While hate and anger have been with us since the beginning of time, it has recently become more widespread because of the wider spread of disinformation available by increased special interest media coverage and the invention and the increased disinformation distribution by political individuals and campaigns on TV and social media. A right-wing political party and many politically ambitious individuals with their own political and financial incentives are using these weapons to incite hate and anger in our country and in the world to induce violence by which they hopefully intend to topple stable governments and install authoritarian regimes. How are they able to induce violence to further their objectives among intelligent and educated people? They do it by weaponizing our own anger and hate against us. They do it by feeding big lies and misinformation to large numbers of people who do not take the time to check them for the truth.

The dictionary defines hate as "an intense hostility and aversion, usually derived from fear or anger or a sense of injury." Anger is described as" a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure and hostility." These are normal emotions that all of us feel at some time or other in our personal lives and which we usually try to handle with maturity and wisdom. But when these emotions are manipulated by those who wish to use our inner frustrations at the normal stresses of life--the stresses that trigger normal hate and anger against our difficult employers or our difficult families or our difficult friends or that even trigger our simple frustrations with our own lives at the moment and then try to turn our normal painful emotions into violence against large groups of innocent people who are strangers, that act becomes dangerous to all of us both personally and politically and can ultimately lead to the destruction of our democracy and all that we love and value.

How can we guard against being used by charismatic and unscrupulous people for their own personal and financial gains? We need to be aware how easy it is to manipulate another person emotionally. Movies do it all the time. A forceful speaker can move an audience to any emotion that they desire. We must then always be on guard to check the facts of anything that we hear or read. We must always check these facts out from different reliable sources until we find the factual truth. We must always question the motives of the people who are or want to be our leaders to find out who is supporting them financially and who ultimately benefits from what they are proposing. That is not being cynical. That is being careful not to be deceived by unscrupulous people in a dangerous world. The truth is that we will always have to watch out for and fight against dishonest and manipulative individuals and groups. That is the price we all must ultimately pay for protecting and keeping our democracy safe and strong.