Does RACISM explain the rise of Donald Trump?

An amusing lack of thought below.   The study concerned is methodologically weak (many more females than males;  no representative sampling etc.) but I believe its conclusions are mostly right.  Support for Trump IS mediated by racism:  Leftist racism.

Mainstream  whites are discriminated against all the time by America's elites.  "Affirmative action" is nothing if not racist.  Leftist are the racists, not conservatives. And American whites don't like being discriminated against any more than blacks do.  It's only the brain-dead Left who think that the cure for discrimination is more discrimination.

And whites know that all sorts of minorities are privileged over them:  Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, homosexuals, the sexually confused, Greenies, welfare parasites etc.  So when reminded about the discrimination that they suffer, they become more favourable to those who are against favoritism:  The Donald and the Tea Party.  And that is exactly what the researchers found.

Being Leftists, the researchers seem to think that they have discredited Tea Party and Trump supporters in some way. They fail to see that mainstream whites have real grievances and that the Left is to blame for those grievances. White males in particular are both badly treated by government and often mocked, condemned and even demonized. The researchers seem to think that they should not be aware of all that. Trumpism is protest -- protest by ordinary decent people, nothing more. It is the Left who are responsible for the rise of Trump


Many white Americans now believe that their hierarchical standing is being threatened by minority groups, leading them to support political forces that would help ‘restore the status of whiteness,’ a new study claims.

Through a series of online experiments, a Stanford University sociologist found that heightened levels of racial resentment were tied to greater support for the Tea Party in white participants.

The study suggests that the perceived ‘decline of whiteness’ prompts some to align with platforms that condemn minority groups – and they say this mindset may be at play in the rise of Donald Trump.

According to Stanford professor of sociology Robb Willer, this trend began with the election of President Obama in 2008 and grew through the Great Recession, along with the rising political influence of minorities in America.

The team, which also included Matthew Feinberg of the University of Toronto and Rachel Wetts of the University of California, Berkeley, conducted five survey-based online experiments involving 1,329 participants.

In the first, white participants were shown altered photos of President Obama.

Those who viewed an artificially darkened picture of Obama were more likely to express their support for the Tea Party, at 22 percent, compared with those who were shown a lightened photo, at just 12 percent.

In another set of studies, white participants were either told that white share of the total U.S. population was decreasing, or that whites’ average income was declining in comparison to other ethnic groups.

Both groups showed greater support for the Tea Party, which the researchers say is partly explained by increased racial resentment.

This was also seen when the researchers emphasized the declining portion of whites in America.

In the last experiment, the researchers found that the participants reported stronger support for the Tea Party when they emphasized aspects of the platform that could have racial implications, including opposition to immigration and welfare, over libertarian ones, like government spending.

The researchers say this is the first study to demonstrate the link between Tea Party support and racial resentment.

WHAT THE STUDY CLAIMS

Since the election of President Obama in 2008, followed by the Great Recession and the rising political influence of minorities in America, some white Americans feel their ‘racial standing’ is threatened, the researchers say.

‘Together these factors could be viewed as a collective threat to the status of whiteness in the U.S., which provided fertile ground for the rise of a social movement that promoted a return to the way things used to be in America, including a set of policies that could restore whites’ position on top in the racial status hierarchy,’ Willer said.

The study suggests that this perceived ‘decline of whiteness’ prompts some to align with platforms that condemn minority groups, including the Tea Party and likely even Donald Trump.

These groups advocate restrictions on immigration, opposition to Obama, militant positions toward Muslim nations, and other policies which the researchers say would help to 'restore the standing of whites in America.'

‘Past work finds that economic downturns can exacerbate racial resentment by giving whites the sense that they have a shrinking piece of a shrinking pie,’ Willer said.

This, combined with the election of a non-white president and other factors in recent years, are leading some white Americans to feel more ‘threatened,’ the researcher explains.

‘Together these factors could be viewed as a collective threat to the status of whiteness in the U.S., which provided fertile ground for the rise of a social movement that promoted a return to the way things used to be in America, including a set of policies that could restore whites’ position on top in the racial status hierarchy,’ Willer said.

And, the findings don’t just apply to the Tea Party; the researcher explains that the growing trend is likely playing a role in the growing support for Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.

‘Donald Trump’s candidacy pulls support from much of the same base that the Tea Party did and has,' Willer said.

'And there is good reason to think that many of the same psychological forces propelling Tea Party support also propel support for Trump’s candidacy. Indeed, Trump’s statements probably go further in criticizing minority groups than the Tea Party did.'

