DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... The Great Divide: A west coast liberal's perspective.

Earlier this week CNN.com listed 24 different theories that pundits have provided for why Trump won. And the list isn’t even complete. I’ve heard other explanations as well. What does it tell you when there are 24 different explanations for a thing?

It tells you that someone just dropped a cognitive dissonance cluster bomb on the public. Heads exploded. Cognitive dissonance set in. Weird theories came out. This is the cleanest and clearest example of cognitive dissonance you will ever see. Remember it.

This phenomenon is why a year ago I told you I was putting so much emphasis on PREDICTING the outcome of the election using the Master Persuader Filter. I told you it would be easy to fit any theory to the facts AFTER the result. And sure enough, we can fit lots of theories to the facts. At least 24 of them by CNN’s count.

Generally speaking, the greater the persuasion, the more cognitive dissonance you get. Trump is – in my opinion – the greatest persuader of my lifetime. I expected this level of cognitive dissonance. Next time you see a persuader of this magnitude, you can expect the outcome to be cognitive dissonance in that case too.

This brings me to the anti-Trump protests. The protesters look as though they are protesting Trump, but they are not. They are locked in an imaginary world and battling their own hallucinations of the future. Here’s the setup that triggered them.

1. They believe they are smart and well-informed.

2. Their good judgement told them Trump is OBVIOUSLY the next Hitler, or something similarly bad.

3. Half of the voters of the United States – including a lot of smart people – voted Trump into office anyway.

Those “facts” can’t be reconciled in the minds of the anti-Trumpers. Mentally, something has to give. That’s where cognitive dissonance comes in.

There are two ways for an anti-Trumper to interpret that reality. One option is to accept that if half the public doesn’t see Trump as a dangerous monster, perhaps he isn’t. But that would conflict with a person’s self-image as being smart and well-informed in the first place. When you violate a person’s self-image, it triggers cognitive dissonance to explain-away the discrepancy.

So how do you explain-away Trump’s election if you think you are smart and you think you are well-informed and you think Trump is OBVIOUSLY a monster?

You solve for that incongruity by hallucinating – literally – that Trump supporters KNOW Trump is a monster and they PREFER the monster. In this hallucination, the KKK is not a nutty fringe group but rather a symbol of how all Trump supporters must feel. (They don’t. Not even close.)

In a rational world it would be obvious that Trump supporters include lots of brilliant and well-informed people. That fact – as obvious as it would seem – is invisible to the folks who can’t even imagine a world in which their powers of perception could be so wrong. To reconcile their world, they have to imagine all Trump supporters as defective in some moral or cognitive way, or both.

As I often tell you, we all live in our own movies inside our heads. Humans did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough.

That’s why the protestors live in a movie in which they are fighting against a monster called Trump and you live in a movie where you got the president you wanted for the changes you prefer. Same planet, different realities.

Well, somebody is chanting "build that wall" toward Latino kids in high school.

Somebody is fueling the alt right

And none other than white nationalist are celebrating a trump victory because they feel they are taking their country back to white america.

So you can try and spin it all you want, the fact is that while trump may not be racist, he sure as hell has motivated the racist of this country to come out of the shadows and rise up.

That can't even be debated at this point.

But the racist don't matter, right? You took your country back. So congrats.

I'm reading this dude's Tumblr and I'm shocked that no one has ever accused him of rape. His thoughts on women are honestly shocking. At one point he states his frustration that women can control when they want to have sex. Dude's a weird guy. I'm almost afraid that I'll scroll too far and see him recreate the buffalo bill scene from silence of the lambs.

What I do find strange is the lengths to which you are going to discredit the man, instead of addressing the above blog post.

You didn't even refute anything I said.

That says a lot about how much you don't get. Or refuse to acknowledge.

You didn't even refute anything I said.

That says a lot about how much you don't get. Or refuse to acknowledge.

It's the progressive way. In order to hide from issues, they try to fabricate, use straw man arguments or dig up dirt. It worked against Bernie, it blew up in their face against Trump.

I've never read his Tumblr.

What I do find strange is the lengths to which you are going to discredit the man, instead of addressing the above blog post. It actually does a fairly decent job of getting across the point that we all see things a bit differently. Understand that and you can understand why people, in good faith, can vote for somebody that others find unconscionable (this could be applied both ways.)

10. Trump's personal image was and is horrible
Trump's victory should be in no way interpreted as a vote of confidence in him or his capacity to do the job. Less than 4 in 10 voters (38 percent) had a favorable opinion of him. Only 1 in 3 said he was “honest and trustworthy.” Thirty-eight percent said he was “qualified” to be president. Thirty-five percent said he has the “temperament to serve effectively as president.”

How can a candidate win with numbers like these? Because the desire for change was so great that it overrode all of the doubts — or at least many of the doubts — people had about Trump.

I don't know who Saul is.

And I don't care to answer much of anything to you.

If anyone knows how, its him ... just like with the tax code ... he knows why he did it and therefore he knows how to fix it ...

Thanks.

Rules for radicals.

Based on the title, now I understand why Diam sounds like one.

Only one problem Diam. Do you honestly believe that Trump ever does his own taxes? Of course he doesn't. He hires people to do his taxes. That doesn't give me any confidence he knows Jack about the tax code.

And yes, with Chinese steel and some illegal immigrants thrown in for good measure, he's done a lot of building. Every "product" he makes is outsourced overseas. That's what he "knows about".

Black Trumpophobe!

PDX, I read your original post the other day and just skimmed through it just now and may have missed this, but when did you move from Cleveland to Portland? How often do you come back to visit?

Part of it is my own curiosity, part of it is trying to figure out a way to relate a few things as Cleveland has definitely changed over the years.

PDX, you the people in Europe holding an anti trump rally? It's going down in Berlin right now.