Academics From Canada

"In Asia, a prominent example of immigration-driven ethnic change is taking place in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam. A Hindu-majority tongue of Indian territory lying north of Muslim Bangladesh, Assam has long been host to large-scale illegal, but peaceful, Bengali immigration. Bengali Muslims grew 30 to 50 percent over the period 1971 to 1991. They now constitute more than 30 percent of Assam’s population and are believed to control the electoral verdict in 60 of Assam’s 126 Assembly constituencies. Numerous battles have taken place over whether large numbers of Muslims have the legal status necessary to add their name to the electoral rolls. Muslim growth has been the catalyst for ugly Assamese attacks against unarmed Bengali workers since the 1980s, and an Assamese political movement demands the deportation of illegal immigrants. This conflict is regional, but on the wider Indian level, the growth of the Muslim population through higher fertility and an often exaggerated degree of illegal immigration has been a red flag for Hindu nationalism. The Muslim population’s fertility advantage over Hindus was 10 percent at partition in 1947, but is now 25–35 percent. Only a fraction of this gap can be explained by relative Muslim poverty. Muslims grew from roughly 8 percent of the Indian total in 1947 to 14 percent today, and are projected to rise to 17 percent by 2050. These are not staggering numbers, yet have proven useful tinder for Hindu nationalists and sparked sporadic violent reprisals against Indian Muslims."

"In reading the genetics literature on South Asia, it is very clear that many of the studies actually start out with some assumptions that are clearly problematic, if not in some cases completely untenable. Perhaps the single most serious problem concerns the assumption, which many studies actually start with as a basic premise, that the Indo-Aryan invasions are a well-established (pre)historical reality. The studies confirm such invasions in large part because they actually assume them to begin with... Part of the reason that many geneticists prove Indo-Aryan invasions so frequently is that they give little if any consideration to other populations that have or may have entered South Asia in prehistoric and historic times.... Another problematic assumption in_ the genetics literature is that caste is unchanging."

"At first glance, Muslims seem more resistant to family planning than others. Research on Muslim fertility in India, for instance, concludes that Indian Muslims have been more reluctant to adopt contraception and family planning than Hindus or Christians, despite equal access. Muslims tend to have an especially large fertility advantage when they are in the minority. In Europe, India, Thailand, Russia, China and the Philippines, the Muslim fertility advantage is greatest. This is particularly true of zones of conflict like Israel–Palestine. One could argue that minorities in general, not merely Muslim ones, tend to have higher fertility rates than majorities. Yet in Muslim-majority Indonesia and Malaysia, Muslims outbirth most Hindu, Christian and Chinese minorities, while in the Arab world, Muslim fertility is higher than that of the minority Christians and Druze."

"The view that Hinduism as a religion, or the Hindus as a people, lack a sense of history has been expressed so often as to have become a cliché. Even when scholars have tried to take a more sophisticated as opposed to a clichéd view, the effect has often been to reinforce it."

"Let me say that I write here, as in all my work, as a journalist with special training in theology and religion. I have the great responsibility of sharing the “story” that follows with as wide an audience as possible, because what I describe and document in the following pages is one of the most far-reaching tragedies in history. It is the premise of this entire account that very early on, in the third and fourth centuries c.e., the Christian Church made a fatal and fateful error. Either deliberately, in a competitive bid to win over the greatest numbers of the largely unlettered masses, or through wilful ignorance of the true, inner sense of the profound spiritual wisdom it had inherited from so many ancient sources, the Church took a literalist, popularized, historical approach to sublime truth."

"How does one teach Yiddish literature without teaching something about the history of the countries in which it was created-mainly Poland, Ukraine, Russia-and the history of the Jews in those countries? How does one teach Jewish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without teaching about anti-Semitism, which was pervasive throughout this region at this time and sanctioned by the government? How many references to the persecution of the Jews in Eastern Europe are too many references? There is no way to avoid the topic of suffering. But how much gloom is too much gloom? How many pogrom stories should one teach? How many novels about the Holocaust?"

"In the end it does not matter whether students are Jewish or not Jewish. What matters is that they be sympathetic to another point of view, that they be open to a reality radically different from their own. And it is the function of literature-and of teaching-to bridge the gap between realities."

"Working together on the translation of my books forged a bond between us that is stronger than the bond I have with any other human being, because it is made up of the intimacy that only translation can confer on a writer and her translator, and because it implies a shared creative effort."

