s reputation. D’Souza became a non-presence on the college’s official Facebook page throughout 2012, which staffers say was no coincidence.

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Will Right Wing Conspiracy Theories Unleash More Right Wing Domestic Terrorism?

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Conspiracism, Conspiracy Crackpots, Conspiracy Crazies, Conspiracy Loons, Conspiracy Theories, Right Wing, Right Wing Assassinations, Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Right Wing Crackpots, Right Wing Crazies, Right Wing Culture Wars, Right Wing Extremism, Right Wing False Flag, Right Wing Fascists, Right Wing Nuts, Right Wing Terrorism, Right Wing Terrorists

How The Right’s Latest Conspiracy Theory Might Unleash a Wave of Domestic Terrorism if Obama Wins
Some types of spin are more dangerous than others.
September 25, 2012  |

Two of the Fort Stewart soldiers charged with murder and conspiracy to assassinate Obama.

In a somewhat desperate attempt to maintain morale among a Republican base that disdains its standard-bearer, a number of conservative media outlets are pushing an alternate reality in which Mitt Romney is leading in the polls by wide margins and American voters have a decidedly negative view not of the challenger, but of Barack Obama.

It’s an exceptionally dangerous game that the right-wing media are playing. If Obama wins – and according to polling guru Nate Silver, he’d have a 95 percent chance of doing so if the vote were held today – there’s a very real danger that this spin — combined with other campaign narratives that are popular among the far-right — could create a post-election environment so toxic that it yields an outburst of politically motivated violence.

A strategy that began with a series of rather silly columns comparing 2012 with 1980, and assuring jittery conservatives that a huge mass of independents was sure to break for Romney late and deliver Obama the crushing defeat he so richly deserves, entered new territory with the bizarre belief that all the polls are wrong. And not only wrong, but intentionally rigged by “biased pollsters” – including those at Fox News – in the tank for Obama. (See Alex Pareene’s piece for more on the right’s new theory that the polls are being systematically “skewed.”)

Consider how a loosely-hinged member of the right-wing fringe – an unstable individual among the third of conservative Republicans who believe Obama’s a Muslim or the almost two-thirds who think he was born in another country – expecting a landslide victory for the Republican might process an Obama victory. This is a group that has also been told, again and again, that Democrats engage in widespread voter fraud – that there are legions of undocumented immigrants, dead people and ineligible felons voting in this election (with the help of zombie ACORN). They’ve been told that Democrats are buying the election with promises of “free stuff” offered to the slothful and unproductive half of the population that pays no federal income taxes and refuses to “take responsibility for their lives” – Romney’s 47 percent.

They’ve also been told – by everyone from NRA president Wayne LaPierre to Mitt Romney himself – that Obama plans to ban gun ownership in his second term. (Two elaborate conspiracy theories have blossomed around this point. One holds that Fast and Furious – which, in reality, is much ado about very little – was designed to elevate gun violence to a point where seizing Americans’ firearms would become politically popular. The second holds that a United Nations treaty on small arms transfers (from which the United States has withdrawn) is in fact a stealthy workaround for the Second Amendment.)

And they’ve been warned in grim, often apocalyptic terms of what’s to come in a second term. The film, “2016: Obama’s America,” offers a dystopian vision of a third-world America gutted by Obama’s supposed obsession with global wealth redistribution. His re-election would bring something far worse than mere socialism – it would be marked by Kenyan anti-colonialism, in which America’s wealth is bled off as a form of reparations for centuries of inequities between the global North and South.

These kinds of fringe views aren’t relegated to the fever swamps of the right-wing blogosphere – they’re often reinforced by elected Republicans. Reps Steve King, R-Iowa, Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, Louie Gohmert, R-Texas and others warn that the Obama administration has been infiltrated by Islamic Extremists. An elected judge in Texas advocated a tax increase – yes, a tax increase! – in order to better arm local sheriff’s deputies whom he claimed would serve on the front-lines of the civil war likely to come should Obama be re-elected. “I’m talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms, get rid of the dictator,” he said.

They’ve been hammered with the idea that while these facts are obvious for those whose eyes are open, the media is covering it all up. Rather than a Democrat with whom people tend to connect running a good campaign against a flawed Republican candidate, many on the far-right will see an illegitimate president colluding with an array of perfidious forces, both foreign and domestic, to deny them the right to finally ‘take their country back.’

