Election fraud! It's always been a thing, almost more feature than bug but its intrinsic to the system and that human beings are involved. But besides re-raising the issue that if Team Donnie are alleging specific acts of fraud, then they surely have proof (a/k/a knowing what they're talking about) (then again, their standard bearer has based his career on being full of shit and getting rewarded for it so why not his (His??) followers?). Which they repeatedly fail to produce.
As for the deranged cohort amongst the GOP, well, they've been tripping on their fantasies since at least the 1990s. Talk about swooning from the vapors...
As for the ammosexuals who want to kill the commies and take back the country, well, I'm on record as saying that that coup happened long ago.
If there's a silver lining at all to this, the fact that they can't even be bothered to use the search function to check on what they're being told is consistent with their general gormlessness and fecklessness. In other words, the wingnut tendency toward incompetence is our saving grace. If a few of them actually knew what they were doing, we already would have a Reich Wing State.
I think the media's problem is they keep trying to find reasons for Trump support besides ''This REALLY pisses off liberals/leftists'' and there just aren't any.
I think the fuck you fracts thing isn't new at all. There is a short video from Myth Busters where one of the guys looks at the camera and says (after an experiment obviously didn't turn out as he'd expected): "I reject your reality and substitute my own." Of course he was making a joke.
I also vaguely remember a short essay by Slacktivist from maybe a decade ago about, in his previous job, trying to convince evangelicals that P&G was not Satanist by providing them evidence (didn't work).
Where I'm going with this I think is that this denial of reality been around for some time, but it might be reaching critical mass.
When Khouhotek went streaming past the Earth last time, a bunch of cultists committed suicide thinking that the comet was a starship come to take them away.
This will sound weird but what makes things different now is the general divorce of most Americans’ livelihoods from simple cause and effect — our economy has gotten strange, rewarding things that seem to have no value or negative value (which they see on their taxes) and penalizing valuable traits like self-reliance and community. Used to be you had to use Jesus to con a son of the soil, because his workday experience gave him a grounding in common sense; no more.
Divorced from reality is an apt description of much of the economy. These days, I make part of my living installing high-end avionics in people's personal airplanes. With the economy in the shitter, I thought I would be facing a layoff as there would be no demand for avionics.
I wonder if there's a connection with the way it's so hard to tell how machines work any more, like a car or a typewriter or a piano. Everything's sealed up and run by transistors, and it's all become magic unless you're a programmer.
I find generally that greater complications of life go along with a dumbing of he masses. Whether they're connected or not is beyond me. But as I've ranted endlessly, I think a problem is the disintegration of the establishment press. Publishing bullshit was the model but they -- not just Fox -- have gone beyond that, return to BS-based scenarios again and again -- that everything is the Dems' fault while nothing the Republicans do warrant criticism; treating a pathological, completely unfit POTUS as normal to any extent; that there was any recovery from the 2008 collapse of any significance as opposed to one limited to a controlling, corrupting elite; that the GOP is not a party of honest to god traitors; and so on and so forth. Newspapers' suicide by gross business mismanagement doesn't help either.
As for nut jobs, their brains have been turned to some sort of oozy mass by decades of lies from right wing media.
They didn’t check because 1) they wanted it to be true, in order to feed their bile stores and 2) their go-to 14 year old wasn’t around to show them how. (“CTRL - how do you even pronounce that?”)
Yeah, this. What those of us with brains aren't factoring in is they *want* to believe this in substitute for reality. We didn't argue them into this corner and we won't argue them out of it. They *want* to be in the corner growling and snapping at, and trying to maul, democracy. Only thing to negotiate is the length of chain allowed them.
I've long maintained that one of the biggest crises America faces is that most of the population is functionally illiterate.
I don't mean that they can't recognize words on a page, it's that they can't read anything that forces them to think for even five seconds. If they read anything at all, it's The Federalist-level crap---just dumb talking point text that tells them *what* to think. