Grooming is generally understood to be the stealthy sexual priming of vulnerable children, using deceit and reward to gain trust and submission, and it’s usually done in secret.

However, grooming as an odious practice takes place regularly and quite openly all around us, streaming now on a platform near you. Ideological grooming is how it has been identified.

Targets in this instance are vulnerable, voting-age adults who appear to have become unmoored in an apparently chaotic post-Covid world.

This conditioning relies substantially, on the part of the conditioner, on what has been identified by linguist Professor Nuria Lorenzo-Dus of Swansea University as a “toxic openness”.

The master of this has been Donald Trump, and though it might have all been very entertaining when he was a grifting television celebrity, this mode of moving through the world as US president has been devastating for democracies.

It has lowered the tone and given permission for louts and bullies to shout loudest to drown out reason and logic.

Democracy and the rule of law with its checks and balances, flawed as it may be, is the best we have to work with right now. Public money is exactly that.

Those who attack accountability, like Trump and former president Jacob Zuma, powerful men who remain, however, perpetual victims, revel in below-the-belt politics with its street lingo, coupled with real-time violence or the threat thereof.

As Laurie Anderson sang through a vocoder, accompanied by “an infinity choir of robots” on Oh Superman, “Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice. And when justice is gone, there’s always force.”  

Malevolent groomers

Ideological grooming is driven by provocative rhetoric, insult and accusation, and relies on “mythologies, specifically the first-person story”, with which the manipulator leverages their “pain” to settle scores.

This in turn finds traction with similarly wounded citizens who transpose their ideals and dreams as well as their pain and victimhood to this apparent larger-than-life saviour.

The notion of an “ideology” as representing a complex system of contesting ideas and policies is absent from this brand of sudsy brainwashing.

Like evangelical movements that have detached Christianity from its mysticism, it’s all just noise, disguised as divine messaging.

“I am the chosen one,” Trump declared in 2019.

The Donald’s “spiritual adviser”, televangelist Paula Michelle White-Cain, in a severe case of echolalia, blessed Potus 45’s victory, repeating nonsensical chants, which the rest of us were left to interpret in our own inner reaches.

“Amha samba orta rika, fika anda ratasata angels from Africa right now, they are coming here,” she recited as if this were bog-standard comms.

We love us some divinity embodied in a deity even if he has to sell gaudy, cheap gold hi-top sneakers to stay relevant and raise money for his legal bills.

Polarise and rule

Research conducted in 2022 by Lorenzo-Dus and based on data sets from the US, the UK and Australia (in other words, countries that would regard themselves as “Western” in outlook, are monolingual and traditionally democratic in nature) found that “digital grooming relies primarily on argumentative polarisation of social identities”.

Anyone possessed of a remaining functional brain cluster is able to understand that Trump is unsuitable 2024 US presidential material.

If you believe otherwise, because thinking is not really your thing, you have been warned: you have stepped off the good ship Reality.

Trump, a supergrifter among supergrifters, has been ideologically grooming his followers, inside the US and outside it, for years. Here it is all about venality and money, money, money. Darwinian.

Where social media has played a role, it has been in opening up a direct pathway to the malevolent hearts and deranged minds of big men, drawing in the fellow damaged and deranged into echo chambers of woundedness. Gargantuan piles of other people’s cash and the ever-gnawing craving for power, dominance and revenge drive this Mafia-style political leadership.

Wilful blindness

There is always a target of this rage, usually groups, parties or individuals regarded as “other”, as “illegitimate”. It is a technique used by religio-political Islamists, Zionists, Christians and the alt-right, as well as left-wing extremists.

Digital grooming differs from propaganda in that the latter is generally regarded as information, especially of a biased or deceitful nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.

Ideological grooming appeals to deeply atavistic human impulses. It thrives on degradation, humiliation, mockery, bullying and, in extreme cases, murder.

Wilful blindness is a defence the timid deploy and is defined as the deliberate failure to “make a reasonable inquiry of wrongdoing, despite suspicion and an awareness of the high probability of its existence”. That’s according to the Merriam-Webster.

It is the very institutions of democracy that have allowed the men who now threaten it the freedom to compete fairly in the first place.

Go suck on that one. DM

This article first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick newspaper, DM168, which is available countrywide for R29.