"Most non-Jews, I have come to realize-and not just my young Albertan students-know little about the history of the Jews. Nor are they necessarily aware of anti-Semitism's roots in Christianity. From Sholem Aleichem to Peretz and beyond, canonical Yiddish literature does not mince words when it comes to identifying the tormentors of Jews as Christians."

"Studying what is specific to one culture is often the first step toward understanding many cultures. And that, finally, is the best reason, I think, for studying literature altogether."

"Maybe already the next generation [of tools] that is coming in 2024 could be very dangerous. Governments need to start preparing for this."

"The Mahatma was a harmonizer of communities and people. Inclusion and not separation was his way. Hindutva disagreed with Gandhi on his interpretation of Hinduism. The agendas of Hindutva though strong on the issues of self-identity and self-definition, have tended to be separatist. The Vaishnava that he was, Gandhi believed in treating "the suffering of others as his own." From such a point of view, it seems clear that the intolerance of Hindutva will not permit the people of India to build a compassionate and just social order."

"During both the past and present, commerce is one of the most efficient carriers of communicable disease."

"The idea that we can control these unimaginably complex genetic encodings and ecosystems is like believing we can control the weather. Yes, we can affect it, but we can also certainly make it worse. We have no reason whatsoever to believe that we can engineer a perfectly desired outcome or fabricate a flawlessly designed product 100% of the time. It only takes one mistake, slipup, inadvertent human error to set us on a disastrous orbit or flight path."

"The religious component was only one motivation for the architects of the Crusades and was generally used as a shroud to mask their real intention, which at the core was political, territorial, and economic advantage."

"The Gates Foundation is the third-largest underwriter of global health research, trailing only the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom."

"The willingness of Africans to participate in the slave trade in Africa allowed it to flourish. Africans delivered fellow Africans into the clutches of European subjugation and servitude, something the mosquito made impossible for Europeans to do themselves. The mosquito would not allow Europeans to pluck Africans from their homelands. Without African slavery, New World mercantilist plantation economics would have failed, quinine would not have been discovered, and Africa would have remained African. The entire Columbian Exchange would have been vastly different, or perhaps not have occurred at all. As it was, however, the Portuguese, and eventually the Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans, were able to tap into the existing internal African slave culture that revolved around captives of war. Africans initially sold their captives to the Portuguese, and small, localized slave trade emerged. Originally, it generally operated under the cultural umbrella of customary and conventional African slavery. By exploiting this traditional feuding among African nations and social networks, Europeans were able to introduce a vastly different form of captive slavery, one of bulk commercial export. African leaders and monarchs began raiding traditional enemies and allies alike, solely for the purpose of capturing slaves to sell at a growing number of slave forts on the coast, operated by an increasingly broad range of European nationalities. The European demand was met by an African supply of African slaves."

"History does not warehouse well in neatly labeled boxes, for events do not exist in quarantined isolation. They exist on a broad spectrum, and all influence and shape each other. Historical episodes are rarely built on the ground of a single foundation. Most are the product of a tangled web of influences and cascading cause-and-effect relationships within a broader historical narrative. The mosquito and her diseases are no different."

"I think that mathematics will have to become more and more algorithmic if it is going to be active and vital in the creative life. This means it is necessary to rethink what we teach, in school, in college, and in graduate school. In our emphasis on deductive reasoning and rigor we have been following the Greek tradition, but there are other traditions—Babylonian, Hindu, Chinese, Mayan—and these have all followed a more algorithmic, more numerical procedure. After all, the word algorithm, like the word algebra, comes from Arabic. And the numerals we use come from Hindu mathematics via the Arabs. We can’t regard Greek mathematics as the only source of great mathematics, and yet somehow in the last half century there has been such emphasis on the greatness of “pure” mathematics that the other possible forms of mathematics have been put down. I don’t mean that it is necessary to put down the rigorous Greek style mathematics, but it is necessary to raise up the status of the numerical, the algorithmic, the discrete mathematics."

"The idea of constructing a table in which the logarithm of unity was zero originated with Napier. Napier and Briggs never thought of logarithms as exponents of a base. ... It was not till considerably later that our modern definition of a logarithm as an exponent was put forward by such mathematicians as , 1684; , 1742; , 1748, 1770."

"About half a century after Thales came Pythagoras. Under his inspiration geometry was first pursued as a study for its own sake. A man of great ability and a most interesting and magnetic mystic, he finally settled at Crotona on the southeastern coast of Italy."

