Trump Supporters - I Figured You Out! Haha!

I have made lots of comments and posts and shared many memes about Trump supporters and came to the conclusion that after reading lots of articles and a book and seen plenty of videos that I have YOU all figured out!

Before I present my rock solid one hundred percent verified conclusion on the character, motivation and thoughts and attitudes of each and every one of you, I want to present a quick and dirty summary of how I got to the definitive answer.

I read several books on the differences between liberals and conservatives like Don't Think Of An Elephant! and Moral Politics by George Lakoff, Our Political Nature by Avi Tuschman, The Political Brain by Drew Westen, Words That Work by Frank Luntz and The Righteous Kind by Jonathon Haidt.

I read The Cult of Trump by Steve Hassan and Losing Reality by Robert Jay Lifton.

I read countless articles and watched innumerable videos.

At first I saw articles explaining the election of Trump by presenting statistics that seemed to validate the hypothesis that it was simply racism that motivated Trump supporters. I thought it was simple and the case was solved. 

But, I ran into other articles that correlated the communities that voted for Trump with opioid addiction levels.

Then I saw articles that correlated the support with industrial jobs lost under Clinton and Obama.

Then I saw more and more and more. If you look at enough statistics and are after confirmation of a hypothesis you can find some very often that show a correlation between two things that you want to believe are linked.

I can, for example, demonstrate that in the United States for the last fifty years when a product with a certain substance is sold violent crime spikes and as the product is sold less the crime drops. Each year every single time. Sell the product more and crime rises, sell it less and crime drops.

Should we ban this product to reduce violent crime?

It seems like a no brainer!

The product by the way is ice cream. Yep. 

See, people tend to get more irritable and angry and short tempered when it gets hot and coincidentally they also buy more ice cream when it gets hotter.

So, we have correlation between unrelated phenomena. The violence doesn't cause the ice cream consumption and the ice cream consumption doesn't cause the violence but on a graph they have nearly identical up and down patterns, because we are both willing to eat ice cream more and more violent, in general, when it is hot.

So, I looked and looked at all this data and realized it is not really established to the level of scientific rigor.

I am not invalidating every idea in every book I listed.

I am saying that the Vox or Salon or AlterNet story that tries to explain every Trump supporter as an idiot, racist, selfish, white supremacist, opioid addiction sufferer, economically disadvantaged, redneck, wealthy elite, evangelical, fundamentalist, etc. etc. person with a couple graphs of correlated data is not up to scientific standards and should be treated as an opinion that lacks evidence.

I am going to address a few points on this with an imaginary conversation between me and two people. I will talk to a conservative devil's advocate (cda) and a liberal devil's advocate (lda). I know they are imaginary and could be called strawmen but bear with me.

Me: I looked at the data and frankly, after years, have reached the best answer I think I have got yet.

Lda: great! You wrote a hundred things about how stupid, biased, racist, selfish, cultic, authoritarian and terrible they are! I am looking forward to more!

Me: okay, okay.

Cda: pfft, you dumb libtard, commie, snowflake, you don't know anything.

Me: okay, okay.

Here it is guys. I looked and looked and thought I had it figured out, then looked, adjusted my opinion and again thought I had it figured out and looked some more.

Lda: you shared a thousand memes calling them out! Yay!

Me: yes, I did.

Cda: whatever, I am not interested in your one sided hit jobs or childish insults.

Me: yeah, yeah. So, as I was about to say - after looking at this stuff for years my conclusion is going with ANY of these explanations for ALL Trump supporters or ANY PARTICULAR ONE without a lot more evidence of a much higher quality is wrong.

Lda: WTF? I know you are not saying that they are not racist!

Me: I, at this point, can't say a particular one or even most Trump supporters are racist. I know, it is a reversal, but the evidence is not there to support that claim in my opinion.

Lda: but, but, you gotta admit that they are at best indifferent to his racism and racism adjacent! 

Me: NO.

Lda: then you are a racist white supremacist piece of shit!

Me: I understand your opinion.

Lda: it's not an opinion! It's a fact you piece of shit!

Me: okay, that went well.

Cda: what's your game? Are you trying to come over to our side now.

Me: NO. I am not going to do that.

Cda: then what is the point? Why not just say nothing?

Me: because I tell people to look at the best evidence and arguments both for and against ideas. I tell people to be mindful of believing things that lack good evidence. I tell them to be aware of unexamined assumptions, our tendency to be guided by cognitive biases and to think in and fall for logical fallacies.

