Moles in plain sight
Cenk Uygur & Ana Kasparian are leading their audience astray, Pied-Piper style.
Joel Cooper and his associates, way back in 1978, noted that the results of their social experiment “seem to indicate that arousal is a necessary component of the attitude change process under conditions of induced compliance.”1
This is important to remember, because in the case of angertainment2 the audience is electing to watch the highly arousing material. Fox & their cohort use the model of evoking in their audiences a sense of “How dare they?” (usually in response to the Democratic Party or left-leaning liberals in general).
But Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks (TYT), with their recent ideological about-face, have embraced an audience model of “How dare you?” — ‘you’ being the hosts! (Witness Uygur appearing with Charlie Kirk at America Fest, participating in what one critic, Francesca Fiorentini, called an apology tour;3 and Kasparian injecting right-wing talking points into TYT segments.)
Either way, both models elicit high levels of arousal in an atmosphere of compliance — the audience sought out or agreed to watch the segments and so came to the material of their own accord.4 This raises dissonance. Combined with the heightening of arousal through exposure to material that produces indignance, anger, fear or disgust, this dissonance leads to changes in attitude.
This is a format of opinion change easily implemented by these shock-doctrine broadcasts and purported ‘news shows’. Indeed, over time, accumulated exposure to this model may radicalize the audience.5
Interestingly, Kasparian just this week spoke about the process of “red-pilling” — that is, being rapidly radicalized toward right-wing views — and her tone was glowing. “That is so true, and that is what I was trying to get across to people,” she exclaimed.
Even though she ostensibly was elaborating on a quote made by someone else entirely, she spoke as though she were giving a testimonial. By doing so, she was effectively giving her audience permission to become red-pilled themselves and to follow Kasparian on her own journey toward becoming “unaligned” not only from the Democratic Party but progressivism altogether.
The only way to avoid this indirect yet highly effective form of influence is to limit exposure.
Progressives who want to shield themselves from such underhanded persuasion should not watch The Young Turks anymore. The two main hosts are completely turning away from leftist ideals yet insidiously maintain a fiction that they’re still “the home of progressives.” They apparently mean to lead their audience to some form of third-way centrism, which threatens to demolish the online progressive movement right when it’s needed most, at the advent of Donald Trump’s retaking of the Oval Office.
This is no time for dismantling the left. This is the time to jettison Janus-faced double agents.
Joel Cooper et al., “Arousal as a Necessary Condition for Attitude Change Following Induced Compliance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1978), Vol. 36, No. 10, p. 1105. The experiment involved having subjects write a short essay arguing against a firmly held belief. The test involved measuring whether dissonance led to arousal, which in turn would lead to attitude change to resolve the dissonance. The main variable was a variable of dissonance as a function of high- or low-choice (i.e., being asked versus being told to write the essay); also tested a blinded administration of a pill, which was a placebo (milk powder), a small dose of dextroamphetamine, or a small dose of phenobarbital. The administration was “blind” in that the subjects given the doses were all informed that their dose was a placebo, when in fact this was not the case.
Notably, in the low-choice condition (which should not have produced dissonance and thus should have led to the subject retaining his or her belief), those who were given the stimulant changed their opinion as much as those in the high-choice condition. The authors suggested that this change in attitude, meant to reduce dissonance, was actually misattribution of the arousal spurred by the stimulant.
I wrote about ‘angrytainment’ in May 2022, a term I coined while composing the piece; I’ve since seen ‘angertainment’ elsewhere around the web, so I am adopting this formulation.
Francesca Fiorentini is herself a contributor to TYT. She thus has skin in the game in terms of the platform’s rightward turn. Her two-hour interview with Uygur can be seen here; I plan to delve into that interview, as well as others that Uygur has done, in an upcoming essay.
“It has been well established that dissonance following attitude-discrepant behavior is aroused only under circumstances in which people perceive themselves to have acted of their own free will[.]” Cooper et al., op. cit., p. 1102.
A cultural critic from the past warned us about this form of influence. “One technique in the new manipulation [in propaganda] to which I would like to draw your attention, so that you can perhaps study it a little more closely and resist it, is cumulative effect. A publication like the Soldaten-Zeitung, that is, the National-Zeitung, has developed a remarkable virtuosity in never writing anything in one issue that is extreme enough to warrant intervention based on the current, quite firm laws against anti-Semitism or neo-Nazism. On the other hand, if one looks at a number of issues in succession, one must truly be stricken with the spirit of formalism not to see what they mean. And this danger, this form of allusion that has been elevated to a sophisticated technique, is one of those things that should not only be studied closely and pinpointed; one should surely also try to find legal means by which a democratic state would be able to intervene.” Theodor Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (1967 / 2020), pp. 23-24. Polity Press: Cambridge.
I think that the bulk of these infotainment pundits are grifts of varying sorts. I’ve read anecdotal accounts that claim that Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson admitted off the record that everything they say is for novelty purposes only and it’s the fault of the listener/viewer if they believe such obvious nonsense. Similarly, I think the first Trump term encouraged the proliferation of pundits and commenters to provide copium for shellshocked liberals. Now that Trump is the once and future president, the bottom has fallen out of that kind of mindless commentary (to be specific, I’m referring both to the ones that were constantly claiming that Trump would be imprisoned for his misdeeds and the ones that only existed to provide breathless updates about whatever dumb thing Trump did in the last three hours). Because these commentators are fundamentally entertainers, rather than journalists or political scientists, their main concern is finding material that sells. If liberalism doesn’t sell, might as well chase the bucks and go conservative.