Influencing Votes with Fear

SOURCE: MELISSA DYKES

Political strategists know if they push your buttons, they can get you to keep mindlessly, pointlessly voting… even though it won’t change a damn thing.

Political strategists (and the people running the show) know it works even though, deep down, most voters in this country have long ago realized somewhere inside that voting, at least in the federal elections, has all of aboutzero effect on actually changing anything and is basically a meaningless gesture that simply solidifies one’s willing participation in a slave system.

Political strategists have figured out how to keep people mindlessly, pointlessly voting anyway.

Here’s a direct quote from one:

Pick your boogeyman: undocumented immigrants or Wall Street bankers.

Let’s stick with the immigrants, she thinks. Just link the border to the national angst and tell everybody that migrants and the idiots who let them in killed the American Dream.

But it’s not that simple. This has to be about more than scaring people…

So, which will it be to keep the masses obediently voting for the country’s continued destruction at the hands of central banks and corrupt corporate interests?

Fear or anger? Anger or fear?

Because, despite Schoolhouse Rockcartoons and the propaganda taught in our public schools, patriotic duty and that little “I voted” flag sticker they hand out aren’t what keep people voting in modern America.

Emotional manipulation in some of its most basic forms is what keeps people voting in modern America. This is openly admitted, it’s just that no one is paying close enough attention.

Fear works a little, but ultimately, it’s a combination of fear and anger that really does the trick.

Why?

Chris Weber, Associate Professor at UA’s School of Government and Public Policy, says fear is more likely to increase open-mindedness and objectivity than diminish it.

Fear alone, you see, might actually be counterproductive, increasing “open-mindedness”.

And they definitely don’t want that in a place like a voting booth…

If there’s a swarm of angry bees headed your way, for example, you’re going to be quite open to new ideas. A long-time preference for turning right isn’t going to stop you if the best escape looks like a sharp left turn.

So fear alone is not the ticket to the White House.The strategist doesn’t want people thinking. She wants them voting — for her guy.

That means getting them scared and mad.

Yes, must have anger, too. Why?

Because —

Anger, says Weber, is an empowering emotion. It increases voter engagement and participation.

How does it do that,  you ask? It’s actually quite simple. They find a hot button topic sure to piss people off, then piss people off with it while simultaneously promising their candidate will work to solve the problem that pissed them off.

Problem — Reaction — Solution.

Anger also can make people more extreme, more partisan and less likely to engage in discussions across the aisle. Especially if the anger is properly manipulated.

So first they make you angry about something, then they manipulate that anger into action by telling you if you vote, it will fix the cause of your anger.

How? Well —

Sullivan says people have some basic needs that are applicable. First, they need to feel like they are in control in a world that is an orderly, predictable place.

We want to believe. Wow. Sounds like an episode of X-files.

But obviously we aren’t that naive. We all know the world isn’t orderly or predictable (at least, not with the information we’re given, unless we go with “predictably broken” or “run by a morally bankrupt elite”), and there are all kinds of things on a world stage the average person has no direct control over.

False flags like 9/11. The military-industrial complex’s insistence on regime change in Syria and the creation of ISIS. The over $1 trillion and growing in student loan debt or the fact that now half of 25-year-olds in this country are still living with their parents and a third of the adjunct professors who teach our college students are themselves living in poverty. Unemployment which will only steadily rise once more robots start taking over basic jobs. Manipulated refugee crises. The suppressed cure for cancer and rising cancer rates. GMO. The banker bailout. The Fed. Usury. The growing Big Brother surveillance state. Bill Gates’ and Al Gore’s b.s. carbon taxes.

The list goes on and on. But…

But the strategist knowsAmericans would never vote for her guy if they gave it any real thought.

Yeah. Just keep watching Football and Dancing with the Stars or whatever new reality show features Kim Kardashian’s plastic ass. Don’t pay attention to the reality the people at the top are constructing around you all.

That brings us to the other basic human need. People want to see themselves as morally valuable, Sullivan says. Everybody wants to be one of the good guys.

We want voting to somehow make us feel like we’re a “good guy” because we’re trying to “change bad things” by voting for a “good guy”.

So what do they do?

Sullivan’s research found that if you remind people of all the threats to their sense of control and then remind them of a perceived enemy, the combined experience helps restore that sense of control by defining a source of the threat.

You know, a scapegoat.

Once you have a scapegoat, it’s easy for people to feel righteous, good-guy anger at that enemy.

And there you have it. Behavior manipulation 101 keeps America voting every four years.

If you still vote for POTUS every four years, they are playing you like a fiddle all the way into the voting booth.

So once again?

Capitalize on fear, channel it into morally outraged anger. The strategist sees great opportunity: Make voting for Our Guy feel like defending Mom against the invading hordes. This kind of anger is motivating, and doesn’t encourage thinking.

And that — that right there — is how the political game is played, ladies and gentlemen.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE...