Trump and conspiracy theories

There is a layman's version here of the academic article below.  The article does not explicitly refer to Trump and his supporters but there can be no doubt about where the gun is aimed.  Basically, the article implies Trump voters are simpletons who explain everything by inventing conspiracies

Their basis for that is however a correlation and, as we all know, correlations don't prove causation.  So the authors are just theorizing about what is behind their findings.  But if they can theorize so can I and I see a rather different causal chain

For a start, tarring conservatives as  conspiracy theorists is a bit rich.  On some accounts up to a third of Democrat voters see the 9/11 attacks as a put-up job arranged by George Bush II.  That's some conspiracy!  And the biggest conspiracy theory of all -- antisemitism -- had its most notable protagonist in the socialist Hitler.  And to this day antisemitism is by far most common among Leftists -- particularly in Britain.

What the authors below found was that people who thought America had lost its way and was going downhill also tended to see conspiracy theories around them.  People who agreed with statements such as: "In this country, there is a 'real America' distinct from those who don't share the same values" and "America's greatest values are increasingly decaying from within" were more likely to agree with statements such as: "The media is the puppet of those in power" and "Nothing in politics or world affairs happens by accident or coincidence."

Note that the latter statement is straight Calvinism (See Ephesians 1:4,11) and is also believed by Muslims -- so calling it a conspiracy theory is defining conspiracy theories very widely.  Are all Presbyterians conspiracy theorists?  And it is not only Presbyterians who see the hand of God in their lives. Many Christians do.  One suspects that the authors below know nothing about religion in America.  The leading author hails from an academic bubble in California so that could well be.

And it is certainly clear that most of the media serves the Leftist elite.  They don't preach mainstream values.  So again "conspiracy" is very broadly defined.

And the authors regard all conspiracy theories as wrong.  But are they? Most such theories probably are but what if one is right occasionally?  Using the broad definition of conspiracy favored by the authors below, an elite consensus could be called a conspiracy.  And the  co-ordinated message of the Leftist elite in praise of all sorts of unnatural things -- such as homosexuality and abortion -- is certainly an elite consensus.

And it must look like a conspiracy to the man in the street -- and it is in one way: An attempt by a small and interconnected minority to bring about a major change in the circumstances of the majority.  Donald Trump's determination to disrupt that elite consensus won him power.

And the unanimous hostility of the establishment to Donald Trump during and after his election campaign could well be seen as a conspiracy -- co-ordinated action by an influential minority designed to take away the ordinary people's champion.

That is particularly so now that we know what Obama's FBI was up to.  There definitely was a quite unambiguous conspiracy there to defeat Trump.  So it is entirely reasonable to see conspiracies in America's deep state.  There WERE conspiracies there.  And that could obviously lead people to more readiness to accept conspiracy theories generally.  Conservatives do well to believe conspiracies given the realities of the day. Sadly, such a theory could well be right in today's world.

To summarize: The unanimous opposition to him among the elites led Donald Trump to suspect a conspiracy against him; He made that opposition to him (by the "swamp") a central part of his campaign; His followers saw the matter similarly and they have now been proven right.


The role of system identity threat in conspiracy theory endorsement

Christopher M. Federico et al.

Abstract

Conspiracy theories (CTs) about government officials and the institutions they represent are widespread, and span the ideological spectrum. In this study, we test hypotheses suggesting that system identity threat, or a perception that society's fundamental, defining values are under siege due to social change, will predict conspiracy thinking. Across two samples (N = 870, N = 2,702), we found that system identity threat is a strong predictor of a general tendency toward conspiracy thinking and endorsement of both ideological and non‐ideological CTs, even after accounting for numerous covariates. We also found that the relationship between system‐identity threat and conspiracy‐theory endorsement is mediated by conspiracy thinking. These results suggest that conspiracy‐theory endorsement may be a compensatory reaction to perceptions that society's essential character is changing.

SOURCE

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The Carnivores of Civil Liberties

Victor Davis Hanson
 
After a landslide loss in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic Party was resuscitated the following year by the Watergate scandal. The destruction of the Nixon presidency powered the Democrats to make huge political gains in the 1974 elections.

Watergate also birthed (or perhaps rebirthed) modern investigative journalism. A young generation of maverick reporters supposedly alone had challenged the establishment in order to uncover the whole truth about abuses of power by the Nixon administration.

