<b>Hijacking the Intellect:</b>

Modern campaign advertising frequently employs logical fallacies, symbolic distortions, and emotionally charged imagery that activate rapid, intuitive processing rather than reflective reasoning.

As this study notes, political messaging often compresses complex realities into emotionally charged images that bypass slow, deliberative reasoning, a dynamic that ancient rhetorical theory, patristic theology, and scholastic moral philosophy all recognized as a corruption of truthful speech. Through interdisciplinary analysis drawing on Aristotle’s <i>Rhetoric</i>, Augustine’s theology of truthful communication, Aquinas’s account of prudence and moral agency, and contemporary research in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and cognitive science, this study argues that fear‑based persuasion constitutes a direct assault on the human person’s rational dignity.