This is ridiculous.
The President took to social media again yesterday to announce that he doesn’t like the Pope:
What an irredeemably stupid thing to do.
cognitive dissonance scale
Anyone Who Genuinely Couldn’t Figure Out That Trump’s Threats and Deadline For Iran’s Annihilation Weren’t Bargaining Ploys Should Shut Up… Forever
…or at least stop weighing in during this President’s term.
What does it take for the Trump Deranged and hopelessly biased (or hopelessly stupid, or hopelessly dishonest) to be embarrassed? Surely there has to be a tipping point where the public starts pointing and laughing. Surely. Surely.
No? Wasn’t it obvious that Trump’s “war crime” ultimatums were designed to get Iran to make concessions? I don’t mean just obvious to me (“I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everyone says!”) but obvious to doctors, lawyers, beggarmen, thieves and Indian chiefs along with anyone else who has watched this guy operate since his real estate days? Seriously? Really? No? Wow.
I’d like to make Rep. Ro Khanna the poster fool for this malady. Shortly after this EA post, Trump announced the two week cease-fire and Khanna did a double back-flip with a twist, stood on his metaphorical head and called the President a TACO, as in “Trump Always Chickens Out”! This is another clear Trump Derangement symptom. Attack the President on the presumption that he is doing or will do one thing, then attack him when he does the opposite.
Why isn’t this embarrassing to those exposed again and again as reflexively criticizing whatever the President does? Let’s see: the ethical values here are fairness, honesty, integrity, accountability, consistency (being consistently inconsistent doesn’t qualify), prudence, proportionality, humility…there are more, but I don’t feel like looking up the list. Ethics, analysis, logic and reality has nothing to do with how these critics react. It’s all emotion and the Cognitive Dissonance Scale:
Imagine, however, that sub-zero section reaching down forever to infinity, with Trump there rather than only at -10. Prof. Festinger’s theory holds that a negative bias that strong is enough to pull anything…literally anything, people, ideas, books, policies, bunnies, rainbows, babies, The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Nancy Guthrie, opposing cannibalism…into negative territory. What’s going on here? THAT’S what’s going on.
Podcaster Dave Rubin wrote on X: “Trump has been running the same negotiation playbook forever. Pressure, escalation, chaos… then leverage a deal. We’ve watched it happen again and again. This wasn’t complicated. It was basic pattern recognition.” Yup! What does this tell you about people who refuse to see that pattern? Go ahead: come up with a kind description. I can’t think of any.
While Fox News and even CNN were properly reporting on the developments in Iran (Not a word about Nancy Guthrie!) do you know what MSNOW decide was the big news? The danger that Trump was going to come up with some way to steal the mid-terms! Yes, that well-used “future news” subcategory of fake news.
Anyone who watches MSNOW for anything but amusement or intelligence on what the Axis of Unethical Conduct is plotting next should also be embarrassed. How I long to post an entry like this on Facebook…but that would be mean. But fun. But mean…
Over at the New York Post, conservative pundit and law prof Glenn Reynolds wrote, before yesterday’s late developments,
Ethics Observations On Byron Noem’s “Bimbofication” Scandal
Bryon Noem, the husband of recently fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, was revealed to be fond of dressing up in women’s clothing, often with massive fake breasts, while paying to interact with others portraying “bimbos,” the Daily Mail reported in a “scoop” that appears to be well-sourced.
His wife issued a statement to the New York Post saying she was “devastated” and her family was “blindsided.” President Trump only commented that he felt badly for the family and that his former DHS head’s husband’s odd hobby was “news to him.”
Predictably, the revelation, which 56-year-old Byron Noem has not denied, thrilled progressives, who pointed to his wife’s alleged hypocrisy in opposing LGBTQ rights, and horrified conservatives, who are as kinky as anyone else but don’t like admitting it.
What’s going on here?
Cognitive Dissonance Games and Tipping Points: President Trump Made Rob Reiner the Greatest Hollywood Director Ever and Himself Into an “Ogre.”
Among the many reasons that President Trump’s attack on Rob Reiner before the shock of his murder at the hands of his own son had subsided was stupid (as well as unpresidential and cruel) was its ignorance of the Streisand Effect. The completely predictable reaction of the Trump Deranged, always seeking a new metaphorical drum to beat, and the similarly inclined Axis of Unethical Conduct, ensured that the President’s gratuitous Truth Social post would trigger an eruption of outrage that will fuel attacks on the President’s character for months, perhaps reaching into the mid-terms.
For this to really work, of course, Reiner must be elevated to near saint-like status, and sure enough, that’s what is going on. The higher Reiner (he was a wonderful, flawless man, we are now being told) and his films ( one of his movies is a favorite movie of everyone, one article claimed) can be pushed up the Cognitive Dissonance scale, the lower Trump goes by attacking him. Trump is first and last a salesman; how could he not know his gratuitous outburst would deeply wound his “brand”?
Among other gifts to Trump’s political enemies. this Cognitive Dissonance Scale botch makes defending or even continuing to support the President perilous. If you link yourself to President Trump (based, as it must be based, on his policies and actions rather than his character) by defending him you are simultaneously proclaiming your opposition to “The Princess Bride,” “Stand by Me” and “When Harry Met Sally” and the unassailable murder victim who made them.
