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Miami Herald: I’m done trying to understand Trump supporters. Why don’t they try to understand me?


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MAGA leaders call for the troops to keep Trump in office

 

An 1807 law invoked only in the most violent circumstances is now a rallying cry for the MAGA-ites most committed to the fantasy that Donald Trump will never leave office.

 

The law, the Insurrection Act, allows the president to deploy troops to suppress domestic uprisings — not to overturn elections.

 

But that hasn’t stopped the act from becoming a buzzword and cure-all for prominent MAGA figures like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, two prominent pro-Trump attorneys leading efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and even one North Carolina state lawmaker. Others like Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who was recently pardoned for lying to the FBI, have made adjacent calls for Trump to impose martial law. The ideas have circulated in pro-Trump outlets and were being discussed over the weekend among the thousands of MAGA protesters who descended on state capitols and the Supreme Court to falsely claim Trump had won the election.

 

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This crazy person is upset her husband lost his job after assaulting a woman while video taping him ignorantly protesting the vote. He is quite the big man - and by that I mean a small minded POS. She is actually a council woman and blames it all on ANTIFA. I have no sympathy for either. 

 

 

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‘Free speech’ Reddit clone Voat says it will shut down on Christmas

 

Voat, an “anti-censorship” alternative social network that’s been described as the “alt-right Reddit,” is scheduled to shut down on December 25th. Voat co-founder Justin Chastain announced the pending closure yesterday, saying the site had run out of money after an investor defaulted on their contract in March. “I personally decided to keep Voat up until after the US election of 2020. I’ve been paying the costs out of pocket but now I’m out of money,” Chastain wrote.

 

Voat was founded in 2014 and hosted Reddit-like forums with minimal moderation. It grew rapidly after Reddit added an anti-harassment policy and banned five subreddits that it said violated the rules, including its infamous r/fatpeoplehate forum. The site set a model for other “censorship-free” alternatives to mainstream web platforms, a category that grew to include Gab, Parler, and the defunct crowdfunding site Hatreon.

 

While these sites often don’t take an explicit political stance, they’ve attracted a largely far-right user base that’s incensed by bigger networks’ crackdowns. Voat also provided a home for the QAnon conspiracy movement after it was purged from most other platforms.

 

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This Article Won’t Change Your Mind

 

The theory of cognitive dissonance—the extreme discomfort of simultaneously holding two thoughts that are in conflict—was developed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s. In a famous study, Festinger and his colleagues embedded themselves with a doomsday prophet named Dorothy Martin and her cult of followers who believed that spacemen called the Guardians were coming to collect them in flying saucers, to save them from a coming flood. Needless to say, no spacemen (and no flood) ever came, but Martin just kept revising her predictions. Sure, the spacemen didn’t show up today, but they were sure to come tomorrow, and so on. The researchers watched with fascination as the believers kept on believing, despite all the evidence that they were wrong.

 

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter wrote in When Prophecy Fails, their 1957 book about this study. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point … Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.”

 

This doubling down in the face of conflicting evidence is a way of reducing the discomfort of dissonance, and is part of a set of behaviors known in the psychology literature as “motivated reasoning.” Motivated reasoning is how people convince themselves or remain convinced of what they want to believe—they seek out agreeable information and learn it more easily; and they avoid, ignore, devalue, forget, or argue against information that contradicts their beliefs.

 

It starts at the borders of attention—what people even allow to breach their bubbles. In a 1967 study, researchers had undergrads listen to some pre-recorded speeches, with a catch—the speeches were pretty staticky. But, the participants could press a button that reduced the static for a few seconds if they wanted to get a clearer listen. Sometimes the speeches were about smoking—either linking it to cancer, or disputing that link—and sometimes it was a speech attacking Christianity. Students who smoked were very eager to tune in to the speech that suggested cigarettes might not cause cancer, whereas nonsmokers were more likely to slam on the button for the antismoking speech. Similarly, the more-frequent churchgoers were happy to let the anti-Christian speech dissolve into static while the less religious would give the button a few presses.

 

People see evidence that disagrees with them as weaker, because ultimately, they’re asking themselves fundamentally different questions when evaluating that evidence, depending on whether they want to believe what it suggests or not, according to psychologist Tom Gilovich. “For desired conclusions,” he writes, “it is as if we ask ourselves ‘Can I believe this?’, but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, ‘Must I believe this?’” People come to some information seeking permission to believe, and to other information looking for escape routes.

 

In this environment, people with good information are valued. But expertise comes at a cost—it requires time and work. If you can get people to believe you’re a good source without actually being one, you get the benefits without having to put in the work. Liars prosper, in other words, if people believe them. So some researchers have suggested motivated reasoning may have developed as a “shield against manipulation.” A tendency to stick with what they already believe could help protect people from being taken in by every huckster with a convincing tale who comes along.


“This kind of arms-race between deception and detection is common in nature,” Boyer writes.

 

Spreading a tall tale also gives people something even more important than false expertise—it lets them know who’s on their side. If you accuse someone of being a witch, or explain why you think the contrails left by airplanes are actually spraying harmful chemicals, the people who take you at your word are clearly people you can trust, and who trust you. The people who dismiss your claims, or even those who just ask how you know, are not people you can count on to automatically side with you no matter what.

 

“You spread stories because you know that they’re likely to be a kind of litmus test, and the way people react will show whether they’re prepared to side with you or not,” Boyer says.

 

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Queens Republicans Under Fire for Maskless ‘Covid Conga Line’ Party

 

More than a dozen people shimmied through a glitzy banquet room in Queens earlier this month, forming a conga line during a holiday party thrown by a local Republican club. Coronavirus cases were spiking around the country, and it was days before Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo closed indoor dining in the city.

 

No one in the conga line wore a mask.

 

The dance was captured in a video that circulated on social media this week, leading to an outcry that culminated with criticism from the governor and led to an investigation by the State Liquor Authority.

 

 

The Whitestone Republican Club held the party on Dec. 9 at Il Bacco, an Italian restaurant in Little Neck, Queens.

 

“In early December we held a small gathering observing all the Covid guidelines in place at the time,” said a statement on the club’s Facebook page on Tuesday. “Every attendee was told to wear a mask and everyone either had one when entering or was given one.”

 

Officials at City Hall felt differently.

 

“There will be significant fines for this incident, and we’re looking at both the group that held the event and the establishment that hosted it,” said Mitch Schwartz, a spokesman for the mayor. “There will continue to be consequences for putting New Yorkers at risk.”

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