Liberalism rode high during the Watergate era. It had demanded that civil liberties be protected from the illegal or unconstitutional overreach of the Nixon-era FBI, CIA and other agencies. Liberals alleged that out-of-control officials had spied on U.S. citizens for political purposes and then tried to mask their wrongdoing under the cover of “national security” or institutional “professionalism.”

All those legacies are now eroding. The Democratic Party, the investigative media and liberalism itself are now weirdly on the side of the reactionary administrative state. They have either downplayed or excused Watergate-like abuses of power by the former Barack Obama administration.

Liberal journalists apparently have few concerns that the FBI apparently used at least one secret informant to gather information about the 2016 Trump campaign. Nor are they much bothered that members of the Obama national security team unmasked the names of U.S. citizens who had been improperly surveilled. Many of those names then were illegally leaked to the press.

Democrats seem indifferent to the fact that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign paid a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on Republican candidate Donald Trump — largely by trafficking in unverified rumors from Russian interests. Obama administration officials leaked details from that dossier.

Civil libertarians appear unconcerned that the Department of Justice sought to deceive the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, getting it to grant warrants to allow the surveillance of U.S. citizens based on the suspect and politically motivated Steele dossier.

Few are upset that former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have lied under oath to Congress on matters pertaining to surveillance. Rather than being investigated by the media, both are now making frequent media appearances.

The FBI cannot remain credible when its former director, James Comey, leaks confidential memos about meetings with the president to the media — with the expressed intent of leveraging the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, who turned out to be a longtime friend of Comey’s.

Why have the former guardians of civil liberties flipped in the near half-century since Watergate?

One, both the media and the liberal establishment believed that the outsider Trump represented an existential danger to themselves and the nation at large — similar to the way operatives in the Nixon administration had felt about far-left presidential challenger George McGovern in 1972.

But this time around, liberals were not out of power as they were in 1972. Instead, they were the establishment. They held the reins of federal power under the Obama administration. And they chose to exercise it in a fashion similar to how Nixon’s team had in 1972.

Second, pollsters and the media were convinced that Hillary Clinton would be elected. As a result, members of the FBI, CIA and other federal bureaucracies apparently assumed that any extralegal efforts to stop the common menace Trump would be appreciated rather than punished by a soon-to-be President Clinton.

Three, those in the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign and the media formed an echo chamber. All convinced themselves that any means necessary to achieve the noble ends of precluding a Trump presidency were justified.

The danger of such groupthink continues; even now they are unaware of the impending bomb that is about to go off.

Public opinion has radically changed. A majority of Americans believe the Muller investigation is politically motivated, according to a CBS News poll.

The inspector general’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email scandal is soon due. It will likely detail violations of ethics and laws among Obama administration officials and may include criminal referrals.

Already, a few liberals and former Clinton supporters are warning the Left that it is on the wrong side of history and about to reverse the entire post-Watergate liberal tradition.

There is a reckoning on the horizon. It has nothing to do with Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Instead, the traditional, self-appointed watchdogs of government overreach have turned into the carnivores of civil liberties.

SOURCE

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The Mojo of Trumponomics

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that April is the cruelest month, but when it comes to America’s fiscal picture, nothing could be further from the truth about this past April. The latest government numbers confirm that last month was a blockbuster for growth, federal revenues, and deficit reduction.

One of the key principles of Trumponomics is that faster economic growth can help solve a multitude of other social and economic problems, from poverty to inner-city decline to lowering the national debt.

We’re not quite at a sustained elevated growth rate of 3 percent yet, but the latest economy snapshot tells us we are knocking on the door. The growth rate over the last four quarters came in at 2.9 percent, which was higher than any of the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Halfway through this current quarter, which began on April 1, the Atlanta Federal Reserve estimates growth at 4 percent. If that persists through the end of June, we will have reached an average growth rate of 3 percent under President Donald Trump.

Not bad, given that nearly every liberal critic trashed the president’s campaign forecast of 3 percent to 4 percent growth as an impossible dream.

Economists such as Larry Summers, Obama’s first chief economist, gloomily declared that we were mired in a new era of “secular stagnation” and that 3 percent growth was unachievable. Paul Krugman of The New York Times said it was more likely we would see flying cars than 3 percent to 4 percent growth.