"... in America before the end of 1888 there had been appreciable amount of mathematical research, some of it of first importance, even according to recent standards. There had been centers of mathematical inspiration. Such universities as Yale, The Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, had been sending out doctors in mathematics for a number of years, and many Americans had been getting degrees in Europe. The time was ripe for an organization to draw together many people scattered throughout the country who were especially interested in mathematical pursuits."

"Our knowledge of Babylonian mathematics is derived mainly from tablets in the British Museum, the Prussian State Museum of Berlin, the Ottoman Museum of Constantinople, the University of Strasbourg, the University of Pennsylvania and the Palais du Cinquantenaire of Brussels."

"In yesteryears there were two gloriously inspiring centers of mathematical study in America. One of these was at the University of Chicago, when , and and were in their prime. The other center was at The Johns Hopkins University, 1876–83, where scholars were " Led by soaring-genius'd Sylvester," as has expressed it in his " Ode to The Johns Hopkins University.""

"These dangers can be parried. The United States has far more authoritarian followers in its midst than democracies usually do, but even so they do not comprise a majority of the nation’s population. If they did, Donald Trump would now be enjoying his second term—likely for the rest of his life. High RWAs can be defeated where it counts, at the ballot box, but it will take a lot of work because authoritarians vote more often than Moderates and Lows. Furthermore, various Republican state legislators are doing all they can to keep their opponents from being able to vote at all. Democracy will probably only survive in America if the non-authoritarians there plow through all the barriers and resolutely cast ballots in elections for the next decade or so. It will take yet more monumental energy and effort like that which carried the day in 2020. But the Americans who rise to defend their country in its hour of need will not only be saving themselves, they will be protecting the blessings of liberty for everyone’s posterity around the planet. We are at a crossroad in history, but take heart: You can do something about it. Involve others who do not appreciate the situation. Determine the outcome."

"The New York Times found the death rate from COVID in counties which Trump won handily in November 2020 was nearly five times as high as the rate in counties where he ran poorly. And even those who thus far have remained unaffected are unwittingly developing a mini-herd immunity to herd immunity, creating a residue of targets for the disease that mass inoculations cannot protect. Yet they support and even adore the person who has caused their suffering more than anyone else, Donald Trump. He has led many of his supporters to their graves and crippled others for life, and they love him anyway. That’s loyalty. It is also deep and abiding authoritarianism. Trump’s core supporters have plighted their troth to him whole hog. They have crossed over into his reality and become anti-matter to the truth. You cannot reach them with facts, studies, or logic. If you try to have a rational conversation with them about Trump, immigrants, COVID, the election, capitalism versus socialism versus communism, whatever, the righter you are, the more they will cling to their beliefs. No matter what Trump does, they will believe his account of it. No matter what he asks them to do, they will trust his reason for doing it. They are ready to risk death rather than doubt. So, many, many of them are doomed."

"Republicans fear the wrath of Trump so much because he owns the GOP base. Always ready to emphasize the obvious, I have said many times that without a crowd of ardent supporters, a wannabe dictator in a democracy is just a clown on a soap box. The crowd is now well-assembled in America. Indeed it was brought together by Republican strategists for their own ends, with only a few like Barry Goldwater anticipating the newcomers would turn the “big tent” into a tabernacle and drive out all the non-believers. Having sown the seeds of its own destruction, the GOP is now reaping the whirlwind. We understand quite well who Trump’s followers are. The October 2019 Monmouth Poll reported in Authoritarian Nightmare found they are the most prejudiced people in America. Their prejudices and many other shortcomings are rooted in authoritarianism, and studies show that authoritarian followers have many emotional and cognitive weaknesses which explain why they are longing for a strong leader who will take their side against the “others” they find threatening. They are highly fearful, ethnocentric, and have uncritically copied the ideas of the authorities in their lives. Their beliefs are highly compartmentalized, even contradictory; they use many double-standards in their judgments; they have lots of trouble distinguishing good from bad evidence; they are highly defensive and dogmatic; they have little self-insight, and a host of other imperfections. Demographically, the two pillars of Trump’s base are white Christian evangelicals and white male blue-collar workers. Both groups score highly on a measure of submission to authority named the RWA Scale."