Obviously, there’s no need to fear a massive rebellion from millions of engraged Glenn Beck fans in their Hoverounds; rather, the danger is that in the aftermath of such an election, a small number of dangerously unstable anti-government extremists will take matters into their own hands — and even a small number can do significant damage.

After the 2008 election, there was a run on weapons and ammunition, and gun sellers are expecting another bonanza if Obama wins a second term. We’ve seen a dramatic wave of right-wing domestic terrorism since Barack Obama’s election. Recently, four active-duty soldiers – and five others – based at Fort Stewart, Georgia, were arrested after murdering two compatriots they suspected of betraying their plot to assassinate Obama. The group had been “stockpiling weapons and bomb parts to overthrow the U.S. government.” With $87,000 in weapons and explosives — and combat training courtesy of Uncle Sam — this was a potentially devastating plot. Just think about the havoc that a few heavily-armed men with military discipline were able to wreak in Mumbai in 2008.

It’s a real threat, but political correctness keeps it in the shadows. At a senate hearing last week, a former Department of Homeland Security official named Daryl Johnson testified that “the threat of domestic terrorism motivated by extremist ideologies is often dismissed and overlooked in the national media and within the U.S. government.” He continued:

Yet we are currently seeing an upsurge in domestic non-Islamic extremist activity, specifically from violent right-wing extremists. While violent left-wing attacks were more prevalent in the 1970s, today the bulk of violent domestic activity emanates from the right wing…. Since the 2008 presidential election, domestic non-Islamic extremists have shot 27 law enforcement officers, killing 16 of them.

That the “unskewed” polls show Romney heading towards a blow-out win is likely to lead more disturbed people to see themselves as victims of a dark plot to undermine America’s “traditional values.” It’s not the only iteration of the alternate universe that the right has conjured up in recent years – just ponder, for a moment, that the creator of “Conservapedia” – a hilariously inaccurate right-wing version of Wikipedia – has undertaken to write a distinctly conservative version of the Bible (one in which Jesus presumably inveighs against taxes and regulation dragging down job creators, and doesn’t constantly blather about the poor).

But while those efforts are often laughable, the unintended consequences of offering the hard-right a Bizarro World analysis of the 2012 election may prove deadly serious if Obama pulls out a win.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He’s the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

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Is the Right-Wing Psyche Allergic to Reality? A New Study Shows Conservatives Ignore Facts More Than Liberals

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Right Wing, Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Wingnuts

Is the Right-Wing Psyche Allergic to Reality? A New Study Shows Conservatives Ignore Facts More Than Liberals
More evidence that conservatives tilted their views of the facts to favor their moral convictions more than liberals did, on every single issue.

This story was originally published at Salon.

Last week, the country convulsed with outrage over Missouri Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s false suggestion that women who are raped have a special bodily defense mechanism against getting pregnant. Akin’s claim stood out due to its highly offensive nature, but it’s reminiscent of any number of other parallel cases in which conservative Christians have cited dubious “facts” to help rationalize their moral convictions. Take the twin assertions that having an abortion causes breast cancer or mental disorders, for instance. Or the denial of human evolution. Or false claims that same-sex parenting hurts kids. Or that you can choose whether to be gay, and undergo therapy to reverse that choice. The ludicrous assertion that women who are raped have a physiological defense mechanism against pregnancy is just part of a long litany of other falsehoods in the Christian right’s moral and emotional war against science.

In fact, even as Akin reaped a whirlwind of disdain and disgust, a new scientific paper has appeared with uncanny timing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, underscoring what is actually happening when people contort facts to justify their deep seated beliefs or moral systems. Perhaps most strikingly, one punch line of the new research is that political conservatives, like Akin, appear to do this significantly more than political liberals.

In recent years, the field of moral psychology has been strongly influenced by a theory known as “moral intuitionism,” which has been championed by the University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Dealing a blow to the notion of humans as primarily rational actors, Haidt instead postulates that our views of what is right and wrong are rooted in gut emotions, which fire rapidly when we encounter certain moral situations or dilemmas—responding far more quickly than our rational thoughts. Thus, we evaluate facts, arguments, and new information in a way that is subconsciously guided, ormotivated, by our prior moral emotions. What this means–in Haidt’s famed formulation–is that when it comes to evaluating facts that are relevant to our deep seated morals or beliefs, we don’t act like scientists. Rather, we act like lawyers, contorting the evidence to support our moral argument.

