Trumpanzees resorting to violence because they lost the election.
A characteristic of Trumpanzee cultists, is their almost complete dependence on conspiracy theories to sustain their patently absurd belief in Donald Trump as some sort of divinely inspired saviour sent by God to engage with Satanic figures running the 'Deep State'.
These Satanic figures are, of course, because the only important things that happen in the world, happen in America, Democrat politicians, scientists and billionaires such as Bill Gates, led by Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama and assorted cannibalistic paedophiles. The conspiracy Trump was fighting gets ever more lurid, the more preposterous it becomes.
The 'Paedophile Deep State' conspiracy of course involved all the election officials in states where Joe Biden won in 2020, because they helped 'steal' the election from the rightful winner, Donald Trump, and all the judges who refused to overturn the result on the 'spurious' grounds that Trump's advocates could not find any evidence to support their claim, other than Trump's claim that he won really.
Another aspect of this 'Paedophile Deep State' conspiracy is the belief that the COVID-19 pandemic was fake and a pretext for injecting people with mind-controlling vaccines developed by Bill Gates, or as an excuse to stop people going to church, or that wearing face coverings was an attempt at population control because people can't breathe properly with a face covering and die of asphyxia. Of course, government health officials like Anthony Fauci, America's leading epidemiologist, were part of the conspiracy and faked the statistics such as the case numbers and deaths.
The third aspect of Trumpanzeeism is the belief that demands by black people to be treated the same as white people by the police is a conspiracy by political extremists such as anti-fascists [sic], to deprive white Christians of their rightful position as the middle and upper class of a stratified society. A society in which the poor (and Black) only have themselves to blame, welfare is a scam whereby the white middle class is robbed through taxation to subsidise fecklessness and drug dependence, and health care should be preserved for those who can afford to pay for it, the way God intended, in White Christian America.
And we shouldn’t forget the notion that Mexicans are all drug-dealing criminals and rapists who want to destroy America.
But just holding whackadoodle beliefs is itself harmless. What is harmful is the antisocial behaviour that can come from holding them, such as discouraging people from getting vaccinated against a lethal virus, encouraging them to attend super-spreader events where social distancing and wearing face coverings were seen as a disloyal political statement, and such as trying to overthrow a democratic government in a violent insurrection.
Previous research has shown that holders of conspiracy theories are more likely to indulge in criminal activities and other anti-social behaviour and less likely]y to conform to prosocial norms, often regarding laws and social norms as part of the conspiracy.
But there is some hope that at least the more anti-social consequences of holding conspiracy theories, such as those adhered to by Trumpanzees, according to the results of an interesting study by four researchers at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany, led by Lotte Plummerer, a PhD candidate.
As described in Psychology Today by Craig Harper Ph.D.:
The researchers devised an experiment to test the following pair of hypotheses:[...] Pummerer and her team tested their participants' levels of adherence to both legal and non-legal social norms (e.g., not talking during a movie, holding doors open for those carrying heavy objects, or paying taxes when they are due) and found evidence in support of their hypothesis. Describing the trends in their data, the researchers stated:
- Those who believe in conspiracies are less likely to adhere to accepted social norms.
- Thinking about why prosocial norms existed would mitigate the negative effects of conspiratorial mindset on low levels of adherence.
... the current research sheds light on the relation between conspiracy belief and adherence to prosocial norms governing everyday behavior: In line with their tendency to go against the grain, people high in conspiracy belief report less adherence to prosocial norms.Interestingly, though, this tendency was mitigated (and to a degree whereby the effect was almost statistically negligible) after participants were asked to think about why social norms were in place.
The researchers findings are published, open access, in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science:
AbstractFrom this research it seems then that even Trumpanzees can be helped to be less antisocial and less dangerous to a civilised society. All we have to do is to encourage them to think for themselves and work out why their antisocial behaviour is frowned on by the decent majority of people.
People believing in conspiracy theories question mainstream thoughts and behavior, but it is unknown whether it is also linked to lower adherence to the prosocial norms of the broader society. Furthermore, interventions targeting correlates of the belief in conspiracy theories so far are scarce. In four preregistered, mixed-design experiments (Ntotal = 1,659, Nobservations = 8,902), we tested whether believing in conspiracy theories is related to lower prosocial norm adherence and whether deliberation about the reason for the norms mitigates this relationship. Across four studies with the U.S. samples, we found that believing in conspiracy theories correlated negatively with prosocial norm adherence in the control condition, which was less pronounced after deliberation (effect size of interaction: d = 0.16). Whether the norm was related to the law or not did not moderate this effect. Results point toward possible ways of mitigating negative correlates and potentially also consequences of believing in conspiracy theories.
Pummerer, L., Ditrich, L., Winter, K., & Sassenberg, K. (2022).
Think about it! Deliberation reduces the negative relation between conspiracy belief and adherence to prosocial norms.
Social Psychological and Personality Science. DOI: 10.1177/19485506221144150
Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by [publisher]. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
For example, encourage them to think why Donald Trump's personal behaviour - his basic dishonesty and disregard for truth, his lack of personal integrity and ready resort to bullying to get his own way, his disregard for the normal rules of behaviour in public office, his misogyny and racism, to list just a few of his character flaws - are not acceptable in a decent, civilised society. This will help them work out that the laws against his criminality weren’t made by "Satanic paedophiles" to prevent him being elected again, but are for the good of society as a whole, because few people want to live in a society run by an incompetent, psychopathic despot with an acute narcissistic personality disorder.
If Trumpanzees can be encouraged to work out for themselves why Donald Trump should never be allowed anywhere near political power ever again, they could probably work out why a violent insurrection to install him in office without being elected is also a bad thing, as are policies designed to ensure as many of their own supporters die of COVID-19 as possible, because self-genocide is really not a great idea. One can but hope.
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