I tell people to doubt and question their beliefs and adjust them if the evidence warrants it.

This is what we are supposed to do, evaluate evidence and arguments, find more, especially for important issues, give it serious consideration and adjust our beliefs accordingly.

I am convinced that some people fit some categories that have been assigned to all or most Trump supporters BUT the evidence is not sufficient in my opinion to justify saying these things about all or most Trump supporters. So, a minority, even a small or tiny minority may fit the stereotype in some way, but that is a poor way to describe all, most or even one particular Trump supporter without having so much additional evidence that it is the same amount you would require for any other person.

Lda: that's crazy! The fact that they support Trump is plenty of evidence!

Me: in the way that ice cream sales matching violence is "proof" that ice cream makes people violent or that violence makes people crave ice cream. It's a correlation with a lack of a causal link. It is not good evidence and the burden of proof is not met by it, not even a little bit.

Cda: I cannot believe that a guy who wrote a blog series calling all Trump supporters cult members is saying this.

Me: you are right, a person who called all Trump supporters cult members isn't saying this. Because I never said that.

I had a post in which I wrote that 95% of the people at ESMB are nice and complained about 5% and was told I said "everyone at ESMB..." and I have written over and over and over that mind control, hypnosis,etc. only works on some people and not others over and over. Then been told I said "Scientology hypnotized all of us!" also, over and over.

As Warren Beatty said people don't remember what you said, they remember how you made them feel. If you make them feel bad and your take has exceptions, nuance, caveats and qualifiers they often distort it to be absolute and definite, even if they omit the most important things you actually said.

In both cases my claims upset people - who then distorted them, and vociferously objected to claims they were certain of but they could have looked at the record, because we only interact online, so the information is still available.

The posts I wrote on the cult of Trump always include the information that the claim that Trump supporters are in a cult is not true for all of them, it is not a black and white issue and of his followers that are in a cultic relationship with him the degree and even type of relationship varies greatly.

Lots of people have cultic relationships of varying degrees with all kinds of people.

The fact is we don't know what percent of his followers are in a cultic relationship. It could be, for example, two million people. That sounds like a lot, sure, but he could have a hundred million supporters. Two million out of a hundred million is only two percent. That's not a high percent for a president or really famous person. It could be higher or lower, we don't really know.

So, if you call his followers a cult and leave that out, you are being inaccurate and wrong.

Cda: so, are you saying he is a normal leader?

Me: no, not at all. I believe he has a lot of issues and they have not evaporated just because his followers are individuals and many, maybe a very large majority, are not people who fit the negative stereotypes that have been attributed to them. 

Me: the case regarding him is still available. But his followers are not him and should not be treated like they are him.

Cda: what are you looking to get out of this? I mean you shared a thousand memes that insulted us? Why should we believe you?

Me: good question. I have written a lot about Scientology and leaving Scientology.

I ran into a few Scientologists who try to discourage and discredit me over and over again.

They have lied about me and I sometimes carefully explain they are wrong.

They in various turns say I was never in Scientology, despite my being in Scientology for twenty five years, and that I just repeat what others taught me and I never read Scientology doctrine myself, despite my spending hundreds, probably thousands, of hours studying Scientology, they say I am sharing fake quotes of Hubbard despite the quotes being from the materials I studied in Scientology while a Scientologist on courses in a Scientology course room and on and on.

One got discouraged as I could debunk lie after lie after lie he spreads and finally got what he thought was a winning strategy.

He pointed out that I had attested to my courses and wrote success stories about them, and his masterstroke was asking if I was lying then, when I claimed gains from Scientology or if I was lying now?

I explained that I believed in Scientology while in and have since gotten more information and changed my mind. Everyone has the right to change their mind, it is not lying.

He could not accept it and kept harping on about how it has to be lying and his Scientological logic is that if I am a liar, then all the evidence and arguments I presented are invalid, because that is how Hubbard and David Miscavige attack people. But it is poor logic, a claimant is not a claim and liars sometimes present valid claims. But that was lost on this Scientologist. 

I changed my mind when I left Scientology and I have changed it again.

I have figured out that Trump supporters are individuals and should be treated as individuals. All you know about them is that they support Trump. That is it. They may be any kind of person and you can set aside the fact that they support Trump when evaluating if they are good, bad, honest, dishonest, generous, selfish and a million other things, because the fact that they support Trump doesn't tell you any of those things.

See, I figured you all out!