But are we all equally lawyerly? The new paper, by psychologists Brittany Liu and Peter Ditto of the University of California-Irvine, suggests that may not actually be the case.

In their study, Liu and Ditto asked over 1,500 people about their moral and factual views on four highly divisive political issues. Two of them–the death penalty and the forceful interrogation of terrorists using techniques like water-boarding–are ones where liberals tend to think the act in question is morally unacceptableeven if it actually yields benefits (for instance, deterring crime, or providing intelligence that can help prevent further terrorist strikes). The other two–providing information about condoms in the context of sex education, and embryonic stem cell research–are ones where conservatives tend to think the act in question is unacceptable even if it yields benefits (helping to prevent unwanted pregnancies, leading to cures for devastating diseases).

In the experiment, the subjects were first asked about their absolute moral beliefs: For instance, is the death penalty wrongeven if it deters others from committing crimes? But they were also asked about various factual aspects of each topic: Does the death penalty deter crime? Do condoms work to prevent pregnancy? Does embryonic stem cell research hold medical promise? And so on.

If you believe some act is absolutely wrong, period, you shouldn’t actually care about its costs and benefits. Those should be irrelevant to your moral judgment. Yet in analyzing the data, Liu and Ditto found a strong correlation, across all of the issues, between believing something is morally wrong in all case–such as the death penalty–and also believing that it has low benefits (e.g., doesn’t deter crime) or high costs (lots of innocent people getting executed). In other words, liberals and conservatives alike shaded their assessment of the facts so as to align them with their moral convictions–establishing what Liu and Ditto call a “moral coherence” between their ethical and factual views. Neither side was innocent when it came toconfusing “is” and “ought” (as moral philosophers might put it).

However, not everyone was equally susceptible to this behavior. Rather, the researchers found three risk factors, so to speak, that seem to worsen the standard human penchant for contorting the facts to one’s moral views. Two those were pretty unsurprising: Having a strong moral view about a topic makes one’s inclination towards “moral coherence” worse, as does knowing a lot about the subject (across studies, knowledge simply seems to make us better at maintaining and defending what we already believe). But the third risk factor is likely to prove quite controversial: political conservatism.

In the study, Liu and Ditto report, conservatives tilted their views of the facts to favor their moral convictions more than liberals did, on every single issue. And that was true whether it was a topic that liberals oppose (the death penalty) or that conservatives oppose (embryonic stem cell research). “Conservatives are doing this to a larger degree across four different issues,” Liu explained in an interview. “Including two that are leaning to the liberal side, not the conservative side.”

There is a longstanding (if controversial) body of research on liberal-conservative psychological differences that may provide an answer for why this occurs. Conservatives, Liu notes, score higher on a trait called the need for cognitive closure, which describes a feeling of discomfort with uncertainty and the need to hold a firm belief, a firm conviction, unwaveringly. Insofar as a need for closure pushes one to want to hold coherent, consistent beliefs–and makes one intolerant of ambiguity–it makes sense that wanting to achieve “moral coherence” between one’s factual and moral views would also go along with it. Conservatives, in this interpretation, would naturally have more conviction that the facts of the world, and their moral systems, are perfectly aligned. Liberals, in contrast, might be more conflicted–supportive of embryonic stem cell research, for instance, but nourishing doubts about whether the scientific promise we heard so much about a decade ago is being realized.

In documenting an apparent left-right difference in emotional reasoning about what is factually true, the new paper wades into a growing debate over what the Yale researcher Dan Kahan has labeled “ideological asymmetry.” This is the idea that one side of the political spectrum, more than the other, shows a form of biased or motivated assessment of facts–a view that Kahan rejects. Indeed, he recently ran a different study and found that liberals and conservatives were more symmetrical in their biases, albeit not on a live political issue.

The question of why some researchers find results seeming to support the left-right asymmetry hypothesis, even as others do not, remains unresolved. But the new paper by Liu and Ditto will surely sharpen it. Indeed, Kahan has already weighed in on the paper, acknowledging that it provides evidence in support of asymmetry, but observing that in his view, the evidence againstasymmetry from other research remains more weighty.

The upshot, for now, is that it’s hard to deny that all people engage in goal-directed reasoning, bending facts in favor of their moralities or belief systems. But–to butcher George Orwell–it may also be true that while all humans are biased by their prior beliefs and emotions, some humans are more biased than others.

