(2018-10-31) Caulfield Its Not About The Heat Of The Rhetoric Its About Its Toxicity

Mike Caulfield: It’s Not About the “Heat” of the Rhetoric, It’s About Its Toxicity. Toxic rhetoric is used not just to attack, but to warp people’s reality.

dangerous meta-narratives that map on to mainstream news stories and that are reinforced by elite dog-whistling.

The prime example of this is the “caravan” meta-narrative that seems to have been the partial motivation of the apparent pipe-bomber and a central motivation of the synagogue shooter.

Hate plays a part, but it is the delusion that triggers the action.

Bowers seems to have believed that the migrant “caravan” had been organized by George Soros as part of a vast Jewish conspiracy to subjugate white people. This theory first emerged in March, attached to a different caravan, and circulated in Facebook groups and other platforms. When the more recent caravan appeared it was attached to that caravan.

I want to be very careful about how I say this — but if you believed this was true, if you really believed your entire race was about to be extinguished by an invading migrant army controlled by all-powerful Jewish interests, then violence not an insane act, or even an act of anger. It would, in a demented way, be rational. And that — not angry words — is what makes our discourse so dangerous.

These Beliefs Are Insane, But the Perpetrators Are Probably Not and That Should Scare You

Bowers apparently believed that George Soros was organizing the “caravan”, funding it and assisting it. Obviously delusional, right? Except these views are quite common. Here’s a VP of Campbell’s Soup (now a former VP). Open Society is a charity that Soros runs... Johnston was a former Secretary of the US Senate under Bob Dole.

Almost two years ago I wrote a post about the wrongheaded idea that when people consumed disinformation it was mainly a case of confirmation bias, with people becoming more confident (and perhaps more emotional) about ideas they already held. The better way to look at it I said was as a process of radicalization into conspiracy-driven networks and other alternate realities.

be conspiracy theorists. And given the history of what happens when conspiracy theory and white supremacy mix, that should scare the hell out of you.