Donald Trump’s contributions to American political discourse.
SLURS. “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best . . . They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.”
HUMILIATION. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her, wherever.”
LIES. “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.”
CONTEMPT. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot people and I wouldn't lose voters.”
FEAR MONGERING. “I think Islam hates us. There's a tremendous hatred.”
THREATS. “By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks, Although the Second Amendment people -- maybe there is, I don't know.”
INSULTS. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
INFLAMMATORY. “Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field’.”
OUTRAGEOUS. Claiming that amongst the Neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville there were “some very fine people.”
Tomorrow is mid-term Election Day. Before you vote remember these Donald Trump statements and consider how hate speech poisons the well of American democracy. I also recommend you read Paul Krugman’s op-ed in Friday’s New York Times, “A Party Defined by Its Lies.”
Please forward this to “friends” or relatives who are still thinking of voting for Trump enablers in the Republican Party or of staying home because they don’t like a particular Democratic Party candidate. There are a lot of Democrats I don’t like, but we need to address disagreements after the election. A vote on Tuesday is about saving constitutional democracy in the United States from hate and autocracy. I worry that Trump’s actions with the support of Republican enablers are steps toward fascism in the United States.
In response to people who say you can just ignore Trump’s rhetoric and support his policies, Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in the New York Times about what he calls “The Neuroscience of Hate Speech.” Friedman’s basic argument is that exposure to hate speech increases prejudice through desensitization to outrageous actions. His article was linked to a number of scientific research studies which I summarize here briefly. Although Friedman did not make the connections, the proliferation of hate speech and lies in the United States today parallels what happened in Germany in the 1930s as the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler consolidated power.
In a report published in November 2017, a team of researchers from Poland explored the effects of exposure to hate speech on prejudices against “outgroups.” In Poland, the targets of hate speech were Jews, Muslims, LGBT, Ukrainians, and Roma. Based on three independent studies that included almost 2,000 interviews, the researchers concluded that “that frequent and repetitive exposure to hate speech leads to desensitization to this form of verbal violence and subsequently to lower evaluations of the victims and greater distancing, thus increasing outgroup prejudice.”
In an article published on a United States National Institute for Health website in 2011, researchers studied Yankee and Red Sox baseball fans. They found that fanatical fans viewed the same plays from radically different perspectives, no surprise, and that their ensuing outrage over what they considered miscalls by umpires stimulated sectors of the brain associated with violent behavior. Another article, published in Science Digest, explored similar brain activity and proclivity towards violence stimulated by hatred but in a broader context. A third study, also posted on the National Institute for Health website, reported that people who were exposed to hatred and bigotry tended to dehumanize its targets and were more prone to tolerate atrocities, torture, genocide, and other inhumane acts.
A last study cited by Friedman is the classic 1963 research report by Stanley Milgram of Yale University that examined obedience to authority. Milgram found that when instructed by authority figures to administer what they thought were lethal levels of electric shocks to uncooperative test subjects, 65% of the participants complied.
Friedman’s conclusion, and mine, is that when people in authority like Donald Trump rant and rage and encourage hate against ethnic, racial, linguistic, or religious minorities, gays, women fighting for equal rights, or political opponents, the United States is in deep trouble.
Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8