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including “The Republican War on Science” (2005). His next book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality,” is due out in April.
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American Conservatism | Ushering In The Age of Absurdity

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Birtherism, Birthers, Republican Anti-Science, Republican Hypocrisy, Republican Insanity, Republican Loons, Republicans Regressive, Right Wing, Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Right Wing Buffoons, Right Wing Clown Car, Right Wing Conspiracies, Right Wing Crackpot, Right Wing Crackpots, Right Wing Crazies, Right Wing Culture Wars, Right Wing Freaks, Right Wing Kooks, Right Wing Lies, Right Wing Nuts, Secular United States, Separation of Church and State, Tea Baggers, Tea Party, Tea Party Racism, Tea Party Racists

Quote of the Day: Modern Conservatism

Via:- Mario Piperni

No More Mister Nice Blog:

…the unreported story of our times is that birtherism isn’t an isolated example of paranoid lunacy taking hold of a disturbingly large segment of the population — in fact, modern conservatism is driven by multiple lunatic theories that are precisely as delusional as birtherism.

True…but the mulitple lunacies have been reported time and time again. The problem is that the people who should be paying attention aren’t listening to anyone whose first name isn’t Rush, Glenn or Sean.

The theories:

  • Birtherism
  • Obama is a Muslim
  • Obama is a Communist
  • Obama is the anti-Christ
  • Obama eats little white babies on Tuesdays (made that one up…but not by much)
  • Tax cuts for the rich creates jobs
  • Homosexuality is a perversion and can be cured with prayer
  • The Tea Party is a grassroots movement
  • Corporations are people
  • Bush, Palin and Bachmann have functioning brains
  • Abstinence education prevents teenage pregnancies
  • Climate change is a hoax
  • The GOP in its current state is a serious political party
  • FOX News is fair and balanced
  • The Affordable Care Act creates death panels
  • Creationism is science
  • Evolution is a flawed theory

And on it goes…the delusional theories of a self-destructing political party.

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The ‘Primitive’ Conservative Right Wing Brain

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Inferior Right Wing Brain, Reich Wing, Religion and the Brain, Right Wing, Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Right Wing Buffoons, Right Wing Crackpots, Right Wing Crazies

Tory voters found to have larger ‘primitive’ lobe in brain

Our political allegiances could be hard-wired into our brains, neuroscientists believe.

Researchers have found evidence that the brains of conservatives are a different shape to those of Left-wingers.

Scans of 90 students’ brains at University College London uncovered a ‘strong correlation’ between the thickness of two particular areas of grey matter and an individual’s political views.

David Cameron and Nick CleggBrain buddies? Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron (right) is more likely to have a thicker amygdala while Liberal Nick Clegg could be expected to have a larger anterior cingulates

Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala – a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion.

It is an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain’s medial temporal lobe.

However, those aligned to the left had thicker anterior cingulates – which is an area associated with anticipation and decision-making.

The research was carried out by Geraint Rees director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience who said he was ‘very surprised’ by the finding, which is being peer reviewed before publication next year.

It was commissioned as a light-hearted experiment by actor Colin Firth as part of his turn guest editing BBC Radio 4‘s Today programme but has now developed into a serious effort to discover whether we are programmed with a particular political view.

An MRI scan of the brain. The right amygdala - an ancient part of the brain - was larger in those people who described themselves as conservativeAn MRI scan of the brain. The right amygdala – an ancient part of the brain – was larger in those people who described themselves as conservative. It’s located where the yellow area meets the red in the centre of the picture

Professor Rees said that although it was not precise enough to be able to predict someone’s stance simply from a scan, there was ‘a strong correlation that reaches all our scientific tests of significance’.

‘The anterior cingulate is a part of the brain that is on the middle surface of the brain at the front and we found that the thickness of the grey matter, where the nerve cells of neurons are, was thicker the more people described themselves as liberal or left wing and thinner the more they described themselves as conservative or right wing,’ he told the programme.

‘The amygdala is a part of the brain which is very old and very ancient and thought to be very primitive and to do with the detection of emotions. The right amygdala was larger in those people who described themselves as conservative.

Colin Firth commissioned the study as a light-hearted experiment but that has now developed into something more seriousColin Firth commissioned the study as a light-hearted experiment but that has now developed into something more serious

‘It is very significant because it does suggest there is something about political attitudes that are either encoded in our brain structure through our experience or that our brain structure in some way determines or results in our political attitudes.’