This, in turn, poses the real danger that Trump’s revolting post will prove to be a tipping point, that last, tiny, thing that makes the Jenga tower fall or Mr. Creosote’s stomach explode as it does after eating the “wafer thin” morsel offered him in the clip above from “The Meaning of Life.” Trump’s stupid, mean words may well tip public opinion against his whole Presidency permanently and completely. If so, it will undoubtedly be the most trivial verbal tipping point in U.S. political history. By comparison, George Romney saying he had been “brainwashed,” President Ford saying in a debate that the Soviet Union did not dominate Eastern Europe, or President Carter claiming in his debate with Ronald Reagan that he consulted daughter Amy on nuclear weapons policy seem positively earth-shattering.
And yet if attacking a recently slaughtered director crushes Trump’s chances of holding off the Far Left’s siege on American values and core individual liberties, it may prove to be the most consequential moment in his Presidency.
Additional points:
Warning to Democrats: Beware the Cognitive Dissonance Scale! [Corrected]
It’s fun watching CNN talking heads cover the events in the Middle East looking as if they are dying of some kind of painful abdominal parasite because they have to say positive things about President Trump. The only time I have seen them look more miserable was on election night last November. Every time these hacks play the moving footage of Israeli families reacting to seeing their loved ones again after being released from Hamas’s tunnels, their expressions look more appropriate for someone who has just watched a beheading than a joyous reunion.
None of them are mentioning the effect today will have on the Democratic Party’s desperate (and stupid) shutdown gambit, but they should. For President Trump is rising into positive territory on the Cognitive Dissonance scale. When that happens, it will necessarily push those things that he opposes down the scale, for that’s how cognitive dissonance works. Except for the hopelessly Trump Deranged, the members of the public who are inclined to be sympathetic to the Democrats in the shutdown will be less so the more the President rises, even though the Hamas-Israel deal he brokered is completely unrelated to it.
The politics of the shutdown are ultimately a PR battle, and the more popular Trump is, the worse the Democrats’ prospects of winning it becomes. The Trump-Hate/ Israel Hate town meeting CNN is about to host featuring AOC and Bernie Sanders could not be timed more horribly for Democrats, foes of Trump, and anti-Israel activists.
True, foreign policy triumphs usually create only temporary bumps in Presidential popularity. Remember that the first Iraq war pushed George H.W. Bush into the 90s for a while. President Trump’s approval will start to fall again, but Democrats were already losing the PR battle over the shutdown. Trump’s big day can only make the situation worse. They ignore the cognitive dissonance scale at their peril.
Addendum: WordPress tells me that this post should have a “Joe Biden” tag. That’s smoking gun evidence that WordPress is tainted with Axis bias: the Left’s current myth-making, along with “Antifa? What Antifa?” is that Biden deserves any credit for the Gaza breakthrough at all.
Professor Jacobson Asks, “What Happened To Tucker Carlson?” EA’s Answer: Nothing! He Was Always Like This!”
Prof. William Jacobson of Cornell oversees an excellent, well-researched conservative blog that often delves into the world of ethics, often from a legal perspective. One of his current posts is titled “What Happened to Tucker?,” as the Prof. laments what he sees as Carlson’s turn to the Dark Side. “He’s turned out not to be the person I thought he was,” Jacobson writes. “After leaving Fox News, he has done more to normalize Jew-hatred and bring it into the MAGA movement through the “woke right” than any other major ‘conservative’ personality…Something has gone very wrong. Maybe his true self finally was freed of the constraints of corporate news, or maybe something else influenced him. But now he is — in my estimation — a malign force and not just as to Jews and Israel, but also to the Trump agenda which he seems determined to undermine.”
You see Fredo above in his pathetic protestations of intellectual acumen from “Godfather II,” one of my favorite entries in the EA Hollywood Clip Archive, because in this instance, I was way ahead of Prof. Jacobson. Last December I issued this post, in which I quoted from an earlier “Why can’t everyone see that Carlson is an untrustworthy asshole?” essay that said in part,
“ [Tucker Carlson is] a smug, narcissistic, ethics-challenged, unprincipled, Machiavellian demagogue who helps pollute our civic discourse rather than enhance it.…since Fox News fired him (one more example of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons), several publications have noted that Carlson’s focus has descended into cheap tabloid territory as he desperately seeks publicity, clicks and eyeballs. Of course he has! Carlson doesn’t need the money (he’s a trust fund kid and has a net worth estimated at $30 million); he could easily maintain whatever integrity he had and present serious, useful analysis from the conservative side on whatever platform he used as he waits for his Fox contract to run out. Nah, he wants fame and power.”
Here Is How Arrogant and Delusional Harvard Is: It Really Thinks It Can Prevail In Public Opinion Over The President of the United States…
The Harvard Alumni Magazine arrived yesterday. Above is the cover and the illustration for its feature section about the University’s “resistance” to President Trump’s completely reasonable, responsible and justifiable demands that the most visible, influential, prestigious and wealthy university in the United States stop dedicating itself to undermining American values, indoctrinating students in anti-American biases, provide intellectual diversity on its faculty, cease discriminating against whites, males and Asians, and stop enabling flagrant Jew hatred on campus.
