Tweet

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @duty2warn

Duty To Warn 🔉

@duty2warn

Mar 22

THREAD

1 - Authoritarians like Putin use ONE weapon above all to keep its own citizens supportive and unaware. Like "The Devil", it has many names: Propaganda. Gaslighting. Disinformation. False narratives. Russia is a closed society, so Putin tries to NEVER let the truth in.

2 - We are still a democracy, with freedom of the press. So authoritarian wannabes like Trump have to work harder to bully the narrative. But he has help. Fox has used fearmongering and culture wars to emotionalize OUR electorate; and they've co-opted many into cult-like beliefs.

3 - The most famous propagandist ever - Josef Goebbels - famously said two things - the first one, we've ALL heard: "Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it, and people WILL believe it.” BUT Goebbels also said something else.

Read 13 tweets

Duty To Warn 🔉

@duty2warn

Mar 20

Is there any power greater than the power to control the minds of the masses?
Disinformation works…

Americans have as much natural resistance to disinformation as the Incas had to smallpox.

Disinformation is a form of germ warfare infecting the mind instead of the body as it spreads wildly.

Read 4 tweets

Duty To Warn 🔉

@duty2warn

Mar 18

THREAD
1 - Before invading, Putin made assessments. One was that America was badly divided and fractured. Putin had experienced four years of Trump. What a godsend! Arrogant America electing a useful idiot! Without HIS assessment of OUR division, this war would NOT be happening!

2 - Putin's desire to reconstruct the USSR is an overstated narrative. What he is really obsessed with, is America, NATO, and most of all - Democracy. What's his goal? TO DIMINISH THEM. Why? Because if he can, the rest falls into place! Ukraine was the democracy on his doorstep.

3 - So after he saw the great America elect a moron, he saw the GOP willingly embrace his help i an unbridled lust to regain power. He's seen millions of Americans buy into false narratives and strongman propaganda. He saw potential for American democracy ITSELF to be controlled.

Read 15 tweets

Duty To Warn 🔉

@duty2warn

Mar 16

THREAD
1- Trump supporters validate who they are by "their beliefs." Well, that makes it easier! If you say you believe something and a lot of others say they believe it too, you think it's real. And who can tell you what to believe? Belief is emotional, requiring minimal thought

2 - Think about it - why work so hard to discern information and knowledge when it's simpler to seek validation for feelings? And it's so easy to mov from that to false equivalencies. "I don't believe in vaccines or masks" becomes equal to "I don't believe in Bigfoot."

3 - Once you adopt a belief system not anchored in truth, and you assign more importance to the belief than you do to fact, it becomes easy to do it again. And AGAIN. Before you know it, you're addicted to the validation you get from whatever media source confirms your beliefs!

Read 11 tweets

Duty To Warn 🔉

@duty2warn

Mar 15

THREAD
1 - In days leading up to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Biden and Blinken were AWESOME and ON POINT combating Putin's FALSE pretexts for invading - WITH specificity, IN ADVANCE. This, along with compelling heroism from Zelensky and Ukrainians, created LOTS of global unity.

2 - Meantime, here at home, while most of the GOP changed their pro-Putin stance to a pro-Ukraine stance - purely and temporarily in response to polling data, there's still Trump, Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, and a few others parroting and amplifying various Kremlin talking points.

3 - For our part as behavioral psychologists, we are continually awestruck by similarities between Russia (as to Ukraine), and the GOP (as to America). It's autocratic fetishization. And winning being everything. And rampant disinformation. In America, it's morphed into a cult.

Read 13 tweets

Duty To Warn 🔉

@duty2warn

Mar 14

THREAD:
1 - We need to take aim at our TRUE FOE! It's not Trump. It's not Putin. But it's a thing we HAVE to defeat! We call it TRUMPISM, because it echoes his malignancies, but it's a much larger thing than TRUMP himself. It keeps metastasizing. It's now a full-on apparatus.

2 - Enablers. Amplifiers. Grifters. Opportunists. Fox News. Talk radio. Right wing podcasts. Performative elected officials. Foreign actors, like Putin. Social networks like Facebook. It's spread like a plague, largely through fear mongering, to millions of our most susceptible.

3 - TRUMPISM emotionalizes, starting with fear. Then it places blame. Then it demonizes who it blames. And this produces hate. Lies become false narratives and then conspiracies. Projections. False equivalencies. We ALL know some people who were manipulated and co-opted.

Read 8 tweets

Share this page!

Duty To Warn 🔉

People who liked this thread also liked...

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @duty2warn

Duty To Warn 🔉

Duty To Warn 🔉

Duty To Warn 🔉

Duty To Warn 🔉

Duty To Warn 🔉

Duty To Warn 🔉

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Like this author's thread?