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Книжка Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (2013) рассказывает о результатах исследований в области биологической политологии - изучении, с какими чертами характера, коррелируют правые и левые политические пристрастия.

Известно, например, что правые (консервативные) взгляды коррелируют с таким качеством, как брезгливость - причем с большой точностью это можно предсказать по реакции мозга на одну картинку.

Disgusting images, especially those related to animal-reminder disgust (e.g., mutilated body), generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation even though these neural predictors do not agree with participants’ conscious rating of the stimuli. Images from other affective categories do not support such predictions. Remarkably, brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subject’s political ideology.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982214012135

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Исследования на близнецах показывают, что генетика определяет подобные склонности на 30-40%.

VEDANTAM: There's a really interesting way to separate the effects of biology from the environment. Think about fraternal and identical twins. Identical twins have identical genes. Fraternal twins have similar but not identical genes. If you follow a group of fraternal and identical twins, each twin pair is raised in the same household. Each pair eats the same food, listens to the same conversations, watches the same movies. Now, if you find differences between identical twins as a group and fraternal twins as a group, that suggests that biology, not environment, is the driver. I asked John what such studies reveal about political preferences.
HIBBING: We were fortunate to have access to a data set. It's very large - includes thousands and thousands of twin pairs, collected by a guy named Lindon Eaves long ago. It's a fairly dated data set, but it was a valuable one for us because it included lots of information about their political views. And when we subjected these data to the standard twin design approach, we did indeed find that the political views were quite heritable. Although, people oftentimes misread this, our results suggested that maybe 30 or 40 percent of our political views come from genetics. But, you know, that bothered a lot of people, and this was quite a controversial study in political science. Many people didn't like that at all, and they tended to over-interpret those results and make it sound like we were saying that everything was genetic. But, you know, if it's 30 to 40 percent genetic, that obviously leaves, you know, 50, 60, 70 percent that comes from the environment. So all we're saying is that that genetic component is not zero, but apparently that was enough that some people were upset about that.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=654127241



Тем интересней истории людей, которые в середине жизни резко меняли убеждения и перебегали в противоположный лагерь. Один из таких людей был Уиттакер Чэмберс. который из коммуниста и советского шпиона стал консерватором, а по дороге обрел религию и "излечился" от гомосексуализма. Чэмберс оказал существенное влияния на Рональда Рейгана и его мировоззрение.



Перебежчик из другого поколения - Дэвид Горовиц - сыграл ключевую роль в приходе Трампа к власти и в возникновении идеологии трампизма.

Горовиц вырос в семье коммунистов из Нью-Йорка, учился в либеральном Беркли и влился в радикально левое движение. Он уехал в Англию для работы с интеллектуальными марксистами и написал там книгу "The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War". В автобиографии "Radical Son" Горовиц описывает, как он в Лондоне подвергся попытке вербовки со стороны агента КГБ, который водил его по дорогим ресторанам и невзначай подарил ему ручку Паркер и конверт с деньгами.



Горовиц вернулся в США в 1968, на пике протестного движения, в которое он немедленно влился, редактируя леворадикальный журнал Ramparts, поддерживая Партию чёрных пантер, критикуя ЦРУ и с надеждой взирая на Фиделя Кастро.

Horowitz and Collier drank the Kool-Aid served by the Left’s most destructive elements. They published Hayden’s drivel calling the Black Panthers America’s “internal Viet Cong,” along with his exhortation for radical white youth to create “liberated zones” in cities and on campuses to serve as sanctuaries for their heroic Panther allies. Ramparts’ new editors then topped this foolishness with their own, proclaiming Hayden “one of the country’s most serious revolutionaries.” To me, the lasting image of Ramparts’ second incarnation was a cover depicting a burning Bank of America branch in Southern California. The radical students who firebombed it, said the accompanying text, “may have done more for saving the environment than all the teach-ins put together.”
https://www.city-journal.org/html/ramparts-i-watched-13251.html




Позже пришло отрезвление, а вслед за ним - крутой разворот в сторону консерватизма. В 1985 Горовиц и его бывший леворадикальный приятель Коллиер пишут статью "Lefties for Reagan", в которой объясняют, почему в 1984 они голосовали за Рейгана. Главный вопрос - международная политика, в которой Рейган служит защитником демократии против наступления диктатур по всему миру, с поддержкой из Кремля.

