The difference between Trump supporters and Clinton supporters all in one graphic.

Courtesy of Inside Same Grain: 

Trump supporters are more likely to believe in most paranormal phenomena - angels, ghosts, alien visits, conspiracy theories, and Big Foot. Clinton supporters are only more likely to believe in psychics. The biggest difference between Trump and Clinton is with a belief in Big Foot; Trump supporters are 28% more likely to believe in the mythological ape-like creature. Clinton supporters' stronger belief in psychics is likely due to to the fact that women, from whom she enjoys strong support, are more likely to believe in psychics. Note also that Clinton supporters are nearly 40% more likely to have no paranormal beliefs. 

If you get right down to it this is really the thing.

The thing that separates the rational from the irrational.

The less intelligent superstitious are easily convinced to put critical thinking aside in favor of feelings, or intuition, or even faith. All of which are easily manipulated to lead them down the path toward making choices that are harmful to them personally or harmful to all of us as a nation.

These are people that Donald Trump, a rabid consumer of conspiracy theories, understands on a fundamental level. And in turn they also feel a connection to him.

This is why fact checking and in depth reporting has no impact on his support.

They BELIEVE they know him, and no facts to the contrary will shake their faith. 

The AP obtains the e-mails of Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis. And yes they are just as batshit crazy as you imagine.

Courtesy of TPM:  

Davis' emails, obtained by the Associated Press under the Kentucky open records law, offer some insight into her state of mind in the weeks leading up to her five-day stint in jail for defying a federal court order to issue the licenses. 

"The battle has just begun," Davis wrote in the email to a supporter in July, hours after four couples filed a federal lawsuit against her. It was the start of a monthslong legal fight against licensing same-sex marriages. 

"It has truly been a firestorm here and the days are pretty much a blur, but I am confident that God is in control of all of this!!" she wrote to the supporter on July 2, the day the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against her on behalf of the couples. "I desire your prayers, I will need strength that only God can supply and I need a backbone like a saw log!!"

"Backbone like a saw log?"  Is that a Kentucky saying, or a crazy person saying?

But wait, there's more:  

Protesters crowded the courthouse lawn and news media from across the country descended on rural Rowan County. She complained to a supporter that the demonstrators stood outside her office window chanting into bullhorns. 

"Will your lawyers and several decent people be around you to protect you from the wicked threatening homosexual mob and their supporters?" a man from Somerset named Willie Ramsey wrote to ask. 

"They are going to try and make a whipping post out of me!!" she wrote in her response. "I know it, but God is still alive and on the throne!!! He IS in control and knows exactly where I am!!" 

"September 1 will be the day to prepare for, if the Lord doesn't return before then," Davis wrote him. 

("If the Lord doesn't return before then?" So she literally expects the end times to occur any day now.)

"I have weighed the cost, and will stay the course." Ramsey said he'd be willing to block the courthouse door if the law came for her that day. 

"I'm sure it will be a mad house!!" she told him, adding that "God will still be in control!!"

Whoa Nelly, that is some deeply psychotic babbling right there.

This woman is clearly suffering from a messiah complex and all of the media attention that she received only exacerbated her break with reality.

Here is what Slate had to say about the e-mails:

These are not the words of a rational public servant attempting to do her taxpayer-funded job to the best of her abilities. Nor are they the words of a conflicted religious person attempting to obtain an accommodation to balance her personal faith and public duties. These are the words of a religious fanatic who views herself as the protagonist in an epic, possibly biblical battle between good and evil—a millenialist zealot who hopes the rapture, rather than mere earthly courts, will intervene to save her.

Exactly! This is a woman suffering from a rather severe mental illness.

Which means that either Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, who both showed up in Kentucky to support her, do not realize that, or suffer from the same or similar psychological issues.

Now don't get me wrong, I think that most people can have faith without necessarily losing the ability to separate reality from magical thinking, but in the case of this individual that is simply not true.

In my opinion a person like this should NEVER hold any kind of important public office, and any person who supports a person like this, should be kept as far away from the White House as humanly possible.

Simply put, this kind of thinking is dangerous.

New studies of the brain indicate that Republicans and Democrats use different parts of it to make political decisions. Guess which one uses their "threat response system!"

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

The past two weeks have seen not one but two studies published in scientific journals on the biological underpinnings of political ideology. And these studies go straight at the role of genes and the brain in shaping our views, and even our votes. 

First, in the American Journal of Political Science, a team of researchers including Peter Hatemi of Penn State University and Rose McDermott of Brown University studied the relationship between our deep-seated tendencies to experience fear—tendencies that vary from person to person, partly for reasons that seem rooted in our genes—and our political beliefs. What they found is that people who have more fearful disposition also tend to be more politically conservative, and less tolerant of immigrants and people of races different from their own. As McDermott carefully emphasizes, that does not mean that every conservative has a high fear disposition. "It's not that conservative people are more fearful, it's that fearful people are more conservative," as she puts it. 

I interviewed the paper's lead author, Peter Hatemi, about his research for my 2012 book The Republican Brain. Hatemi is both a political scientist and also a microbiologist, and as he stressed to me, "nothing is all genes, or all environment." These forces combine to make us who we are, in incredibly intricate ways. 

And if Hatemi's and McDermott's research blows your mind, get this: Darren Schreiber, a political neuroscientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, first performed brain scans on 82 people participating in a risky gambling task, one in which holding out for more money increases your possible rewards, but also your possible losses. Later, cross-referencing the findings with the participants' publicly available political party registration information, Schreiber noticed something astonishing: Republicans, when they took the same gambling risk, were activating a different part of the brain than Democrats. 

Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain's threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the insula, involved in internal monitoring of one's feelings. Amazingly, Schreiber and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9 percent of the study subjects' political party choices—considerably better, they note, than a simple model that predicts your political party affiliation based on the affiliation of your parents.

Okay I have read various versions of these studies the past several days and they are both fascinating and frustrating to me.

According to the data there does not seem to be a whole lot that one can do to change a person's political point of view. Which in some ways explains why introducing new facts to people with a conservative perspective seems to be a waste of perfectly good data. They simply refuse to accept its existence or challenge the methods by which is was gathered.

It also seems to explain why conservatives are so incredibly concerned about gun ownership and national security. They apparently base their world view on the fear center of their brains, which is constantly on alert for danger, while where as the more liberal among us are using the insula, whihc has been described by neurosurgeons as the following:

According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human. 

They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.

Well that certainly explains quite a lot doesn't it?

Essentially, according to the new research, Republicans make their political decisions based on fear, and Democrats tend to make them based on empathy and moral intuition.

Sounds reasonable to me.