Thursday, January 19, 2017

Brainwashed

How Political Correctness Hijacked Trump Inauguration Protesters’ Brains, Americans can learn how political correctness infects the mind by understanding the role it plays in recruiting protesters to disrupt the inauguration. By Stella Morabito, 1/13/17

The goal of the Left’s campaign against the Trump presidency is “mass resistance” to bring the administration down. Likely, that means you’ll be seeing lots of street protests of the 1960s variety, reminiscent of the campaigns to bring down Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.
I suspect they will not only cause Bill Ayers to relive his glory days as a domestic terrorist, he will also be able to test out the inroads he made after 40 years engaged in radical education reform built entirely on the agitprop known as political correctness. These “reforms”—or mind arson, as Robin Eubanks so perfectly put it in her book “Credentialed to Destroy”— replace a child’s capacity for reason with raw emotional reflexes. The question is: How many will “rise up” and be mobilized like the good little drones political correctness has primed them to be?

Somehow, this all reminds me of a public service ad from 30 years ago that used a metaphor to warn about the harmful effects of drug abuse on the human brain. In it, a man holds up an egg and says “This is your brain.” He then points to a hot skillet and says, “This is drugs.” Finally, he cracks the egg into the skillet and as it loudly sizzles, he remarks: “This is your brain on drugs.”

The narrator prefaced his remarks with barely suppressed irritation that the harmful effects of drugs aren’t obvious to all: “Is there anyone out there who still isn’t clear about what doing drugs does? Okay [sigh] . . . This is your brain…”

Political Correctness Also Fries the Brain
Let me take this one step further and ask: Why can’t people understand that automatic obedience to the demands of political correctness, essentially a tool to incite mob psychology, will change their brains as well? Blind compliance with the propaganda of political correctness undeniably affects the mind. That’s the whole point of it. Your brain on PC is like your brain on drugs.

Consider this: when people fear talking about an idea, it tends to go out of circulation. The alternative view becomes perceived as the only socially accepted view. When most outlets of communication—Hollywood, academia, and the media—collectively push political correctness, social distrust grows and more people believe they are all alone with their “unpopular” opinions. A while back, I “dissected” this phenomenon.

Political correctness is basically mind hacking. It is a form of propaganda that induces self-censorship in order to send politically incorrect ideas into a spiral of silence. After observing the social hostility to your politically incorrect opinion you are supposed to start thinking of yourself as the crazy aunt locked up in the attic. So your only hope for relief is to “come out” and support the PC line. Once you do so (Meryl Streep’s Golden Globe lecture just gave Hollywood another lesson on how to do this) you can pat yourself on the back and simply mimic it.

Voila! You don’t need to do the hard work of thinking anymore. Instead, PC conditions your brain to respond to the good feeling of being praised, and to reject the bad feeling of being socially punished for saying the “wrong” thing. That’s your brain on PC.

Power Elites Use PC to Mobilize Masses
In essence, political correctness is designed to force one view of reality and promote psychological isolation in anyone who adopts a different view. This is the mental state many Americans are now waking up from after a decades-long, force-fed diet of political correctness from so many outlets of communication and the education establishment. Our universities are now accommodating students’ inability to absorb different points of view by giving them “safe spaces” in which they can become even further insulated from real conversations.

You may ask: “Why turn students into such ‘snowflakes?’” Well, for those with power-consolidating agendas, this type of mind hacking short-circuits independent thought, turning the subjects into deployable agents. (This is how cults operate, by the way.) With their brains fried and fearful, unable to accept a different point of view, the recruits can be used as drones and street agitators. They’ve internalized the message that their very survival depends upon obedience to the sorcerers of political correctness.

Enter Agitators, Propagandists, and Street Theater
There are numerous reports that “community organizers” of various stripes are planning “massive” protests against Donald Trump’s inauguration, hoping even for violence and riots. They are passionate about blockading streets in Washington, calling for what they call “clusterf–ks” of roads. Students whose minds have been indoctrinated with political correctness are no doubt expected to serve as warm bodies to prop up the illusion of mass mobilization that might bring down the newly elected administration. If the agitators can’t succeed through messaging, they are likely to pin their hopes on provocations against the police that would then spin stories that accuse the new administration of repression.

Any protesters who hope to march “peacefully” won’t exist as a story, particularly since groups like “DisruptJ20” say they are intent on using any means necessary to prevent the inauguration from happening. The central theme of the inaugural protests is that Trump is a “fascist,” or as stated in the central theme on ANSWER Coalition’s web page : “Donald Trump is a racist, sexist bigot.” This boogeyman approach aims to cultivate paranoia that will cause the protesters to act up. By heightening fear and loathing in the masses, the participants can be primed for maximum exploitation and mobilization by their leaders.

