WalkAway videos and changing minds: the interpersonal and the intrapersonal

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “huxley” writes:

What conservatives miss in this question of why do Democrats accept lies and ignore the debunkings is that Democrats realize, likely unconsciously, that their place in the circle is being jeopardized. It’s a tiny threat to their survival and they know better than to do that.

This is what raises the #walkaway videos to acts of courage. I guarantee each walkaway person is going to suffer socially.

I think that huxley is correct. But I’ll add that it’s not only a threat to their social survival. It’s also a threat to a deep marker of self-identity. The question “Who am I?” is one we all answer in an ongoing manner, and political leaning is a big part of that. So while the threat that the person perceives can indeed be social, it also involves the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance of having an internal belief system threatened.

I think that, for most (not all) people on left or right, the first reaction to such a threat is to entrench by coming up with reasons that the evidence contradicting a previous point of view is wrong, or to just shrug off that evidence in some way. In the WalkAway video by Georgia that I posted a while back, she describes that process very well several times in her video. Here’s one of those times (this and the other clips in this post are very very short, although her entire video is rather long):

It’s understandable. People are busy, and there’s a lot of confusing information coming at them. How to evaluate what to pay closer attention to, and what to dismiss? Authenticating information isn’t easy, and it takes time. And of course, the more deeply committed a person is to a side or a cause, the more it usually takes to change the person’s mind, and for many even an avalanche of convincing information will never do it.

This rejection of evidence is not exclusive to the left. But I have noticed it is especially common on the left compared to the right, at least among people I know.

At some point – but only for some people – there’s a critical moment where the doubt can no longer be overcome by rationalizations or just not thinking about it. As Georgia says later:

She makes several statements there that are especially important, I think, and one of them – “If I was wrong about that, what else was I wrong about? – is especially central. I’ve seen people say that in many WalkAway videos, and it’s something I experienced myself as part of my change experience. I maintain that it is the turning point (as Georgia also seems to be saying in her video): the moment of pivot when the entire edifice of belief begins to be questioned in a deep and meaningful way, and the person becomes committed to pursuing the truth wherever it may take him or her.

Not everyone will do that. It takes curiosity and – as Georgia also indicates – a certain amount of humility that means the person is able to entertain the notion of having been wrong about something very important, and wrong for a long time. Georgia also mentions that to do this she had to get some distance from feelings and emotions which had been a partial driver of her political opinions.

A commitment to finding out the truth as best as one can is by no means a universal need. But for some people it becomes a deep one. In this portion of the video, Georgia describes two things – the loss of the sense of social belonging to the Democratic group (you might say she perceives herself as being outside the circle dance already, and she can’t pretend anymore), and the sense of needing truth as much as she needs oxygen:

The social intersects with the sense of personal integrity, and everyone has a different need for each and makes a different decision – sometimes unconsciously. For me, I made the transition alone, in a time when I was socially isolated. I was naive, and had no idea people would ostracize me or get so angry at me – which shows you how long ago this happened to me. By the time I realized I had committed a grave social transgression, it was too late and there was no turning back. Not that I would have, anyway, had I known what was in store.

NOTE: I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea to send the Georgia video to people you know who are not completely rabid leftists, especially younger people, and see how they react. Here’s the URL. The cuts are somewhat distracting, but I think she may have edited out meanderings or pauses, or stopped periodically to collect her thoughts. She certainly doesn’t appear to be reading a prepared statement, and she seems to be very sincere.

The Amy Coney Barrett hearing

The New Neo Posted on by

You can find many posts covering it at Legal Insurrectoin, for example this, this, and this.

Barrett seems like a remarkable person, a worthy candidate for the Court. Of course, if the Democrats manage to get the big victories they are predicting, they are likely to set about destroying the Court because the right had finally achieved a majority of SCOTUS judges, and the voice of Barrett would be drowned out by those of the new leftist judges joined with the old leftist judges.