Mr Firth – who recently declared he had ended public support for the Liberal Democrats – said he would like to have party leader and now Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg subjected to the tests.

‘I think we should have him scanned,’ he said.

He said the coalition made him ‘extremely uneasy’ but would not rule out voting Lib Dem in future.

‘I would have to see what identity they took on because I don’t recognise them at the moment. I think all three parties are in a state of re-evaluation.’

Talking about the experiment, he said: ‘I took this on as a fairly frivolous exercise: I just decided to find out what was biologically wrong with people who don’t agree with me and see what scientists had to say about it and they actually came up with something.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1342239/Brain-study-reveals-right-wing-conservatives-larger-primitive-amygdala.html#ixzz1qDdxqUtp

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Why The Right-Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Right Wing Crackpots, Right Wing Crazies, Right Wing Nuts

How the Right-Wing Brain Works and What That Means for Progressives

            There really is a science of conservative morality, and it really is vastly different from liberal morality. And there are key lessons to be drawn from this research.

March 20, 2012  |

Photo Credit: ShutterStock.com
Editor’s Note: This essay draws upon Chris Mooney’s forthcoming book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality (due out in April from Wiley), as well as his interviews with George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt and Dan Kahan on the Point of Inquiry podcast.

If you’re a liberal or a progressive these days, you could be forgiven for being baffled and frustrated by conservatives. Their views and actions seem completely alien to us—or worse. From cheering at executions, to wanting to “throw up” over church-state separation, to seeking to “drown” government “in the bathtub” (except when it is cracking down on porn, apparently) conservatives not only seem very different, but also very inconsistent.

Even the most well-read liberals and progressives can be forgiven for being confused, because the experts themselves—George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt and others–have different ways of explaining what they call conservatives’ “morality” or “moral systems.” Are we dealing with a bunch of die-hard anti-government types in their bunkers, or the strict father family? Are our intellectual adversaries free-market libertarians, or right-wing authoritarians—and do they even know the difference?

But to all you liberals I say, have hope: It’s not nearly so baffling as it may at first appear. Having interviewed many of these experts over the course of the last year, my sense is that despite coming from different fields and using different terminologies, they are saying many of the same things. Most important, their work suggests that there really is a science of conservative morality, and it really is very different from liberal morality. And there are key lessons to be drawn from this research about how to interact (and not interact) with our intellectual opponents.

That’s what I’m going to show—but first, let me first emphasize that morality isn’t the only way in which liberals and conservatives differ. They differ on a wide variety of traits–and it is not necessarily clear, as Jonathan Haidt recently put it to me, what’s the root of the flower, what’s the stem and what’s the leaves.

But set that aside for now. Moral differences between left and right tend to draw the greatest amount of attention, and for good reason: They seem most directly implicated in policy disputes and the culture wars alike.

Another thing that you need to know at the outset about conservative “morality” is that it’s not at all the sort of thing that moral philosophers debate endlessly about. We’re not talking about a highly developed intellectual system for determining the way one ought to act, like deontology or utilitarianism. We’re not paging Immanuel Kant or Jeremy Bentham.

Rather, we’re talking about the deep-seated impulses that push conservatives (or liberals) to act in a certain way. These needn’t be “moral” or “ethical” at all, in the sense of maximizing human happiness, ensuring the greatest good for the greatest number, adhering to a consistent set of rules and principles, and so on. Indeed, they may even be highly immoral by such standards—but there’s no denying that they are very real, and must be contended with.

The Science of Left-Right Morality

So how do conservatives think—and more important still, what do we know scientifically about how they think?

Perhaps the earliest and most influential thinker into this fray was the Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, with his classic book Moral Politics and many subsequent works (most recently, this item at Huffington Post). Lakoff’s opening premise is that we all think in metaphors. These are not the kind of thing that English majors study, but rather real, physical circuits in the brain that structure our cognition, and that are strengthened the more they are used. For instance, we learn at a very early age how things go up and things go down, and then we talk about the stock market and individual fortunes “rising” and “falling”—a metaphor.

For Lakoff, one metaphor in particular is of overriding importance in our politics: The metaphor that uses the family as a model for broader groups in society—from athletic teams to companies to governments. The problem, Lakoff says, is that we have different conceptions of the family, with conservatives embracing a “strict father” model and liberals embracing a caring, empathetic and “nurturing” version of a parent.

