How do win friends and demonise people

Using the rhetoric of Donald Drumpf, Nick Griffin, Nigel Farage and Richard Dawkins (yes, really, he's that bad), along with a rather large dollop of the truth, I attempt to convince you that scientists are a bunch of evil, delusional, murderous villains. I won't quote anything because literally the entire thing is out of context, also, you should at least skim-read the links as they come up. Most of the best bits (IMHO) use the rhetoric of the demagogues themselves. However, some basic techniques :

- Never tell a lie when the truth will do. This makes it easier to get away with the lies when you need them. Use a mixture of the truth, half-truths, and massive in-your-face lies. It confuses the heck out of people.
- Only ever use the truth selectively. But, occasionally say something ostensibly much more moderate. This will give your supporters helpful ammunition against anyone accusing you of being a bigot.
- A closely-related tactic is to state that you're not demonising the people you are, in fact, demonising. Tell them you're just demonising everything they believe in, because that makes it alright. Whether people actually do believe all this is totally irrelevant.
- Scare people. Telling people they're being attacked is just one part of this.
- If possible, be an expert in the field you're talking about. If yours is a minority viewpoint, your supporters will ignore or try to discredit every single other expert.
- If that's not possible, don't worry. You can be an expert in a completely different field instead. Your supporters will insist that gives you credibility regardless of what the real experts think.
- If you have no qualifications of any kind, that's fine too ! You can depict yourself as one of the "common people" and don't have to worry about statistics at all. You can also say things like, "that's just common sense" with absolutely nothing to back it up.
- Regardless of who you are, always use as many statements that can't be factually verified as possible. Things are "probably" happening, "everyone knows", it's all just "common sense", you have an "opinion", maybe give a personal anecdote - people naturally learn by induction, not by reading statistics.
- Emphasise your own amazing qualities as often as possible. Drumpf takes this to absurd new heights, often stating he's a successful businessman as though that gives him legitimacy. Wealth brings goodness, right Socrates ? The trick is to convey authority. It doesn't matter what authority.
- Use short, snappy sentences.
- Try to use correlation to infer causation, forgetting any wider statistics, however forced that might seem. "But it tells them to do it in a book !". Exploit the Nirvana fallacy to the hilt : it happened that one time, so it's not perfect, therefore everything about it is bad.
- Be personal. Although they all have very different styles, just about all the successful populists try to seem like "one of us". They have different ways of doing this, though, "I'm just saying what everyone's thinking" is a common tactic. Whether everyone's really thinking it is completely beside the point.
- Perhaps most importantly, cherry-pick to the extent that the cherry is likely to go locally extinct within a 50 mile radius of wherever you happen to be.

https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2016/07/worked-example-selective-reporting.html