The Big Lie that keeps on giving: Trump and the disabled reporter

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently I was watching a video of WalkAway founder Brandon Straka being interviewed by TimPool and telling the story of why he left the Democratic Party. It’s a good video, with the hallmark political changer experience of an “aha!” moment in which the person previously on the left realizes that much of what he has come to believe via the MSM is based on a lie, and then a series of lies, and that moment sparks a sequence of realizations that leads to a political change.

You can watch the whole thing at YouTube if you like. But I’ve cued it up here to show the particular segment I’m talking about:

Do you remember when the press said Trump was mocking the reporter’s disability? Here’s a clip and commentary from CNN, posted on YouTube five years ago. It has over 8 million views and is still going strong. You can see very recent comments there made by people outraged – just as Brandon Straka was way back when – that Trump would be such a low human being as to mock a reporter’s disability, and that anyone would have voted for him in spite of that.

So the story had a dual purpose: turning people off from Trump and making them not just dislike his policies but despise him as a person, and causing them to detest Trump’s followers as well. The video has never been taken down or corrected, either by CNN (which undoubtedly knows better because their claim was debunked quite quickly) or by YouTube:

And yet, as Straka says, Trump was not making fun of the reporter’s disability at all. He was using a mocking gesture he’s used many times (and for years) to indicate a person who is flailing around in terms of an answer, either lying or pretending not to know or just acting confused:

Notice also that although the original video has over eight million views and almost twenty thousand comments, the video correcting it has a relatively small view count (the same is true of other videos making the same point). The lie gets many times around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on. And this is a lie that has mattered to voters.

But as Brandon Straka discovered, it’s not just about this lie. Nearly every day something about Trump is blatantly lied about, or covered up, or distorted by the media. Sometimes it’s done the way it’s done in this instance. Sometimes it’s done by simply not covering an important story that would make Trump look good or make his opponents look bad. Sometimes it features a misleading and truncated quote, sometimes just an exaggeration, and there are other techniques used as well. The coverage isn’t just occasionally deceptive; it’s a relentless barrage of it pervading the entire MSM except for the small enclaves of conservatism – and even they are not exempt.

Fox News used to be one of those enclaves, but these days it’s been joining with the rest more often. That leaves us some talk shows, some YouTubers, bloggers, and The Federalist, parts of National Review, and a few other online outlets. The imbalance is profound, and social media acts as an amplifier.

But I wonder how many people would see these videos and, like Brandon Straka, ask themselves, “What else was I wrong about? How else have I been lied to, and how often?” And then how many would start digging into it and find out that the answers are, “A lot, and often, and it matters.” Many of the people giving WalkAway testimonials on YouTube have a similar story to Straka’s, as do I, although mine happened many years ago.

But I think such people are somewhat uncommon. At any rate, not enough people – not nearly enough people – change their minds even when confronted by evidence, or get curious about what other evidence they might be ignoring. Too many never even see the evidence in the first place. Too many who do see the evidence don’t seem to care and would never watch three times as Straka did and then again the next day, deeply disturbed. As Winston Churchill said: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

[NOTE: I’d be curious – if you were to send a link to this post to some Democrat friends who hate Trump, whether they’d read it and if so, how they’d react. Would it cause them to rethink at all?]

Joe Biden’s contempt for the American public – and for the facts

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the hallmarks of today’s Democratic Party is contempt for the American public – even its own supporters. They are children who must be taken care of, manipulated, and if need be deceived, in order to get them in line to vote for their Democratic leaders and betters.

Such as Joe Biden. Need I say more?

Republican voters are beyond the pale, deplorables beneath contempt. But Democratic voters aren’t much better and don’t deserve to know much of anything – certainly not the truth, whatever it might be.

Now, let’s see the Biden quote in context:

So not only does he answer “No, they don’t,” when asked if Americans deserve to know his viewpoint on Court-packing, but he doesn’t even explain why they don’t deserve to know. He says it’s only Republicans who want to know – which at least gives them credit for some thought, as opposed to his Democratic voters, who don’t know and don’t care and who are just sheep. Then he immediately deflects to an attack on Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, and relies on a whopper of a lie, a lie so huge it’s almost stunning in its audacity – that making a SCOTUS pick “in the middle of an election” has never been done before – that it’s “the first time in history” it’s happened.

Astonishing. Not only did Barack Obama try to do the same thing with Merrick Garland, whom he nominated in Match of 2016, but both Obama and Trump have every right to do so. It was the Senate controlled by Republicans that made a different decision in each case as to whether to take up the vote – which, by the way, is the Senate’s right to decide.

And not only did Obama do it, but nearly thirty other presidents have done it as well, including some in lame-duck sessions:

Twenty-nine times in American history there has been an open Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, or in a lame-duck session before the next presidential inauguration. (This counts vacancies created by new seats on the Court, but not vacancies for which there was a nomination already pending when the year began, such as happened in 1835–36 and 1987–88.) The president made a nomination in all twenty-nine cases. George Washington did it three times. John Adams did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. Abraham Lincoln did it. Ulysses S. Grant did it. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. Barack Obama, of course, did it. Twenty-two of the 44 men to hold the office faced this situation, and all twenty-two made the decision to send up a nomination, whether or not they had the votes in the Senate.

Say it isn’t so, Joe. When the media has your back, you can say anything.

Whatever happened to immigration?

The New Neo Posted on by

The relative quietness on the southern border – both because of Trump’s policies, and then the effects of COVID as well – has made it almost a non-issue in 2020. And that’s too bad for Trump, in a way, because the energy of that battle was a great part of what propelled him to victory in 2016.

I was thinking as much last night, and then today I saw this article on that very subject.

Pelosi and the 25th

The New Neo Posted on by

We knew this was coming:

…[N]now House Democrats are toying with attempting to invoke the 25th amendment to remove Trump from office since he tested positive for COVID-19. Or so they say.

Trump’s response:

I think Trump should say to Pelosi: “You first, Nancy. You first.”

Nursing home residents demonstrate

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve been seeing some demonstrations lately from groups who don’t usually go that route. First, Chasidic Jews, and now Colorado nursing home residents:

Waving signs that read such things as “I’d rather die of COVID than loneliness,” and “We are prisoners in our home,” residents of one nursing facility staged their own anti-lockdown protest along one of the busiest streets in Greeley, directly across the street from the city’s largest and longest operating hospital.

“Freedom, freedom, freedom,” one lady chanted while waving a sign that read “we want our families back.”

The protest against the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) and Gov. Jared Polis’ mandates that do not allow nursing home residents to see their loved ones, was thought up, organized and carried out by the residents, with oversight from their nurses and other staff members, said the Assistant Administrator of Fairacres Manor Ben Gonzales.

Good for them.

I have long felt that this is one of the cruelest of the many cruel “protective” measures set by certain states in response to COVID. The first month or two of the pandemic, I could see why it was done. But once we learned more about the disease, and as time went on and the effects of prolonged isolation of the elderly and ill would become more serious, it has become more and more important to allow visits. Surely some sort of distancing and hand-washing and all the rest can be instituted without too many ill effects?

I don’t say it’s not a problem, because the nursing home population is especially at risk. But if someone is saying “I’d rather die of COVID than loneliness,” shouldn’t their wishes matter? The problem is that they live in a group facility with other people who perhaps would rather die of loneliness than COVID, and visitors increase everyone’s risk of COVID at least somewhat.

This hateful disease has had so many terrible repercussions. One of them appears to have been the strengthening of the hand of the left against liberty. I hope we can escape that grip.

Forever Young

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s commenter Bryan Lovely, speaking about the 1973 Bob Dylan song [see *NOTE below] :

“Forever Young” sure has a different meaning in my fifties than when I was nineteen. Still love that song.

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young…

That’s one of the great things about any sort of art – popular or classical, highbrow or low. We can keep revisiting it and find something fresh every time. They say you never step into the same river twice, and that’s true of all artistic experiences. It’s also true of performers, who bring something different to the very same song as they age.

The son for whom Dylan wrote the song was born in 1966, which would make him around 54 years old now. Not forever young, I guess, because that’s not possible, as we all know. And yet the wish is there.