Now for the even better news. We are already starting to see a fiscal dividend from Trump’s tax, energy, and pro-business policies. The Congressional Budget Office reports that tax revenues in April—by far the biggest month of the year for tax collections because of the April 15 filing deadline—totaled $515 billion, which was a robust 13 percent rise in receipts over last year.

MoneyWeek reports that the $218 billion monthly surplus (revenues over expenditures) this April was the largest ever, with the previous record being $180 billion in 2001. (April is always the one surplus month.)

Here’s the simple lesson: more growth, more tax revenue.

But there’s another lesson, and it is about how wrong the bean counters in Congress were who said this tax bill would “cost” the Treasury $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in lost revenues over the next decade.

If the higher growth rate that Trump has already accomplished remains in place, then the impact will be well over $3 trillion of more revenue and thus lower debt levels over the decade. Putting people to work is the best way to balance the budget. Period.

Critics will dismiss the importance of these higher revenue collections by arguing that the new receipts are for 2017 tax payments, which don’t take account of the tax cut that passed in December. This ignores that some of the growth we have seen was a result of the anticipation of the tax cut. Moreover, the fact that the tax cuts are just sinking in means that we should get even higher growth rates for the next several years at least.

Alas, it is not all good news in the April surprise. The inexcusable omnibus spending bill increased federal spending by some $300 billion in 2018, and we are starting to feel the impact of that splurge. Federal outlays are up 8.7 percent in April. That’s unforgivable, given that Republicans run everything in Washington these days.

No one thought that Trump could ramp up the growth rate to 3 percent or that his policies would boost federal revenues. But he is doing just that—which is why all that the Democrats and the media want to talk about these days is Russia and Stormy Daniels.

SOURCE

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Google Says Republicans Are Socialists

A search listed the California Republican Party's ideology as "Nazism."

Less than a week before the California primaries, Google search lists the state’s Republican Party ideology as “Nazism.” Vice News reports, “In the ‘knowledge panel’ that provides easy access to information next to search results, Google was showing ‘Nazism’ as an ‘ideology’ of the party as of Thursday morning. The word ‘Nazism’ was hyperlinked to a secondary page that shows ‘Nazism’ alongside other ‘ideologies’ of California Republicans like ‘Conservatism,’ ‘Market liberalism,’ ‘Fiscal conservatism,’ and ‘Green conservatism.’”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) blasted Google: “It is disgraceful that the world’s largest search engine has labeled millions of California Republicans as Nazis. This is just the latest incident in a disturbing trend to slander conservatives. These damaging actions must be held to account. The bias has to stop.” McCarthy is correct. The most recent example was Google’s silencing of pro-life ads before the Irish referendum on whether to legalize abortion. But don’t forget the tech giant’s firing of software engineer James Damore last year for his daring to question the company’s leftist dogma, or its use of the hate-mongering Southern Poverty Law Center to police YouTube.

Google responded with a “dog ate my homework” excuse, blaming the “mistake” on Wikipedia vandalism. In other words, “Oops, but it really wasn’t our fault. Can we move along now?”

But aside from Google’s convenient mistake, what may be more frustrating is the regular misrepresentation, even among conservatives, of Nazism as a far-right political movement. The fact is both Nazism and communism are extreme expressions that come out of the same leftist ideological camp of socialism. Both produce totalitarian forms of government that preach the “needs” of the collective over and against individual rights and Liberty. The primary difference between the two totalitarian ideologies is that of race-based nationalism versus collectivist globalism. The term “NAZI” itself was the German acronym for National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

By contrast, conservatism champions the protection of the rights and freedoms of the individual against the encroachment of the collective. Yet the Leftmedia has taken President Donald Trump’s populist message of America First (nationalism) and falsely linked it with racism in an effort to imply that Trump and all Republicans are fascist Nazis. Nothing could be further from reality, but in the age of identity politics, emotions rather than facts are what sell.

SOURCE

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Some sarcasm from Twitter

Trump is racist because...he's showing that a privileged rich white man can bring down unemployment among minorities in a way the guy before him couldn't

Horrifically, Trump will spend 8 years working to drive down unemployment and crime in black communities as a dogwhistle to racists

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