Want to know a secret that far-right politicians & right-wing newspaper editors have ruthlessly exploited for at least a century? Traditional ideologies, usually embodied by mainstream parties, are anchored in emotionality as much as ideology or what we call 'populism'.
Conservative thinking is often a response to a need to reduce #fear & #uncertainty (Jost, Kruglanski, Glaser & Sulloway 2003). Experimental evidence shows that priming 'mortality threats' results in post-manipulation conservative identification (Thorisdottir & Jost 2010). 🇬🇧
Liberals, on the other hand, are less concerned with fear, & rather characterized by a higher propensity for #empathy (Hsu, Anen, & Quartz 2008; Taber & Young 2013). This emotion emerges as a distinctive trait of liberal ideology in a number of studies, highlighting (Smith 2006).
References:
Jost J. T., J. Glaser, A. W. Kruglanski and F.J. Sulloway (2003), “Political Conservatism As Motivated Social Cognition”, Psychological Bulletin, 129(3): 339–375.
Thorisdottir H. and J.T. Jost (2010), “Motivated Closed-Mindedness Mediates The Effect Of Threat On Political Conservatism”, Political Psychology, 31: 1–38.
Hsu M., C. Anen and S.R. Quartz (2008), “The Right And The Good: Distributive Justice And Neural Encoding Of Equity And Efficiency”, Science, 320: 1092–1095.
Taber C.S., and E. Young (2013), “Information Processing”, in L. Huddy, J.S. Levy and D.O Sears (eds.), The Oxford Handbook Of Political Psychology. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Daniel Sonabend's book, 'We Fight Fascists', charts the rise of the #43Group of tough Jewish WWII vets, who regularly fought & attacked Oswald Mosley & other British fascists, showing that Jews would not meekly accept post-WWII racism & bigotry.
🚨 Emergency services are at the Border Force migrant processing centre in Dover, Kent, after a Reuters witness says a man threw petrol bombs before killing himself. The man drove up to the centre and threw three petrol bombs, one of which did not go off. Also today, in the Mail:
🚨 A white man threw three petrol bombs attached with fireworks at a centre for processing migrants in the southern English port of Dover on Sunday (one did not go off) & then killed himself, a Reuters photographer said.
#LeakySue Braverman held secret meetings with her mentor, swivel-eyed ERG loon John Hayes, before she was forced to resign over leaking sensitive information to him.
She also looked to implement Policy Exchange's inhumane anti-refugee proposals.
Braverman appears to have instructed officials to look at potentially implementing grotesque proposals cooked up by opaquely funded right-wing free-market think tank Policy Exchange, that would in effect prohibit “genuine refugees” from settling in the UK. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Before her resignation, Home Office officials were tasked by Braverman to study a 2022 Policy Exchange report about tackling Channel crossings.
The extremist Policy Exchange has lots of form - they've recently attacked the police for being 'too woke'! 🤪
The suspect's blog, website & social media accounts are filled with anti-Semitic memes, Holocaust denial, references to far-right websites & conspiracy theories such as QAnon, debunked allegations of election fraud & a host of far-right talking points. 🤬
Having said this, the suspect is clearly a troubled person, likely homeless, with a history of violence & drug use. So while his interest in conspiracy theories & far-right extremism certainly APPEARS to some extent to have motivated the attack, this is currently speculative.
There seems to be compelling evidence that the suspect has a long & well documented history of writing & posting about conspiracy theories. But again, the extent to which his views did or did not motivate the attack remain unknown, & therefore speculative. independent.co.uk/news/world/ame…
We're told we have a 'representative democracy', but over the past fifty years, the proportion of MPs from manual work backgrounds has declined to ZERO, & the proportion of MPs who were elected representatives or worked in politics before becoming MPs is now over half.🇬🇧
The proportion of privately educated cabinet ministers has been much higher than the population for decades, even under @UKLabour. Truss (68%) & Johnson’s (64%) first cabinets had the highest proportions of private school-educated ministers since the early 1990s. Sunak's has 65%.
There has been a dramatic exclusion of those from lower middle & working class backgrounds from representation at the top of British politics.
There is also a difficulty in participation for the large majority of people who weren’t privately educated.
This #thread quotes extensively from the FT article above.
Many are fearful Musk's leadership could do more harm than good: he's pledged to restore “free speech” to the platform & undo permanent bans, paving the way for Trump to return as the US midterms loom just days away.
“We’ve seen people’s businesses and reputations rise and fall by what happens on Twitter, we’ve seen markets rise and fall by what happens on Twitter, we’ve seen elections rise and fall by what happens on Twitter,” says Joan Donovan.