The following poem on a similar theme gives me the chills every time I read it. And by “chills” I don’t mean chills of fear or revulsion. I mean a mixture of feelings that includes enormous admiration for the craft involved, delight at the unusual images, appreciation for the poet’s economy of words, awe at the depth of his love that is imagined beyond the grave – and a sense of dread at the meaning of that final couplet.

Roethke died not long after he wrote the poem.

Ted Roethke’s “Wish For a Young Wife“:

My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy’s mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.

*NOTE: Apparently I missed that Bryan Lovely was referring not to the Dylan song but to Alphaville’s song of the same name, “Forever Young.” The discussion works for either, I guess.

There’s also this one:

More lies getting halfway around the world

The New Neo Posted on by

The minute I read that six men (and then more) had been arrested for allegedly plotting against Michigan’s Governor Whitmer and other officials, I strongly suspected that no matter what their actual identities and political leanings, they would be called Trump supporters and described as inspired by him.

And that’s exactly what has happened. I’m not going to bother with the details, because you can just go here and here.

This particular group seems to me to conform more to the Timothy McVeigh type of anti-government thinking than anything else. At least one is apparently an anarchist who hates Trump:

Trump is not your friend, dude. It amazes me that people actually, like, believe that when he’s shown over and over and over again that he’s a tyrant. Every single person that works for government is your enemy, dude.

I suspect that’s the basic sentiment of the entire group.

Doesn’t matter. The blame-Trump narrative is set for most people. Biden himself said it, as did Whitmer, and although I’ve not done an exhaustive search (I’ll leave that to you this time), I don’t imagine that the MSM is keen to get the truth out and counter the impression.

This is the way we’ve seen it work, over and over. A public that’s been exposed to this for many many years doesn’t read this particular story in a vacuum, either. It’s a building block that’s piled on top of the many many other building blocks that have been put in place over many years, to create and then to strengthen an edifice of lies that’s sturdy and nearly impervious to attack.

Making election prognostications

The New Neo Posted on by

I have a natural tendency to be pessimistic about elections. This has been accentuated in recent years by the closeness of so many recent ones, and a growing distrust of polling. But that doesn’t mean I don’t take polls into consideration – I do. An when every poll predicts a Biden win, it’s hard not to be disheartened.

I don’t think the polls are necessarily wrong, either, although I just don’t know – and neither does anyone else. One can argue back and forth about it for a long, long time. There are points made about “shy Trump voters” and the like, but we don’t know the extent of that phenomenon. What we do know is that the polls are telling a bad story.

It’s even a frightening story. For a host of reasons, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are probably the two worst national candidates I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. They’re also tremendously unappealing, and their voters don’t even like them, for the most part. And yet at least half of Americans and maybe more are prepared to vote for them or have already done so.

And that’s because they hate Trump even more.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time now talking about why, because we’ve discussed it already so many times before. Let’s just say it’s a combination of the media, celebrities, the educational system, social media, and the naturally abrasive and rather unconventional personality of Donald Trump himself.

Let us not forget, either, that if the Democrats don’t win fair and square in the voting, I believe they are fully prepared to game the mail-in voting system which they insisted on setting up. That might include dead registrants, as well as this sort of thing.

I have thought for quite some time now that the continued drumming up of COVID panic even as the number of deaths and serious cases falls, is partly in order to expand the use of mail-in voting and therefore of fraud.

Ordinarily there’s a limit to how much fraud can be committed, but the sky’s the limit now in mail-in states. Report of people getting multiple ballots, and of people who no longer live at a certain address getting ballots there, seem rampant. The states that ordinarily have this method of automatically sending ballots to everyone on the voter rolls, whether requested or not (dead or alive) are: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah. Utah is the only one that’s Republican, and in the others I don’t think Trump has any kind of chance at all to win. Belatedly joining their ranks this year are California, New Jersey, Vermont, DC (not a state – yet) and Nevada. The first three are deep deep blue, but although in 2016 Nevada went to Hillary Clinton, it was only by a couple of points. So Nevada could be a state where this method of voting and the potential for fraud ends up mattering a great deal. And they all matter if the Democrats use the method to pump up the popular vote, so that even if Trump somehow manages to win they can complain as they did in 2016 that he lost the popular vote and the Electoral College has got to go.

