Thread by @AnonAlexTheGr8

#Resistance

Why does 2019, as well as the previous years, of the Trump presidency seem so crazy?

It has to do with the narcissism of Trump, the GOP, and how deception works.

I’ll explain more in this thread.

1/

To start, my background is in Interpersonal Communication, and one of my undergrad mentors is a deception expert.

There is a wide variety of deception that can be used to mislead people. For instance, you can have omissions (leaving important information out) and you can have 2/

bald-faced lies (100% fabrication). Another useful term is strategic ambiguity, where words/sentence structure is used to be open to interpretation.

Now, it’s fairly routine for the GOP to use deception in their rhetoric. It has been happening for decades. However, most 3/

of their successful politicians avoid using bald-faced lies, unless absolutely necessary.

Besides the types of deception, we need to have a very quick discussion of detecting/shutting down deception.

To keep it simple, we’ll talk about verbal and nonverbal aspects of 4/

detecting deception. Often, we think of looking at nonverbal aspects of communication to detect deception. Society promotes the idea that it’s more important how we say something than what we say.

This assumption can lead to faulty assumptions if the verbal language is not 5/

attended too. In fact, if you have to focus on just one (verbal or nonverbal), you will usually be more successful in detecting/shutting down deception if you focus on verbal than if you just focus on the nonverbal.

So, since people often don’t discuss how to analyze the 6/

verbal aspects or analyze both together, I am going to share a relatively simple framework for how people evaluate statements in conversation.

It’s called Grice’s Conversational Maxims.

Essentially it views communication and language as something that is supposed to be 7/

cooperative and people pay attention to violations of what could be seen as appropriate for a response.

There are four qualities of conversation in Grice’s Maxims.

1) Quantity
2) Quality
3) Relevance
4) Manner

Quantity is the amount of words you use in your response. Saying 8/

too little or too much is seen as a violation of quantity.

Quality is related to truthfulness. It means saying things you know to be true and not saying things you know to be false.

Relevance is tied to whether or not the information in the response is pertinent to the 9/

previous speaker’s statements and the conversational context.

Manner is more of a nonverbal component. It’s related to things like use of sarcasm.

Now that we have that out of the way, all forms of deception violate Grice’s Maxims in at least one way.

Using these criteria 10/

and information available to us, we are more equipped than ever to catch politicians when they use deception.

Now back to the craziness at hand. Since Trump has gotten away with so many bald-faced lies, his minions are emboldened to do the same.

So we now have an 11/

information space full of factual information, documented better than ever, and a nonstop barrage of deception.

We can break down the deceptions and notice patterns easier than before. This also forces them to use more bald-faced lies.

It started even before the 12/

inauguration photos, but that is a famous instance of when people realized how bat-shit crazy things were going to get.

To make this all click even further, we should discuss why people deceive.

Basically what happens is that in conversation, as the other person is talking 13/

the deceiver realizes the truth will be problematic. So before the other person is done talking, the deceiver makes a microsecond decision to lie or be accountable.

If choosing to deceive, and wanting to be successful, bald-faced lies are best constructed using aspects of 14/

previous truths. Here’s an example.

You’re in college, you have a partner, you went to a party & ran into an ex. Whatever happened with your ex is something you don’t want your partner to find out. So instead of saying you went to the party when your partner asks about your 15/

night, you search for other things you’ve done on that same night (e.g. Friday) in the past. You select the most relevant and use that. Instead of “I went to a party and ____ with my ex,” the bald-faced lie becomes, “I went to the Avengers movie.”

Now, if your partner has no 16/

access to conflicting information, they may just ask a couple of questions, which can be deceived easily as well.

Other (essentially lesser) forms of deception, using Grice’s Maxim, involve some aspect of the real truth, but with either too much information, irrelevant 17/

information, a deceptive manner of communication, or real truth mixed with a fabrication.

Technology and the publicity of Trump has enabled us to document so much information to discredit his bald-faced lies. However, Russian Active Measures, involve creating fake info to 18/

make Trump’s bald-faced lies seem true to his enablers or uneducated people.

The whole Ukraine scandal is an attempt to create a successful false narrative that will make Trump seem like the victorious victim. It also benefits Putin. And the only way it can truly be 19/

effective is if we don’t hold them accountable. That’s why it’s so important for us all to improve our messaging as much as possible and #KeepResisting.

It seems so crazy though, because we’ve uncovered probably 20,000 lies across Trump and his entourage.

Note: @blakesmustache has good resources for concisely understanding and communicating a lot of this.

P.S. I forgot to mention this.

So, I don’t know the classified details, but I am privileged to know aspects of how certain intelligence agencies use interrogation methods to shut down deception. I’ll explain what I can below.

So when that process is occurring for deciding 21/

to deceive, the deception typically only happens if the deceiver believes a lie can be successful. It happens very fast if necessary.

So first it’s a realization they can’t just tell the truth. Second it’s a realization that there’s a way to manipulate information or how it 22/

is conveyed.

You can think of it like this, as the truth gets harder to admit, deception increases more and more until you reach a point where it can’t be achieved and that’s when the average person gives up. Not Trump and his narcissistic band of minions. Their mental 23/

state precludes them from accepting that their words aren’t powerful enough to create a new reality. Trump is the worst of all about this.

In the NSA, and often what lawyers (probably the House Dems) are attempting to do is gather so much information and finally connect it 24/

to Russian money laundering, that regardless of if most of Trump’s 35% of his base still believe he’s innocent, at least 35 Republican Senators will end up voting to remove Trump after his is impeached. 25/

Note2: Bald-faced lies always violate the quality aspect. Other forms of deception may involve one or more violations.

My favorite example of a lie that’s part true and part manipulation of all of the rest is this:

A certain friend’s brother could lie to his mom because (cont)

she thought he was basically innocent. So toward the end of high school when he wanted to go to a party and she asked what he was doing that night, he said “Oh, me and my friends are going to a party to get drunk and do cocaine.”

The deceptions were in the tone of his (cont)

voice (manner), quality (he wanted to get drunk, but had no intention of doing coke), and quantity (added information).

Earlier today when Putin joker that of course he was going to interfere with the 2020 election and not to tell anyone, he was being honest and making it look like a joke/deception.

*joked

*faulty predictions