This is right out of Saul Alinsky’s how-to guide on mass manipulation. In “Rules for Radicals” Alinsky explained it is essential to personalize the opposition so that there is a human face to hate. Then the organizers can stoke resentment in their recruits and channel that hatred into a force for mass mobilization. This is similar to the way political correctness works. To consolidate power, twentieth-century totalitarian regimes mobilized masses of people, especially exploiting individuals who were uprooted and alienated. The ANSWER coalition, by the way, praises murderous dictators and their henchmen, like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Such organizations are marshaling the snowflakes who have been cultivated by our media and education establishment to bring about its stated goal: “revolution” of the freedom-hating communist variety.

Another “community organized” group has taken out a full-page ad in The New York Times to recruit protesters to prevent the inauguration. It calls itself “Refuse Fascism” and uses the slogan “NO!” It is led by unabashedly self-avowed communists like Carl Dix and Bob Avakian. So to march with this group is really to march for communism, a totalitarian form of government the legacy of which includes the government-sponsored murders of well more than 100 million innocent people.

How Polarization Is Key to Effective Propaganda
I believe we need to see most protesters as victims of political correctness. Propaganda has many definitions, depending on whom you ask. But the common denominator of this mind-altering propaganda pushed by power mongers is its hostility to free speech, free thought, and free association with other people. It is anti-conversation and anti-friendship.

It marches towards conformity of thought, or “collective belief formation.” It focuses on manipulating human emotions—fear, envy, desire, anger, hate, etc.—rather than the dispassionate examination of reality. That’s because independent thinking always stands in the way of the monolithic conformity necessary to grant power-mongers the raw power and status they crave.

They know that if your exposure to political correctness it is left unchecked, if you are isolated into a bubble of only one viewpoint or way of looking at the world, you’ll be less able to think independently of the propaganda. That ability erodes as you become isolated from alternative viewpoints. Your emotional reflexes—in the case of protesters, their fear and loathing—will tend to overpower the brain’s capacity for reason and logic.

That certainly seems to be the case for celebrities who have shown us that they cannot manage the reality of Trump’s election. From Lena Dunham to Bruce Springsteen, their meltdowns should be instructive. Through repeating politically correct slogans and memes that permeate the media and pop culture, they are transferring an emotional state of despair to the masses—or, as Michelle Obama memed to Oprah Winfrey recently, “What not having hope feels like”—fueling the urge to obstruct Trump’s presidency and to agitate against him. They both reflect and irradiate the inability to think or adapt.

Celebrities as Protesters’ Ventriloquists
In acts of not-so-quiet desperation, wannabe sorcerers of political correctness hope to get Americans with the program by also showing them what “enlightened celebrity thought leaders” think about Trump. They act like ventriloquists who keep repeating themselves in hopes that you will follow suit. They recently put together a video encourage us to direct Congress to obstruct Trump’s presidency.

They throw out all of the usual emotionally-charged epithets—“racist,” “xenophobic,” etc.—in an attempt to round up Americans to block Trump’s cabinet choices. They accuse Trump of intolerance and encouraging violence—and in so doing, arouse the violent and intolerant to “protest” Trump’s inauguration.

Protesters’ Brains on PC: Hardboiled or Scrambled?
So, political correctness can do a lot of things to the brain. Blind obedience to it can hard-boil those neural connections so no other ideas can compute. When confronted with a different point of view, the signals tend to get scrambled in a process now known on college campuses as “triggering.” When that happens, the victim is increasingly led by his PC authorities into a safe space so he is out of the zone of potential conversation and friendship. In this way, he can preserve and maintain his brain’s hard-boiled PC status. (Such students are constantly recruited into mass mobilization efforts, as Dix made clear in looking for protesters to join “RefuseFascism’s” call to arms.)

But seriously, our brains are not static organs. The neural connections within them can constantly change, based on the effects of stimuli to which they are exposed. In fact, our brains are not only responding constantly to our physical senses and what is in the world outside of our bodies, but they also pick up and assess cues from interactions in the more esoteric world of ideas. (That’s the world universities now seem dedicated to protecting their students from.) So if we consider the recent discovery of the brain’s changeability—its neuro-plasticity—we can learn to become more aware of the pitfalls of lazy, shallow thinking.

Let’s not forget that protesters’ emotionally charged behaviors have been in large part conditioned in them through radical education reform and media committed to pushing political correctness. And political correctness is definitely a bad habit for the brain. After watching protesters’ irrational behavior, the lesson for Americans going forward is that we must ignite a vigorous campaign to just say NO! to political correctness.


http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/13/political-correctness-hijacked-trump-inauguration-protesters-brains/#disqus_thread

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