‘What was largely implicit in the case of the Tea Party has become more explicit in the case of Trump’s candidacy’ Willer said.

According to Willer, the findings suggest the ‘threats’ to racial status have caused some to turn to support for the Tea Party, and likely Trump, based on their advocacy of certain policies, including restrictions on immigration, opposition to Obama, militant positions toward Muslim nations.

The researcher says these policies would help to 'restore the standing of whites in America.'

SOURCE

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GOP Establishment wails that Trump isn’t a conservative. Have they looked in the mirror recently?



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Donald Trump is going to troll his way to victory

IN INTERNET parlance, a troll is a malevolent mischief-maker, a commenter who says something politically incorrect, then sits back and enjoys the resulting furore — sometimes even fanning the flames under multiple contradictory identities.

In politics, the master troll is Donald Trump.

During the recent GOP nominating process, he gave the media the vapours by criticising John McCain’s war record, and promising to ban all Muslims from the US and build a giant fence across the Mexican border. Each time, bien-pensant society (largely consisting of leftist politicians and fellow-travelling journalists) assured their increasingly nervous followers that this time the troll had gone too far, that Trump was finished.

Instead, he only got stronger. Why? The public was tired of politics as usual, sick of polite society. In the internet age, they loved the troll.

Last week, The Donald set off another tempest in a piñata when he posted a Cinco de Mayo tweet of himself sitting at his desk about to dine on a taco bowl from the Trump Grill. What really frosted his critics was his line: “I love Hispanics!”

It was classic Trump, being simultaneously innocuous (what was he going to say — “I hate Hispanics”?); funny (is he serious?); and sure to get plenty of attention. Once again, there was the master troll, on every news show and political web site in the country. “Dumb and condescending and racist,” groused Gawker.

Meanwhile, his fans just laugh and sit back to await the next outrage. Trump has disrupted the conventional wisdom of politics, where every speech is focus-grouped into blandness. Some think he says whatever pops into his head, but it’s more likely that he often makes statements just to be mischievous, in order to discomfit and disrupt his enemies.

Whatever he says doesn’t have to be particularly consistent, it just has to get the goats of the right people, to keep everyone focused on him, not on Hillary Clinton. Heck, even Hillary isn’t focused on Hillary.

What does this mean for his chances of being elected?

Well, the people who hate Trump aren’t going to stop if he no longer says outrageous things. The people who love Trump aren’t going to stop backing him. Those who haven’t made up their minds will, I suspect, not take everything Trump says seriously. But they may be amused, especially when compared to Hillary Clinton’s scandals. Setting up your email server to hide your correspondence from the public while the Romanians hack into it sounds a bit worse than tucking into a taco bowl.

The only worry Trump should have is if he fails to follow through on his promises. If his fans find out he’s trolling them, it really will end him.

Politics today, as Trump understands, is largely a narrative-driven reality show with good guys and bad guys.

His campaign is a gamble that the good guys — the scorned white working class, economically struggling inner-city blacks to whom Obama and the Democrats have consistently given the back of their hand, patriotic Americans in general — vastly outnumber the bad guys moving jobs overseas, racking up debt, allowing immigrants to flood in unchecked.

And if you don’t believe that, just ask Barack Obama, whose juvenile foreign-policy guru, Ben Rhodes, recently confessed that the White House shamelessly manipulated its own useful idiots of the press and others (“the Blob,” he called it) in order to foist its disgraceful Iran deal upon a trusting but duped public.

But I suspect the liberal politician attitude toward “shaping narratives” will be a typical one — it’s only right when we do it.

SOURCE

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More Welfare Going to Illegals Than U.S. Citizens



The average American household receives $4,431 a year in federal welfare, including food stamps and cash. That’s plenty of evidence for Barack Obama’s poor economic record, but it gets worse. Illegal immigrants take in an average $5,692 from the federal government a year. Who are the people paying taxes? The numbers were crunched by the Center for Immigration Studies, which last year also discovered that 51% of immigrant households take in some sort of federal aid compared to 30% of native households.

“It is difficult to imagine sitting down to craft an immigration policy that will benefit the American people and coming up with one in which immigrants consume more welfare than natives,” wrote Jason Richwine, the analyst who crunched the numbers. “It’s a strong indication that current policy is not working.” Immigrants — both legal and otherwise — take in more welfare because they often have more children and attained less education than people born here in the United States. America may be the land of opportunity, but it should present its opportunity through work and enterprise, not creating a whole class of people dependent on the government.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- mainly about The Donald

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