The strict father family is like a free-market system, and yet also very hierarchical and authoritarian. It’s a harsh world out there and the father (the supreme and always male authority) is tough and will teach the kids to be tough, because there will be no one to protect them once the father is gone. The political implications are obvious. In contrast, the nurturing parent family emphasizes love, care and growth—and, so the argument goes, compassionate government control.

Lakoff has been extremely influential, but it’s important to also consider other scientific analyses of the moral systems of left and right. Enter the University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose new book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion has just come out. In his own research, Haidt initially identified five (and more recently, six) separate moral intuitions that appear to make us feel strongly about situations before we’re even consciously aware of thinking about them; that powerfully guide our reasoning; and that differ strikingly from left and right.

Haidt’s first five intuitions, or “moral foundations,” are 1) the sense of needing to provide care and protect from harm; 2) the sense of what is just and fair; 3) the sense of loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for a group; 4) the sense of obedience or respect for authority; and 5) the sense of needing to preserve purity or sanctity. And politically, Haidt finds that liberals tend to strongly emphasize the first two moral intuitions (harm and fairness) in their responses to situations and events, but are much weaker on emphasizing the other three (group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity or sanctity). By contrast, Haidt finds that conservatives more than liberals respond to all five moral intuitions.

Indeed, multiple studies associate conservatism with a greater disgust reflex or sensitivity. In one telling experiment, subjects who were asked to use a hand wipe before answering questions, or to answer them near a hand sanitizer, gave more politically conservative answers. Haidt even told me in our interview that when someone like Rick Santorum talks about wanting to “throw up,” that may indeed signal a strong disgust sensitivity.

More recently, Haidt and his colleagues added a sixth moral foundation: “Liberty/oppression.” Liberals and conservatives alike care about being free from tyranny, from unjust exertions of power, but they seem to apply this impulse differently. Liberals use it (once again) to stand up for the poor, the weak; conservatives use it to support the “don’t tread on me” fulminating against big government (and global government) of the Tea Party. This, incidentally, creates a key emotional bond between libertarians on the one hand, and religious conservatives on the other.

Haidt strives to understand the conservative perspective, and to walk a middle path between left and right—but he fully admits in his book that conservative morality is more “parochial.” Conservatives, writes Haidt, are more “concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity.” And Haidt further suggests that this is not his own view of what is ethical, writing that “when we talk about making laws and implementing public policies in Western democracies that contain some degree of ethnic and moral diversity, then I think there is no compelling alternative to utilitarianism.” It’s hard to see how thinking about the good of the in-group (rather than the good of everyone) could be considered very utilitarian.

But to my mind, here’s the really telling thing about all of this. When you get right down to it, Lakoff and Haidt seem to be singing harmony with each other. It’s not just that they could both be right—it’s that the large overlap between them strengthens both accounts, especially since the two researchers are coming from different fields and using very different methodologies and terminologies.

Lakoff’s system overlaps with Haidt’s in multiple places—most obviously when it comes to liberals showing broader empathy and wanting to care for those who are harmed (nurturing parent) and conservatives respecting authority (strict father). But the overlaps are larger still, for the strict father family is also an in-group and quite individualistic—in other words, prizing the conservative version of freedom or liberty.

What’s more, both of these systems are also consistent with a third approach that is growing in influence: The cultural cognition theory being advanced by Yale’s Dan Kahan and his colleagues, which divides us morally into “hierarchs” and “egalitarians” along one axis, and “individualists” and “communitarians” along another (helpful image here). Conservatives, in this scheme, tend towards the hierarchical and the individualistic; liberals tend toward the egalitarian and the communitarian.

Throwing Kahan into the mix—and yes, he uses yet another methodology–we once again find great consistency with Lakoff and Haidt. Egalitarians worry about fairness; communitarians about protecting the innocent from harm; hierarchs about authority and the group (and probably sanctity or purity—hierarchs tend toward the religious). Individualists are, basically, exercisers of the conservative version of freedom and liberty.

Terminology aside, then, Lakoff, Haidt and Kahan seem to have considerably more grounds for agreement with each other than for disagreement, at least when it comes to describing what actually motivates political conservatives and political liberals.

