Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Megyn Kelly admits Trump is in cognitive decline. It’s not just him

On the Glenn Beck show Megyn Kelly admits that “he’s lost a step, several steps” when talking about Trump’s weakening cognitive ability. Frankly, it’s worse than that - he’s falling into full-on delusion. His repeated claims that he won the 2020 election isn’t just because he’s decided to make that claim for his own advantage, it’s actually a sickness.

This is a common thing that I’ve seen with MAGAs, it’s willful mass delusion. These people have taken Confirmation Bias into a near clinical condition. Their belief’s about the election, about the pandemic, about the vaccines, about the January 6 attack (which they claims was “totally peaceful”), about Antifa and BLM (who were somehow the “violent” part of J6), and about Trump’s outstanding civil and criminal cases are more than just a difference of opinion. It’s not just being badly informed, it’s a difference in how you perceive reality. It’s a difference in how you accept, analyze and process facts.

These people actively and violently reject any information that goes against their preferred narratives. They simply can’t even listen to any view that is different from theirs. They refuse to even consider any new contrasting information. It is simply discarded out of hand. You can tell them that every court case that Trump filed during the election failed and they come up with a convenient excuse as to why that somehow doesn’t matter. [They were Democrat courts] They’ve all been indoctrinated into a narcissistic self-aggrandizing delusion.

Surveys of hundreds of fervent Trump voters, whom researchers refer to as Make American Great Again (MAGA) supporters, reveal strong beliefs that the election was stolen; that COVID-19 is a bioweapon from China; and that the riot was the work of antifa. The data, collected just before and after the Capitol riot, is believed to be the only information of its kind, shedding light on MAGA supporters’ opinions about race, gender, the pandemic and the 2020 election.

The data also uncovers demographic information that may dispel some myths about hard-core Trump supporters: Nearly half of MAGA adherents, for example, roughly half earn at least $50,000 a year, considered middle-income by many standards, and approximately one-third have at least a college degree.

“Right now, these people feel like they’re losing their country and their identity. They feel like they’re being displaced by communities of color, by feminists and by immigrants. These people are motivated by what they see as an existential threat to their way of life,” said Christopher Sebastian Parker, professor of political science at the UW and co-author of the research. […] Highlights of the findings include:

Nearly all (98%) of respondents said they believe Trump’s election fraud claims and distrust the actual results of the presidential election;

About 90% said voting “shouldn’t be easier”

More than two-thirds said Trump bears no responsibility for the events of Jan. 6 – roughly the same percentage that laid the blame on antifa

At least 90% said Trump was honest about COVID-19, and that state and local government restrictions related to the pandemic should be loosened

Almost all said they were concerned that “forces are changing our country for the worse” and “the American way of life is disappearing”

The findings related to “difference”– race, gender and immigration status — provide an additional lens through which to view the MAGA movement, Parker said.

On race, significant majorities of respondents agreed with statements like “Black people should work their way up like other minorities” and “Black people would be as well off as white people if they tried.” Along the same lines, a majority disagreed with statements such as “Slavery/discrimination made working up difficult for Black people” and “Black people have gotten less than they deserve.”

Similar themes emerged in the results regarding women and immigration. A majority of respondents agreed with statements such as “Women interpret innocent remarks as sexist,” “Feminists are seeking more power than men,” and “Immigration is changing our culture for the worse.”

These people are modern-day Nazis. They are the New Reich, same as the Old Reich. Birth of a Nation and the KKK reborn.

All of these beliefs are bullshit. Every single one. Very clear empirical, factual, documented and confirmed evidence can disprove all of it. But a true MAGA will never be moved and never be convinced. That is decidedly not how normal humans function in the real world. They don’t look at contrasting information, analyze and consider more than a single possibility - test each option for its accuracy and viability - then make a reasoned and rational decision about what makes the most sense.

They believe whatever makes them feel better. They believe everything that’s ever gone wrong is somebody else’s fault, not the fault of anyone like them and they — themselves personally, their party and Trump — had nothing to do with it going wrong even when they quite literally did.

The pandemic is the fault of China, it doesn’t matter that Trump botched his response to it, wrongly downplayed it, wrongly recommended Ivermectin and bleach to combat it, he didn’t give a dime from “Operation: War Speed” to Pfizer, the company that first developed a vaccine, and consequently, more Americans died than in any other nation on earth and the death rate due to Covid and early dropping of actual CDC mitigation efforts in Red States meant that 15% more of them died than in Blue states and that gap increased to 43% after the vaccine was introduced.

The study looked at deaths in both Florida and Ohio during the first 22 months of the pandemic and found the overall excess death rate of Republican voters was 15% higher than that of Democrats. The gap widened further once COVID-19 vaccines were introduced.

In general, there was a 20.5 percentage-point (95% prediction interval [PI], 15.6 to 25.6 percentage points) increase in weekly death counts in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021. Excess death rates were 2.8 percentage points (15%) higher for Republican voters compared with Democratic voters (95% PI, 1.6 to 3.7 percentage points).

The higher excess death rate observed among Republican voters may continue through subsequent stages of the pandemic.

After May of 2021, roughly 1 month after COVID-19 vaccines became widely available, the gap between Republicans and Democrats further widened, to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0 to 9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis, or a 43% difference, the authors said. The difference was seen in Florida, but was most pronounced in Ohio.

Trump literally got more of them killed, and they still love him for it. That’s not normal. Instead, they blame Democrats for the lot in their lives when just about everything that’s gone wrong in the last 3 years - started on Trump’s watch.

He was the guy in charge when the pandemic hit, he was the guy who threw out the pandemic response plan and took pandemic planners out of the NSC, he was the guy who had 14% unemployment - losing 6 million jobs - he was the guy in charge when oil prices started rising in March of 2020 and he was the guy who forced Saudi Arabia to cut their oil production by threatening to pull our military out of the country.

MORE: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/23/2213234/-Megyn-Kelly-admits-Trump-is-in-Cognitive-Decline-because-he-and-all-MAGAs-are?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web