Thanks Colin, for your refreshingly blunt analysis of assholes and why they are winning. I would add that a couple of cognitive biases tend to supercharge asshole ideas on Twitter. 1. Negativity Bias. We ignore and forget a lot of information. But information with a powerful negative emotion attached to it tends to stick more. If Trump had tweeted "Hillary Clinton should undergo more congressional scrutiny" no one would remember, no one would care. But "Crooked Hillary" and "Lock her up!" Make impressions that stick. So, Asshole very negativity hijacks our attention. 2. Repetition bias. This is actually a cluster of biases that make us tend to believe something when we hear it more often - especially if we hear it from different sources. Social media, but especially Twitter's retweets make it easy for one bad idea to hit us multiple times from seeming different sources (even though it's just one asshole screaming). I suppose one could call it the echo chamber effect. Together, these baises make it hard to resist the power of the assholes on Twitter.