"VOTING is symbolic behavior, a way of evaluating what one's country has been as well as what it might become. We do not accept Reagan's policies chapter and verse (especially in domestic policy, which we haven't discussed here), but we agree with his vision of the world as a place increasingly inhospitable to democracy and increasingly dangerous for America.
One of the few saving graces of age is a deeper perspective on the passions of youth. Looking back on the left's revolutionary enthusiasms of the last 25 years, we have painfully learned what should have been obvious all along: that we live in an imperfect world that is bettered only with great difficulty and easily made worse -- much worse. This is a conservative assessment, but on the basis of half a lifetime's experience, it seems about right."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1985/03/17/lefties-for-reagan/c3d58778-8ec9-4463-9252-3a032e078d36/



Постепенна борьва с "левачками" превратилась для Горовица в нездоровую навязчивую идею, ради которой он приложил огромные усилия.

For those most deeply invested in this universe, clinging to anti-Communism is as much a personal as it is a political phenomenon. What comes through vividly in Horowitz's memoirs is a fierce Oedipal struggle entwined with radicalism. Horowitz wanted to antagonize his Communist father; in later years, when he was ailing, Horowitz would bait him by raising the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But Horowitz also wanted to please him and win the unconditional love he never felt as a boy.
This sense of acting out of personal injury permeates everything Horowitz writes today. He is enmeshed in a kind of co-dependent relationship with the left. He wants to hurt them, and wants to be hurt back. As John Podhoretz wrote reviewing "Radical Son," Horowitz "has yet to find emotional distance from his onetime brethren on the left. They have the capacity to wound him as surely as if he were their brother still. Horowitz cannot help but desire their approbation, just as he sought his father's until the day of Phil Horowitz's death."
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/28/magazine/cold-war-without-end.html



Коммунистический догматизм, с которым Горовиц взялся за дело антикоммунизма, призывал к полной беспощадности к врагам.

During the 2000 presidential and congressional elections, every Republican member of Congress received a free pamphlet from Congressman Tom DeLay, the party’s majority whip. It was called “The Art of Political War: How Republicans Can Fight to Win” by David Horowitz. It was endorsed by Karl Rove, senior advisor to candidate G.W. Bush. The Heritage Foundation sent another 2,300 copies of the pamphlet to other conservative activists.
The pamphlet states:
Politics is war conducted by other means. In political warfare you do not fight just to prevail in an argument, but to destroy the enemy’s fighting ability…. In political wars, the aggressor usually prevails.

A former left-wing activist, David Horowitz offers Lenin’s words of advice:
You cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate. You can do it only by following Lenin’s injunction: “In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent’s argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.”

https://sites.google.com/site/911newworldorderfiles/bananarepublicans

what if you could place political parties from around the world on the same scale? where would the democrats and republicans fall? turns out it's a hard question! here's my answer: https://t.co/DCysZNTymL pic.twitter.com/AHUtc3HSVQ
- Sahil Chinoy (@sahilchinoy) June 26, 2019

В том, что нынешняя республиканская партия заплыла далеко вправо и находится справа от UKIP и партии Мари Ле Пен, есть скромный вклад Горовитца. В 2000ых он становится крестным отцом анти-исламской истерии, вкупе с дикими теориями заговора.

As the GOP becomes increasingly influenced by Tea Party politicians who bring conspiracy theories to the debate, Horowitz and his acolytes have emerged as the experts on radical Islam and its terrifying infiltration into American society and government.
Horowitz has accused anti-tax activist Grover Norquist of being a secret Muslim plant in the federal government. More famously, he has led the charge that Huma Abedin, a long-time aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is a Muslim Brotherhood agent sent to “penetrate” the U.S. government. Horowitz argues that Abedin, who is married to former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, has “been given a special dispensation to marry a Jew so she can infiltrate our government.”
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2014/godfather



Анти-исламизм идет в удобном пакете с анти-иммигрантской риторикой. Со школьных лет Стивена Миллера, спичрайтера Трампа и архитектора его иммиграционной политики, Горовиц служит его ментором и наставником. Именно по его рекомендации Джеф Сешнс взял Миллера себе в помощники и таким образом предоставил тому трамплин в Белый дом.

В марте 2014, за месяц до появления Трампа в Нью-Гэмпшире, в Калифорнии проходило ежегодное сборище Горовица (Restoration Weekend), на котором Сешнс получал из рук Миллера награду за срыв попытки иммиграционной реформы. Там же питомцы Горовица договорились сконцентрироваться на иммиграции, как главной теме для выборов.

