Cruz’s unethical profiling of Americans

Quit psychoanalyzing your supporters according to atheistic Freudian principles of neuroticism and fear.

Headline news in The Guardian, UK, looks somewhat different than in the United States concerning Sen. Ted Cruz and his electioneering. Has “Trust” Ted created a fake PhD psychologist post-nominal title behind his lawyerly Harvard initials?

“Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users Exclusive: Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters.” [Source]

Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian revealed.

A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey.

As part of an aggressive new voter-targeting operation, Cambridge Analytica – financially supported by reclusive hedge fund magnate and leading Republican donor Robert Mercer – is now using so-called “psychographic profiles” of US citizens in order to help win Cruz votes, despite earlier concerns and red flags from potential survey-takers. (Ibid)

While Ted and company (Cambridge Analytica) celebrate his Iowa victory because of data-mining, attributed to his “Big Data” by the news media, others are not as ecstatic as the Cruz Crew. In fact, many people are wondering why this creepy psychographic collection of personality profiling on American citizens would have any Cruz supporter cheering.

There are two facets of Ted’s data collection endeavors. First, Ted started with harvesting a base of voters using questionable privacy-invading activities. This was done by collecting personal data that he scraped off of Facebook and/or other personal and social data sources. And, second, realize that Ted is building his own sophisticated psychological model beyond those questionable sources, based on each individual user’s personalities, but without their knowledge or consent.

Virtually Cruz has set up door-to-door psychotherapy, coffee shop couches, email diagnoses, and psycho phone sessions. Here is how it works. Someone sharing a conversation with you at a coffee shop, or a phone solicitor, or a knock by a pollster at your front door, will diagnose and SCORE your “mental condition” surreptitiously, without your knowledge. So, without a person knowing your background or what you think, and without your permission, a digital psychographic profile is created on you. Meanwhile, back at the ranch the data-mining from other data sources is collected about you – e.g., are you a soccer mom? a working dad? what did you purchase last month? and do you own a gun? Add in your demographics and purchasing habits, including census data, and you begin to realize the full scope of 50,000 separate data points. Big Data is adding up your life and forming a Big Picture ABOUT you.

But, have you seen your profile? Is this really YOU? Someone is assuming what you’re thinking. But, WOW! Someone has also put a number and a score on your personality – and then continually micro-targets your perceived weaknesses or strengths with ads, focus groups, radio, and a ca-zillion email blasts daily, not to mention social media. Plus, you have to ask: where is all this Big Personal Data about ME going?

Cruz tells voters exactly what they want to hear, blurring the lines of truth into outright lies.

This is the manipulation of wholesome America. Citizens are being drugged with Cruzalizing diatribes. Meanwhile in your backyard he has been rubbish gathering and snooping, and then busily painting each person separately into a micro-whitewash of psychological profiling.

An article appeared in Bloomberg Politics, November 12, 2015 entitled, “Cruz-Connected Data Miner Aims to Get Inside U.S. Voters’ Heads,” by Sasha Issenberg, who traveled to the UK to investigate this futuristic phenomenon of Ted’s psychographic data mining. Issenberg even said, “The firm [Cambridge Analytica] promised to tell me things I might not even know about myself.” [Source]

Cambridge Analytica brags that they can predict your future behavior of voters by analyzing 5 big personality traits they called OCEAN. They have devised a plotted description attached to a numerical assessment that targets individual voters, based on a “psychographic score” of your presumed personality traits.

Here is what the not-so-complimentary acronym, OCEAN, stands for:

O – OPENNESS;
C – CONSCIENTIOUSNESS;
E – EXTROVERSION;
A – AGREEABLENESS;
N – NEUROTICISM.

‘The Cruz campaign modified the Cambridge template, renaming some psychological categories and adding subcategories to the list, such as “stoic traditionalist” and “true believer.” The campaign then did its own field surveys in battleground states to develop a more precise predictive model based on issues preferences.

‘The Cruz algorithm was then applied to what the campaign calls an “enhanced voter file,” which can contain as many as 50,000 data points gathered from voting records, popular websites and consumer information such as magazine subscriptions, car ownership and preferences for food and clothing.’

‘An email will be tweaked based on the personality of the recipient. If a respondent were a “stoic traditionalist,” the conversation would be very direct and to the point. If a potential supporter was labeled “temperamental,” the language and approach would change, according to Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research and analytics, who has taken a leave from the polling firm he leads, WPA Opinion Research. “The tone would be inspiring and become more and more positive as the conversation progresses,” he said.’

‘Cruz has largely built his program out of his Houston headquarters, where a team of statisticians and behavioral psychologists who subscribe to the burgeoning practice of “psychographic targeting” built their own version of a Myers-Briggs personality test. The test data is supplemented by recent issue surveys, and together they are used to categorize supporters, who then receive specially tailored messages, phone calls and visits. Micro-targeting of voters has been around for well over a decade, but the Cruz operation has deepened the intensity of the effort and the use of psychological data. The personality and political scores applied by the campaign are used to tightly tailor outreach to individuals. For example, personalities that have received high scores for “neuroticism” are believed to be generally fearful, so a pro-gun pitch to them would emphasize the use of firearms for personal safety and might include a picture of a burglar breaking into a home.’ [Source]

Christians especially and all other American citizens should be fuming. So, let’s get this straight. If you are a conservative and are fearful about the direction of this country, you are “neurotic.” If you are a gun owner, you are “neurotic.” If you fear immigration, you are “neurotic.” Are you confident in your beliefs? Are your fundamental personality traits characterized by anxiety, fear, moodiness, worry, envy, frustration, jealousy, or loneliness? You are “neurotic.”

“Cruz had a London-based firm on call to tell him which Iowans were introverted and which were neurotic.” [Source]

Demographics are one thing, but are we to assume that the Cruz psych team can do all this legally? Can these amateurs actually analyze our subconscious mind and stuff it into a computer – where it can travel far and wide?

Where does this junk science come from? You got it. Straight from Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, and Carl Jung, the psychotherapy mental psychosis junkies. In Freud’s, The Future of an Illusion, he described believing in God as a collective neurosis: he called it “longing for a father.” Neurosis was a popular term coined by Freud and used by other psychoanalysts. Freud thought if a person believed in a supernatural God, they were neurotic.

So here we have an evangelical Christian politician utilizing atheistic/humanistic theories of psychological fear and feelings, which are being unethically collected and diagnosed by whomever. And upon this faulty foundation he is sorting through personal information about your unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behavior, in order to identify your personality – and especially your motivation so he can get your votes – all of which will be stored into some deep, dark databank. Is this for real? Are you feeling uncomfortable yet?

It gets worse. It turns out to be not just any old databank, but the RNC’s. This is because the RNC made Republican voter file databanks available to Republican candidates, with a promise in return. You guessed it… the candidate must give it all back, plus what they may have covered up. The list-sharing agreement reveals a new level of cooperation between the GOP and any Republican running for President, something which they believe could be highly beneficial to all sides.

For any candidate who signs an agreement with the RNC, that candidate will have access to a database containing a trove of information on more than 200 million Americans, which can be used to power a get-out-the-vote effort. And for the RNC, it means that any information a candidate collects from his supporters, many of whom may not even be traditional Republicans, will be fed back into the database for future use by the party and its candidates. [Source]

Now, here’s a little background about Ted’s psych business partner, a Brit named Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica CEO, who worked on “psychological warfare” as an international specialist in military disinformation campaigns prior to joining SLC, the parent UK company of Cambridge Analytica. Nix brought his mind-bending business to America.

“Your behavior is driven by your personality and actually the more you can understand about people’s personality as psychological drivers, the more you can actually start to really tap in to why and how they make their decisions,” says Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix. “We call this behavioral microtargeting and this is really our secret sauce, if you like. This is what we’re bringing to America.” (Emphasis added.)

“After the 2012 election, Nix found an American marketplace far more receptive to his entreaties. The overseas work in conflict zones amounted to a promising calling card, a new comparative advantage over entrenched American political firms. “This is really trying to use psychology to understand why hostile audiences do what they do, and to use this methodology to deconstruct that behavior and then use communication to try and change attitudes and ultimately behavior,” Nix says. “Persuading somebody to vote in a certain way,” he goes on, “is really very similar to persuading 14- to 25-year-old boys in Indonesia to not join Al Qaeda.” [Source]

Read that last sentence again. Just wondering by now if this makes you feel all warm and fuzzy….

To make matters worse, Mercer, the hedge fund magnate and owner of Cambridge Analytica, is also Cruz’s main benefactor that bankrolled his Make The Promise I Super PAC. But there is a little quirk in that slippery slope. Last June, Keep the Promise I Super PAC (the same PAC bankrolled by Robert Mercer of Cambridge Analytica) gave Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina a half million bucks. So the big question here is why would Ted Cruz give an opponent running for the White House $500,000? [Source]

Yet another twist and turn in this data-mining story reveals that Carly knows how to crunch data, too. After 9/11, a report showed that Carly, as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, was hired by NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden to set up surveillance apparatus on Americans. The result was the world’s “most extensive” spy network, capable of intercepting every phone call, text message and email on each American. Hayden called Carly Fiorina and purchased spy equipment that would make the story of released security papers by Eric Snowden famous.

Carly worked with the CIA during the Bush administration, making recommendations for national security policy and developing a close working relationship with some of the most powerful officials in the administration. Hayden was named director of the Central Intelligence Agency by President Bush. He created an external advisory board, in which Fiorina was selected by Hayden to be chairman of the board. Carly knows how to crunch data. But did she share her secrets with Ted for a tip? We don’t know, but a fishy $500,000 comes to mind. [Source]

When Edward Snowden released and exposed the world-wide NSA data snooping interceptions, world leaders were alarmed. Americans were alarmed. It was found that NSA had a backdoor access, not only through Verizon, but to Microsoft and its Skype division; Google and its YouTube division; Yahoo; Facebook, AOL, Apple and PalTalk – a lesser known chat service owned by AVM Software. Then NSA had eavesdropped on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, an act for which she demanded a full explanation. Germans are extremely nervous about past surveillance by secret police. Mrs. Merkel grew up in the former East Germany, where the Stasi spied on millions of citizens.

Americans have not yet faced the full adverse affects of their government spying on their every move, except for the unusual activity over Tea Party 501(c)(3) applications. But, has Ted Cruz changed all of this by taking the beginnings of NSA snoop files and adding to them his psychographic details on 220 million Americans, lined up in digitized files? If Ted would become President, he would surely have enough made-up personality files on Americans to do a much better snooping job than the Stasi. What should make you uneasy is that Ted is identifying all “neurotic” Christians and God fearing people, and placing them as a target in one big data pot. Think about it.

Americans are very passionate about their privacy. But now, behind your back psychographics?! I’m sure citizens will not like this new Ted Cruz “Minority Report” resembling the famous other Cruise movie about monitoring and predicting your future behavior.

Wouldn’t you like to see Ted’s OCEAN profile? Is he comfortable with lying? Does he cling to his guns? Does he fear losing the White House? Let’s ask the question, “Is Ted neurotic?”

Senator Ted Cruz, the flaming Christian politician, who doesn’t act like one, turns out to be just a politician with a bent toward unethical principles. Freud would be proud of him. So, what are you thinking?

How can anyone “Trust” Ted?!