Mailing unrequested ballots to all voters is the most dangerous method of voting in terms of potential fraud, but some other states have applications for a ballot mailed to all registered voters, who then may apply for a ballot to be sent to them. The issue is not just how the applications are sent, but also how the ballot requests and ballot submissions are authenticated (or whether there’s an effort to authenticate them at all), and when.

I know that things can change. I know that the polls favoring Biden might be wrong. But my level of anxiety is very high. I wish I could write something that wasn’t such a downer, but honestly I can’t.

I was thinking the other evening about Thomas Sowell. How many lucid and brilliant books has he written over the years? A great many; a remarkable achievement. How many columns has he written? Likewise. And yet, although he has indeed influenced a lot of people – including me – in the end, did he just have his finger in the dike all that time? And are the waters about to rush in? There are forces much stronger than logic, and there always have been.

One thing I tell myself is that, even if this election goes the way I’m dreading, it doesn’t necessarily mean the country won’t or can’t wake up in a few years. I think the Democrats will fix things so that they entrench their own power (new states, court packing, and the like) and a reversal might be difficult or impossible. But perhaps the backlash will be so strong it will overcome whatever they do.

Another thing I believe is that, even if Trump is somehow able to pull this one out and win four more years, the forces allied against him are formidable and they will be angrier than ever. Whoever wins, I don’t see this settling down. Not at all.

I remember back in the fall of 2012 before the election, I went to my book group – which, except for me, consists of women from left to liberal who are predictable Democratic voters. I wondered what they’d say about Romney, who seemed to me to be the sort of person they wouldn’t be able to work up much of a head of steam against. Wrong, wrong, wrong. They had swallowed, and were bent on regurgitating, all the stupid memes they’d been fed. I recall in particular all the angry dissing about “binders of women,” and how it meant that Romney hated women and if elected would be harming them in some way or other.

It taught me just how very susceptible almost everyone I know is to propaganda. To see it get spread in real time that way was an education. Now, of course, the situation is far worse. To almost everyone I know, Trump is a sort of secular devil, and anything he says or does must be opposed with every fiber of a person’s being. And that is true not just of people who don’t follow politics, or who aren’t especially intelligent, but of people whose intellect and reasoning power I ordinarily respect.

And although I have never heard anyone say a single good thing about Joe Biden, he is truly irrelevant in their equation. He’s simply the un-Trump, and that will do.

Awww! Poor lil’ Kamala got mansplained by the big bad Pence

The New Neo Posted on by

A despicable but all-too-predictable accusation/excuse:

[from various tweets] ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

“A lot of people were noticing some mansplaining going on tonight.”

Jamira Burley

“Every woman I know has given this look when some man attempts to mansplain or present an idea that isn’t theirs.”

Andrea Mitchell

“I asked a man I know what he thought of the debate. He said: ‘The debate was over when she said Mr. Vice President you are interrupting me.'”

So feminists who believe women are fully qualified to be president or vice president nevertheless also believe – when it suits their purposes, which is to say when the woman is a Democrat and the man a Republican – that a woman running for office should not be interrupted or argued with by a man.

Can we call that “womanthink” or “womanlogic”? No? Well, then, don’t call it “mansplaining” when a male opponent treats a female opponent normally.

In other words:

[NOTE: Also, among Kamala Harris’ many lies was this one about “Honest Abe.”]

The vice presidential debate is tonight

The New Neo Posted on by

You can discuss it here.

I don’t think I’ve got the stomach to watch.

UPDATE 11:30 PM:

Looking at comments around the right side of the blogosphere, the consensus is that Pence acquitted himself well, Kamala was incredibly annoying, the moderator was biased but not to quite the same extreme degree as Chris Wallace, and the fly stole the show.

No one has a clue what effect, if any, this will have on the polls, so I won’t even speculate.

It did occur to me prior to the debate that Pence might be able to set a good tone for debating Harris. He had to walk a fine line between assertiveness and bullying – I suspect it wouldn’t play well if he appeared to be doing the latter to a female. Pence is no pushover and yet has an almost unfailingly polite and calm demeanor.