And in fact, that’s just the beginning of the expert agreement. In all of these schemes, what’s being called “morality” is emotional and, in significant part, automatic. It’s not about the conscious decisions you make about situations or policies—or at least, not primarily. Rather, the focus is on the unconscious impulses that shape how you think about situations before you’re even aware you’re doing so, and then guide (and bias) your reasoning.

This leads Lakoff and Haidt to strongly reject what you might call the “Enlightenment model” for thinking about reasoning and persuasion, and leads Kahan to talk about motivated reasoning, rather than rational or objective reasoning. Once again, these thinkers are essentially agreeing that because morality biases us long before consciousness and reasoning set in, factual and logical argument are not at all a good way to get us to change our behavior and how we respond.

This is also a point I made recently, noting how Republicans become more factually wrong with higher levels of education. Facts clearly don’t change their minds—if anything, they make matters worse! Lakoff, too, emphasizes how refuting a false conservative claim can actually reinforce it. And he doesn’t merely show why the Enlightenment mode of thinking is outdated; he also stresses that liberals are more wedded to it than conservatives, and this irrational rationalism lies at the root of many political failures on the left.

Getting Through

On the one hand, the apparent consensus among these experts is surely something to rejoice about. Progress is finally being made at understanding the emotional and cognitive roots of the culture war and our political dysfunction alike. But if all of this is really true—if conservatives and liberals have deep seated and automatic moral and emotional differences—then what should we do about it?

Here, finally, we do find real disagreement among the pros. Lakoff would have liberals combat conservative morality by shouting their own values from the rooftops, and never falling for conservative words and frames. Haidt would increase political civility by remaking our institutions of government to literally make liberals and conservatives feel empathetic bonds and the power of teamwork. And Kahan has done experiments showing that talking about the same issue in different value laden “frames” leads to different outcomes. For instance, if you discuss dealing with global warming in an individualistic frame—by emphasizing the importance of free market approaches like nuclear power—then you open conservative minds, at least to an extent. We’ve got data on that.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the experts become dissonant as they move from merely describing conservative morality to outlining strategy. After all, there’s a heck of a lot more uncertainty involved when you start to prescribe courses of action aimed at achieving particular outcomes. Understanding conservatives in controlled experiments is one thing; trying to outline a communications strategy with Fox News around, ready to pounce, is another matter.

Nevertheless, here’s what I’ve been able to extract.

Clearly, you shouldn’t try to persuade your ideological opponents by citing threatening facts. Rather, if your goal is an honest give-and-take, you should demonstrate the existence of common ground and shared values before broaching anything controversial, and you should interact calmly and interpersonally. To throw emotion into the mix is to stoke automatic, moralistic, indignant responses.

Such are some scientific tips about trying to communicate and persuade–but liberals should not get overoptimistic about the idea of convincing conservatives to change their beliefs, much less their moral responses. There are far too many factors arrayed against this possibility at present—not just the deeply rooted and instinctive nature of moral intuitions, but our current political polarization, by parties and also by information channels.

You can’t have a calm, unemotional conversation when everything is framed as a battle, as it currently is. Our warfare over reality, and for control of the country, is just too intense. And in a “wartime” situation, conservative have their in-group preferences to naturally fall back on.

But if we merge together Lakoff and Haidt, then I think we do end up with some good advice for liberals who want to advance their own view of what is moral. On the one hand, they should righteously advance their own values, not conservative ones. But they should remain fully aware that these values are somewhat limited since, as Haidt shows, conservatives seem to have a broader moral palette.

To reach the political middle, then, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to demonstrate much more loyalty than liberals are used to emphasizing, and to show respect for authority as well—which doesn’t come so naturally to us. What authority should we respect? I suggest either the authority of president, or perhaps better yet, the authority of the Founding Fathers. Let’s face it: Conservatives have insulted, defiled, and disobeyed the secular, rational, and Enlightenment legacy of the people who founded this country (if you want to get moralistic about it).

When it comes to loyalty and unity in particular, liberals could stand to look in the mirror and try to be more…conservative. Not in their substantive policy views, but in their ability to act as a team with one purpose and one goal that cannot be compromised or weakened. Diversity is great for our society—but not for our objectives. And that means we have something to learn from conservatives: They may not know how to make America better, but they certainly know how to take a strong, united and moralistic stand in order to get what they want.

That’s an example that liberals could do worse than to follow.

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including “The Republican War on Science” (2005). His next book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality,” is due out in April.
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