"Demographically, the odds line up against Trump’s reelection. He draws much more support from older voters than he does from younger ones. But really old voters (and this is being written by someone in his 80s) kick the bucket a lot more than fuzzy-cheeked youths. And it turns out people do not inevitably get appreciably more conservative as they get older, but instead seem to carry forward the beliefs they formed in their younger years. Republicans have known for a long time—and that’s why they started recruiting politically inactive white evangelicals en masse—that the up-and-coming generations will be clenched-teeth liberal on balance. Generation Z could give an authoritarian leader nightmares. Add to this the fact that Trump supporters are dying faster than necessary from a disease their leader encourages them to catch, and you can see the climb is getting steeper and steeper for Republicans in 2022 and 2024. But Trump’s loyalist candidates can still win control of Congress in 2022, and he can still become president again in 2024, if enough persons who oppose him do not vote. You can’t possibly think that people who are ready to die for him won’t bother to show up at the polls, and they’ll proselytize like crazy to bring in converts the way they did in 2020. The question is, will his opponents show up too, especially given all the roadblocks Republican legislatures have thrown up to prevent them from voting? The GOP knows this is game-set-match for them personally. They are considerably outnumbered, but by no means defeated. Authoritarians commonly think they will prevail by steely force of will, and sometimes they do. You have to meet their attack with resolve and commitment, or they will win."

"But the core connection between himself and his followers was their great fear of the future. As Ann Coulter, his strong promoter during the campaign and reputed source of his anti-immigration rhetoric, said “He had me with ‘Mexican rapists.’” Trump’s MAGA slogan resonated with masses of “forgotten Americans” who indeed felt America wasn’t great anymore. Everything was changing. All the old standards were being trashed. The things that gave them whatever precarious advantage they had in life, being white (and for most of them) being male counted for less and less. Instead the United States was filling up with bad people who would blow up your church, steal your jobs and get your kids hooked on drugs."

"The main reason, I submit, is that most of Trump’s backers are authoritarian followers—people who submit too much to the leaders they consider legitimate, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want. “Well yeah,” you might say. “But that’s like saying an apple is an apple because it’s an apple.” And it would be golden delicious example of a rhetorical tautology except social scientists have had a good, independent way of measuring this kind of authoritarianism since the 1970s. And it was clear from the first studies that political “conservatives”—from ordinary voters to elected officials—tended to score highly on this personality test (Chapter 6 of The Authoritarians, the book on this website). We can gain considerable insight into Donald Trump’s supporters from the research on authoritarianism."

"In another sense, however, the fidelity of Trump’s base remains astounding. He has made so many unforced errors because of his lack of understanding and low problem-solving intelligence, his vast ignorance, his enormous, never-ending dishonesty which seems as reflexive as his breathing, his explosive hostility, his uncontrollable vanity, his despicable demeaning of women, his squalid vulgarity, the stupidity of his stereotypes, the shabbiness of his thinking, the buffoonery of his parading, his attacks on the institutions he needs most to safeguard the country, his incredibly poor judgment about the character of those whom he has brought into his administration, his equally mind-numbing lack of judgment about foreign leaders, friend and foe, and his willingness to inflame Americans’ disagreements and turn them into conflagrations which make us that deeply divided house which the Gospels and Abraham Lincoln warned against—how can his supporters have stood so solidly behind him? You’d think they’d be having some second thoughts at least."

"Ethnocentrism comes naturally when we identify with a group, but authoritarian followers are profoundly ethnocentric. Whereas some people will deliberately expose themselves to different ideas, experiences, cultures to avoid living in an “echo chamber,” followers want to live smack dab in the middle of one and are glad to do their part of the echoing. Surrounding themselves with people who agree with them, clapping together, chanting together, cheering together, and marching together is convincing evidence for them that their beliefs are right."

"The long run prospects encourage one. Trump has solid support among my generation of Americans, for example, especially men, but we are not going to last forever. Some suppose that people become more authoritarian as they age, and so one batch of old white men will just be replaced by another. But studies show that political opinions tend to be set in early adulthood and endure. Today’s youth, better educated and wonderfully less ethnocentric than their predecessors, give one great hope for the future of American democracy in the long run. But this is like climate change. We were warned plenty that we were creating a disaster in the only atmosphere we’ve got, and we kept on doing it. Now we are facing the consequences. Whether American democracy endures could well depend on what happens at the polls in 2018 and 2020. Authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers have no great love of freedom and equality. Those who do had better organize and get out the vote, or they will make Donald Trump look like the super-genius he believes he is."