In March 2014, the center made the first of $175,000 in contributions to the Party for Freedom, a group founded by Geert Wilders, one of Europe’s most ardent anti-Muslim politicians, according to documents released by the Dutch government and originally described by the New York Times and the Intercept. He was campaigning on a platform of preventing the “Islamization of the Netherlands,” proposing a ban on Muslim immigration and the shuttering of mosques.
Later that year, Wilders spoke at Restoration Weekend.
“The truth is that our own Western culture - based on Christianity, based on Judaism and humanism - is far superior, far superior, than the Islamic culture that immigrants have adopted,” Wilders said to applause.
On hand that weekend was Jeff Sessions, a regular at the annual retreat. He was honored with a glass trophy for helping to derail a bipartisan bill aimed at overhauling U.S. immigration law. He acknowledged Horowitz from the stage. “I’ve seen some great people receive this, David. And it’s a special treat and pleasure for me, David, because you know how much I admire you as we battle for right and justice and law,” Sessions said.
Later that night, Sessions and Miller went to a lounge at the resort. Joining them was Ann Coulter, another regular and a contributor to Frontpagemag.com. She was writing a book called “Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole.”
As Sessions sipped on a drink, she and Miller batted around ideas about how to crack down on immigration until long after midnight. “There was obviously a major meeting of the minds,” said one person in the lounge at the time who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of repercussions. “They thought immigration was the single most important issue in the country.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-a-shadow-universe-of-charities-joined-with-political-warriors-to-fuel-trumps-rise/2017/06/03/ff5626ac-3a77-11e7-a058-ddbb23c75d82_story.html

В 2017 Горовиц с удовлетворением напишет про своего протеже:

"When I watch Steve’s rapid fire responses now, as he is interviewed before the cameras, and relish his articulation of complex policies and mastery of the arguments that support them, I am still impressed, even though I saw this coming many years past.
But what I continue to marvel at is the way he continues to move forward despite the incoming fire, the way he doesn’t bend or falter before the onslaught of mean-spirited and ignorant attacks on his character and motives. In this he is like Bannon and their boss Trump, and unlike the Republicans we have known. These are the new conservatives who are changing the face of the Republican Party, and America too. For me it is all captured in a single image."
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2017/02/07/david-horowitz-stephen-miller-a-second-thoughts-warrior/

I've been unsuspended after protest. But yes the greatest threat we face is the biggest blacklist in the history of our country against supporters of America and its great leader Donald Trump. https://t.co/Tcud0bRzT2
- David Horowitz (@horowitz39) May 8, 2019

Среди других заступников - Трамп-младший, участник недавнего шабаша троллей в Белом доме.

Happened to @GrrrGraphics on Instagram. Same lame excuses, oops a “mistake “
- GrrrGraphics Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) May 8, 2019

Man who drew a cartoon the @ADL calls “blatantly anti-Semitic” says he was invited to the White House for a social media summit https://t.co/Fzckv4rJbD https://t.co/nmH1zyCV7C pic.twitter.com/hvz4BpLNVt
- Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 6, 2019

As he opened an event that had brought 200 conservative social media firebrands to the White House, President Trump wanted his guests to know just how much he appreciated their work helping shape the online narrative about his presidency and a re-election fight.
“The crap you think of,” Mr. Trump said as he surveyed his Twitter kingdom, “is unbelievable.”
Mr. Trump was once an outsider political candidate who prided himself on bending rules and subverting norms, and he wants to keep that sensibility as a candidate in 2020. So on Thursday, the president went in search of outside-the-box campaign ideas from a group that also has little use for playing by the rules.
Sandwiched between a flurry of morning presidential tweets and bleeding into Mr. Trump’s early evening news conference on how his administration would collect data on citizenship, the White House Social Media Summit was dominated by activists willing to share unverified smears against Democratic presidential candidates, disseminate QAnon conspiracy theories and create memes the president might share.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/us/politics/white-house-social-media-summit.html

Incredible man spread here pic.twitter.com/7P0UR1HpR6
- Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) July 11, 2019

Для многих участников шабаша это был "reunion" после встреч под крылом Горовица, на которых планировалась безжалостная война мемов. Некоторых из участников прошлых встреч уже нет в строю, но их дело живет.

Every year, far-right activist David Horowitz brings together members of Congress and other conservative powerbrokers with anti-Muslim, anti-immigration activists at a Florida resort for a “Restoration Weekend.” This year, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka spoke at the event, as did at least one member of Trump’s “election integrity commission.” At least four members of Congress attended the event, including House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes.
Over the weekend, attendees had a chance to mingle with far-right activists who helped to shape the alt-right movement, including Ann Coulter, Gavin McInnes and Milo Yiannopoulos. <...>
Also at the event were Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, Rebel Media owner Ezra Levant, right-wing social media personality Candace Owens, a.k.a. Red Pill Black, Joy Villa, and James O’Keefe. Along with Nunes, Republican Reps. Rob DeSantis and Brian Mast of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas appear to have attended.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/far-right-activists-party-with-bannon-gorka-congressmen-election-integrity-commissioner-in-florida/

Milo dressed as Christine Blasey-Ford. Lots of laughs! #restorationweekend pic.twitter.com/MCZudJwOIH
- Horowitz Freedom Center (@HorowitzCenter) November 17, 2018