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BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So there was one from Wednesday this week that you say embodies all four of these categories, preemptive framing, diversion, trial balloon and deflection. I will read it. It is, “Intelligence agencies should not have allowed this fake news to leak into the public, one last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

GEORGE LAKOFF:  First, preemptive framing, this is fake news, secondly, diversion, it’s gonna be discussed whether or not it’s fake news or should have been leaked, rather than the content.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Right.

GEORGE LAKOFF:  There’s deflection, which is attacking the messengers, and then you get the trial balloon, will the intelligence agencies be stopped from doing this? Are they working like Nazi Germany?

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THE OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE FUNCTIONS OF IDEOLOGY

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The structure of fascism is characterized by metaphysical thinking, unorthodox faith, obsession with abstract ethical ideals, and belief in the divine predestination of the führer. These basic features are linked with a deeper layer, which is characterized by a strong authoritarian tie to the führer-ideal or the nation. The belief in a “master race” became the principal mainspring of the tie to the “führer” on the part of the National Socialist masses, as well as the foundation of their voluntary acceptance of slavish submission. In addition to this, however, the intensive identification with the führer had a decisive effect, for it concealed one’s real status as an insignificant member of the masses. Notwithstanding his vassalage, every National Socialist felt himself to be a “little Hitler.” Now, however, we want to turn our attention to the characterological basis of these attitudes. We must seek out the dynamic functions that, while they themselves are determined by education and the social atmosphere as a whole, remold human structures to such an extent that tendencies of a reactionary-irrational nature are capable of taking shape in them to such an extent that, completely enveloped in their identification with the “führer,” the masses are immune to the insult heaped upon them by the label “inferior.”

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-Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 80

ITS CONTENTS

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Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of the word economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have a meaning only to a numbskull. We do not want to enter into the other absurdities here–as if racial circumscription and not its opposite, promiscuous mating within the same species, were the rule in nature. In the present examination we are not concerned with the rational content of the race theory, a theory that, in stead of proceeding from facts to valuations, proceeded from valuations to a distortion of the facts. Nor will arguments be of any use against a fascist who is narcissistically convinced of the supreme superiority of his Teutonism, if only because he operates with irrational feelings and not with arguments. Hence, it would be hopeless to try to prove to a fascist that black people and Italians are not racially “inferior” to the Teutons. He feels himself to be “superior,” and that’s the end of it. The race theory can be refuted only by exposing its irrational functions, of which there are essentially two: that of giving expression to certain unconscious and emotional currents prevalent in the nationalistically disposed man and of concealing certain psychic tendencies. Only the latter function will be discussed here. We are especially interested in the fact that Hitler speaks of “incest” when an Aryan interbreeds with a non-Aryan, whereas it is usually sexual intercourse among those who are related by blood that is designated as incest. How are such stupidities to be explained in a “theory” that presumed to be the basis of a new world, a “third Reich”? When we bear in mind that in the final analysis the irrational, emotional basis of such a hypothesis owes its existence to definite existential factors; when we free ourselves of the notion that the discovery of such irrational sources of views of life, which have come into being on a rational basis, means a shifting of the question into the sphere of metaphysics, then we open the way to the source of metaphysics itself. We comprehend not only the historical conditions under which metaphysical thinking arises, but also its material substance. Let the results speak for themselves.

-Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 78-9