"Authoritarians did not disappear after George W. Bush left office and the United States avoided financial collapse. Instead they flocked to the Tea Party Movement, which the Republican Party cleverly (it thought) helped create and gathered unto itself. But the movement drove moderates from the GOP and sent radical conservatives to Congress. The “Tea Party Party” produced eight years of non-compromising stalemate in Washington as they imposed their own agenda on the Republican leadership. Now American authoritarians have united behind a presidential candidate who unabashedly says he wants to destroy the traditional Republican Party and deal a devastating blow to the Democrats as well. Is that anything to worry about?"

"One consequence of the followers’ strong need for consensual validation, experiments have found, is that they will trust someone who says things they believe, even if there is a lot of evidence that the person does not really believe what he says. They’re just so glad to hear their views coming back to them, they ignore solid reasons why the person might be insincere or outright lying. Relatively UNauthoritarian people, on the other hand, are downright suspicious of someone who might have ulterior motives for reinforcing their beliefs. It is therefore much easier to “con” authoritarian followers, as many a TV evangelist, radio shock-jockey and flag-waving politician knows. It’s no accident that Donald Trump, who had only loosely organized and not particularly right-wing political beliefs, became a Republican politician when he decided to declare war on both the Democrats and Republicans. That’s where the “suckers” are most concentrated, the people you can fool all of the time. (It’s another story, but the GOP largely brought this on itself by deliberately courting these folks.)"

"There’s a hidden danger to authoritarian leaders in all this. When they discover their followers will believe anything they say, even things that contradict something they said earlier, they get sloppy with their lies. Maybe Donald Trump always was careless with the truth. But it seems that over the past two years he has become downright reckless. His base will swallow anything, he has learned, so he just says the first thing that comes to mind. The trouble is, for him and the future of his presidency, Truth happens. Constantly. It may be seen differently by various folks, but things did happen as they happened, not something else. You can only ignore the truth so long, and then reality will inevitably catch up with you. It will destroy you if you have been massively denying it."

"It will seem strange that persons protesting against the government would be labeled “authoritarian followers.” But the concept of authoritarianism centers on submission to those whom one views as the legitimate, established authorities. And the whole point of the “birther” campaign against Obama is that he is an illegitimate president. As well, many Republican rank-and-file members believe the Democrats were unfairly favored by the media in 2008, and stole the election through massive voter fraud engineered by ACORN."

"Research indicates that a bed rock 20-25% of the adults in North America is highly vulnerable to a demagogue who would incite hatred of various minorities to gain power. These people are constantly waiting for a tough “law and order,” “man on horseback” who will supposedly solve all our problems through the ruthless application of force. When such a person gains prominence, you can expect the authoritarian followers to mate devotedly with the authoritarian leader, because each gives the other something they desperately want: the feeling of safety for the followers, and the tremendous power of the modern state for the leader. I would not say that all of the people trying to surge Donald Trump into the White House are authoritarian followers. But they almost certainly compose his hard core base. Where are the rest coming from? Various places, such as white males who fear their status in society is eroding and those who cannot abide a Hillary Clinton presidency. But authoritarianism rises in a population that feels threatened, and many Americans today are anxious about their family’s economic future, not to mention the throbbing fear of terrorist attacks. Many of them are clutching at straws. It’s been noted that if 25% of the American population is always ready to vote for a dictator, that’s half-way to a majority. If the “right” kind of crisis comes along, it could create enough newly panicked citizens to vote a tyrant into office who would overthrow the Constitution, the rule of law, you name it."

"Today’s Tea Party movement began in early 2009 in reaction to the American government’s efforts to stabilize the banking system and keep the nation from sinking into economic turmoil. In October, 2008 the Democrat-controlled Congress passed a “Wall St. bailout” bill (the “TARP” bill) proposed by the Bush administration, which Bush immediately signed. This bill deeply offended some economic conservatives who held a “let the chips fall where they may, no matter what” view of free market economics. Anger among economic conservatives rose yet higher in early 2009 when Congress responded to President Obama’s call for a massive economic stimulus to keep the recession from turning into a Depression. Almost every major Western government, whatever its political stripe, went deeply into the red at this time to keep its economy afloat. Republicans in Congress voted massively against the bill, and Democrats took the heat for trying to stop a recession that the Republicans had largely caused by deregulating the banking system."

"I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to get a divorce. I'm saying that there's a teensy-weensy bit of hypocrisy in a group opposing gay marriage on religious and "save the family" grounds when one-fifth to one-third of its members have themselves been divorced."

"As a moderate and an Independent, I would like to see at least two sets of well-thought-out policies to choose from when I vote. But who is left to shape and guide conservatism in America now? Sarah Palin? Rush Limbaugh? Glenn Beck? Sean Hannity? Newt Gingrich? Michelle Bachmann? Mitch McConnell? John Boehner? Mitt Romney? Scott Brown? Mike Huckabee? Ann Coulter? The best and brightest Republicans have been shown the door. As was true during McCarthyism, some GOP leaders must be deeply concerned about what is happening, but few dare speak. They’ve seen what happens when someone challenges Rush."

"A wannabe dictator is all about dominance. He wants to dominate everyone and he will do whatever he can get away with to become “Number One.” Often the movement he leads becomes a personality clique, because ultimately it is really just about, only about, him. Trump appears every bit as narcissistic as he is aggressive and constantly striving for dominance. The most remarkable thing about Donald Trump as an authoritarian leader, in my mind, is that he’s so obvious about it. Look at his comments about Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong-un. While he has some negative evaluation of each, he praises all three for becoming autocrats and using their power to dominate their countries. How hard is it to see what he’s hoping to do? Who will stop him if he becomes President?"

"Eternal vigilance. Remember, no one said democracy would be easy."

"Eleven years later, as I am now definitely writing the last pages in my last book on the subject, I believe circumstances such as “9/11" have nearly swept us to disaster, the authoritarian threat has grown unabated, and almost all the protections I saw in 1996, such as a “free and vigilant press,” are being eroded or have already been destroyed. The biggest problem we have now, in my view, is authoritarianism. It has placed America at one of those historic cross-roads that will profoundly affect the rest of its history, and the future of our planet. The world deserves a much better America than the one it has seen lately. And so do Americans."

"Often one person can steel another, and another and another, until many are working together. You don’t have to form a majority to have an effect. Two or three people speaking out can sometimes get a school board, a church board, a board of aldermen to reconsider authoritarian actions. Lack of any opposition teaches bullies simply to go for more. But it takes one person, an individual, to start the opposition."

"Despite all the factors handicapping the Republicans from the start, and the painfully inept, lurching, hypocritical, unfocused campaign they ran, some 60 million Americans voted for McCain/Palin. That’s a pretty sobering realization. I think it shows Barack Obama was working against a significantly stronger headwind than John McCain was, yet he prevailed."

"Fundamentalist parents could talk to their children about being Christians before talking about being Baptists. They could talk about being God’s children before talking about being Christians. They could talk about all being brothers and sisters before that. They could."

"The need for social reinforcement runs so deeply in authoritarians, they will believe someone who says what they want to hear even if you tell them they should not. I have several times asked students or parents to judge the sincerity of a university student who wrote arguments either condemning, or supporting, homosexuals. But some subjects were told the student had been assigned to condemn (or support) homosexuals as part of a philosophy test to see how well the student could make up arguments for anything, on the spot. Other subjects were told the student could choose to write on either side of the issue, and had chosen to make the case she did. Obviously, you can’t tell anything about the real opinions of someone who was assigned the point of view of her essay. But high RWAs believed that the antihomosexual essay that a student was forced to write reflected that student’s personal views almost as much as when a student had chosen this point of view. In other words, as in the previous experiments, the authoritarians ignored the circumstances and believed the student really meant what she had been assigned to say--when they liked what she said."

"I similarly think you’ll likely be wasting your time trying to convince authoritarian followers that they are being systematically misinformed and played for dopes by their leaders. It’s too important to them to believe otherwise, and just your raising the question will likely put you into their huge out-group and make them suspicious of you."

"Unfortunately, the wretchedly divisive 2008 GOP campaign will, I fear, poison the country for some time. High RWAs have been told over and over again by their trusted sources that Barack Obama is a Muslim socialist/Communist America-hating dictatorial terrorist intent on destroying the country. They have been led to intensely dislike, if not hate the president-elect, and it’s no accident, I submit, that the Secret Service noted a sharp increase in the number of threats to the Democratic standard-bearer as Palin’s crowds became more rabid. Furthermore the Republican National Committee, Fox News, and so on have sold authoritarian followers the myth that the Democrats won through massive voter fraud, because the media conspired to keep Americans from discovering “the truth” about Obama, and that the Democrats caused all the problems that have occurred over the past eight years. You could easily find postings on various blogs in the last weeks of the campaign saying people should be ready to “take up arms” against an “illegal Obama tyranny” to “preserve democracy and the Constitution.”"