re: #639 Gus 802

They are basically playing with their viewers emotions. Instead of communicating to their intellect they’re communicating to their “hearts” if you will. By the heart I mean the id or the more basic of human emotions. I doubt they plan things out in this manner but that is the end result. Hence, not only do we see the wording to the pleasure senses of their viewers but the shrill like modulation of their voices.

It’s weird to see how some on the right appear to be emulating their worst fantasies about those on the left:

Emotions over reason? Check
Paranoid fantasies about the POTUS? Check
Unhinged conspiracy theories? Double check
Unfounded accusations of fascism? Check
Cries of victimisation? Check

Time to haul out Hofstader’s 64 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics again, specifically the section called Emulating the Enemy:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse.
(snip)
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.
(snip)
The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).
It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.

The whole essay really captures the Malkin/Beck/wingnut dynamic, IMO