To Harvard’s credit, the alumni magazine makes a pass at even-handedness, even highlighting an alumnus who writes that “no private institution has a right to demand that taxpayers fund discrimination, exclusion and intolerance.” But most of the issue is devoted to familiar anti-Trump victim-mongering, including an essay extolling the work of a non-binary (or something) professor “whose data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.”
“Authoritarianism” has joined “sexism,” “racism,” “violence,” “insurrection” and other rhetorical weapons of the Left as infinitely flexible accusations steeped in double standards. A President who uses his constitutional powers to pursue policies the Left opposes is an “authoritarian.” A President who weaponizes the legal system to imprison and persecute his political opposition is not—as long as he is a Democrat.
I mean, just to pull a fantastic hypothetical out of the air…
Ethics Quiz: Victor Davis Hanson’s Head-Exploding Pro-Trump Essay
Over at RealClearPolitics, conservative scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson has an essay that I fervently believe is spot-on regarding what he calls “the Trump counter-revolution.” Of course I do: it tracks exactly with what I’ve been writing here for more than a decade, the primary difference being that Hanson’s views carry a lot more weight than mine do. The “money quote” in the essay, its conclusion:
Enraged Democrats still offer no substantial alternatives to the Trump agenda.
There are no shadow-government Democratic leaders with new policy initiatives. They flee from the Biden record on the border, the prior massive deficits and inflation, the disaster in Afghanistan, two theater-wide wars that broke out on Biden’s watch, and the shameless conspiracy to hide the prior president’s increasing dementia.
Instead, the Left has descended into thinly veiled threats of organized disruption in the streets. It embraces potty-mouth public profanity, profane and unhinged videos, nihilistic filibusters, congressional outbursts, and increasingly dangerous threats to the persons of Elon Musk and Trump.
All that frenzy is not a sign that the Trump counterrevolution is failing. It is good evidence that it is advancing forward, and its ethically bankrupt opposition has no idea how, or whether even, to stop it.
Oh, those words give me a BINGO! orgasm. I am now in the processes of fighting the impulse to post Hanson’s essay on Facebook, knowing full well that it will lead to mass fury among 90% of my friends, have me unfriended and cancelled, even cause some associates to pull out of a major theatrical project I’m involved in. Posting it would run directly into Cognitive Dissonance Scale reality.
And yet…I put up with far more triggering (for me) content from them literally every day without protest. I don’t cancel them or unfriend them, any more than I reject friends and relatives when they have contracted a pernicious disease. Do friends let friends remain tunnel-visioned, bubble-bound, biased and ignorant?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Should I post Hanson’s essay on Facebook, knowing that it will change the minds of no one, except perhaps changing the minds of valued friends to conclude I am not fit for human contact?
The Last “Snow White” Post (I Promise)
Why is the Cognitive Dissonance Scale the graphic I chose for the final word on Disney’s “live-action” remake of Walt’s biggest and most important hit, 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”? (For some perspective, realize that we have the same relationship on the timeline to that film that it had to the Presidency of Millard Fillmore.) It is clear that this cultural ethics train wreck, which EA has been dutifully covering (here, here, here, here here, and here), is now stuck inextricably in cognitive dissonance territory. For most viewers, what they think about the movie will be influenced far more by their biases and what they associate with the movie than the movie itself.
That’s how the scale works, as I keep explaining ad nauseam. If Disney is generally a plus-5 on a ticket-buyer’s scale (once upon a time, Disney would have been a plus-10 or higher on everyone’s scale) and the movie in a vacuum would be at “Meh”-level Zero, Disney would pull the film into positive territory. If Disney is in negative territory already for a different viewer, the film begins with an anchor chained to its metaphorical ankles.
Thus it is hardly surprising to see this as the early returns on the film (which doesn’t officially open in theaters until tomorrow):
Now that’s polarization!
What’s going on here? Well, a lot…
An Ugly “Lookism”-Kings Pass Hybrid
Above is a photo of then-high school pole-vaulter Allison Stokke. Stokke was made into an involuntary pin-up when the photo was posted in 2008 to a sports blog, along with the caption: “Meet pole vaulter Allison Stokke… Hubba hubba and other grunting sounds.” The image went “viral” making her an instant celebrity, and sex symbol. As I wrote in 2021, “Oh, Allison did just fine: she became a model and married a pro-golfer. But that’s moral luck. Her photo might have triggered an obsession by a sheik who had her kidnapped and brought to his harem as a sex slave. You never know.”
This is just one of the ugly pathologies social media has inflicted on us. Even more people than before the internet are obsessed with appearances, particularly since the culture now actively cultivates narcissism. (I will never take a selfie to my dying day.) A particularly nauseating example occurred this week, when University of Georgia student Lily Stewart was arrested on March 8 for speeding, Morgan County Crime shared Stewart’s mugshot with her arrest information, and the photo went “viral” to the extent that the British tabloid The Daily Mail treated it as a news story.
Ethics Alarms 