George Lakoff: 'Don't retweet Donald Trump and don't use his language'

DW: You argue that many well-meaning people including journalists completely ignore the latest findings in the field of cognitive and brain science when they try to refute the falsehoods routinely tweeted or uttered by President Donald Trump. Can you explain what you mean?

George Lakoff: Language activates an idea and a circuitry in your brain. And the result of that is every time a circuit is activated, its synapses get stronger. So the more you hear certain things, even if you just hear and understand them, the circuitry gets stronger.

I wrote a book called "Don't think of an elephant" — which makes you think of an elephant. Or when Nixon said "I am not a crook" everybody thought of him as a crook. Why? Because in order to negate something you have to activate it in your brain first which makes it stronger. So every time you deny something overtly using the language of the person you are trying to contradict, you are actually helping that person.
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So how should we react when Trump sends out one of his many agenda-setting tweets?

What you do first is understand what the tweet is doing and what he does not want you to hear. Often there is some actual real news, real truths that he doesn't want you to hear. He wants to control the media. The media should not let him control them. You are not puppets — cut the strings.

Click for link to George Lakoff's post, and the full article at DW Akademie

It's a public post: You should be able to read George's post on Facebook even without a Facebook account.

George Lakoff now has a podcast on SoundCloud, free to subscribe for now. If you do a search for George Lakoff on SoundCloud.com, that will be difficult because you will get many results: he has done many interviews that are on SoundCloud.

So if you want to find his podcast, search for his organization FrameLab instead. I've posted the logo to the right to make it easier for you to find the podcast if you don't have the link handy.