Commentary: You are guilty, regardless of what you think

By Emmitt Hayes, Jr.,
Guest Writer,

The New York Fraud case fined $355 million plus interest. Guilty.
Defamation and Sexual Assault. Guilty. Now, the Hush Money Trial, 34 counts, Guilty.
There are at least 3 more cases to go and he says he is innocent. He has even convinced many of his supporters that this is all political. Many of his supporters know he is lying but they still support him this man who shows over and over again his propensity to commit crimes.
As the old song goes, “What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am?
Let’s quickly examine the sycophants and supporters who help to perpetuate this dangerous criminal’s success in his politics. So, as human beings perceive reality, we receive raw data, and use cues presented of how to interpret the data. We filter these cues through our values, beliefs, attitudes, paradigms, language, philosophies, that we get from family, education, religion, peers, environments, age, talent, birth order, geography and so on…Then we make assumptions based on this filtering process, resulting in behavior or how we respond to the data.
So, many of us do not have the exact same experiences and education so the filtering is different. Simply put, a left-handed person will see a baseball flying toward home plate differently than a right-handed person. Then they react to the pitch. Got it?
Now, Criminal thinking styles are used in the criminal justice system to help address how to help a criminal change behavior. To know what to change you must first work to understand the thinking.
A scale adapted from the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles, developed by Glenn Walters; Walters (2013), is a standard in understanding the thought processes and criminal thinking errors. Examine this sample of the scale which relates to criminal thinking:
• May have a simplistic world view (strong or weak)
• They try to control their surroundings by dominating activities and people, to counteract their feelings of impotence or powerlessness.
• Motivated by immediate gratification and interpersonal control
• External control – (power)
• Internal control (self-discipline); they put themselves in an “up” position and feel better about themselves by putting another person down.
• When people get away with most of their crimes they can engage in a criminal lifestyle for months, sometimes years, before experiencing the negative consequences of their lifestyle.
• An attitude of invulnerability develops due to escaping the physical, psychological, and legal consequences of habitual criminality.
• They convince themselves that they will escape consequences.
• However, this only makes their eventual fall that much more dramatic.
• They distort their thinking to deny behavior is self-destructive and/or harmful.
• Rather than making excuses because of perceived injustices (mollification), instead sentimentality involves justifying their actions by emphasizing the positive things they have done.
When these elements of behavior are applied to Donald J. Trump and his followers, understanding the behavior, the comradery behind criminal behavior is explained. While there are still more court dates for Trump, the Republicans have disregarded years of the law and order foundation they have stood on.
They now are attacking the very law and order they say they stand for but you have to still ask, “What Kind Of Fool Do You Think I Am?”