Trump Unleashes Another Amygdala Dogwhistle

You hear this, and what do you think?

Donald Trump has taken aim at Hillary Clinton by suggesting she should strip her bodyguards of their weapons and ‘see what happens’.

Trump – who has long claimed his presidential rival wants to overturn the Second Amendment – appeared to suggest such a move would court ‘danger’.

‘I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. They should disarm, right?’ he asked his baying crowd of supporters at a rally in Miami.

He went on: ‘Take their guns away, she doesn’t want guns. Let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away. Okay, it would be very dangerous.’

I see the logical argument and think, “Yeah, Hillary really is a hypocrite.” Extrapolating how my K-brain would think in Hillary’s position, I would imagine myself seeing the same logic and thinking, “How dare he highlight my hypocrisy!”

But that is not what a liberal brain takes from the comment. A liberal brain’s amygdala scans that statement for imagery, and what it sees flash through it is Hillary, her security disarmed, being set upon by armed militia members who throw her to the ground, kick her in the stomach, punch her teeth out, and then put an AR-15 muzzle to her head and pull the trigger, blasting blood and brain matter all over the ground under her as her body falls limp and lifeless.

Suddenly, the liberal only see’s Donald’s statement as dangerous talk designed to get Hillary assassinated. It doesn’t matter that her Secret Service are never going to disarm, and her security will never be compromised. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t what Donald said. It doesn’t matter that such an image was conjured entirely in the liberal mind, and had nothing to do with what Donald was saying. That image is the dogwhistle – the twig-snapping danger sign that their amygdala is programmed to look for, and focus them on. Their brain began flash-scanning a multitude of images related to what Donald said, and when that image flashed through their amygdala the warning sirens went off, it was everybody to battle stations, and they entered point and shriek mode reflexively.

You can say one thing, and a different message pops up in the liberal’s head because of that mechanism, just as in this case. Here, Donald is exploiting it to make liberals look stupid and weak. Donald points out hypocrisy, every normal person will see the hypocrisy argument, and then the normies will see Hillary suddenly freak out over being assassinated, seemingly for no logical reason, which makes her look weak, fearful, and somewhat mentally damaged in addition.

I can’t figure if Donald is just trolling all the time, and this ended up being more brilliant than normal by chance, or if he actually understands this, and designed that statement with that end result in mind. I can see the mechanism after the fact, but even knowing it, I am still not quite sharp enough to craft these gems with a certainty of how they will work. If Donald is that sharp, he is unbelievable.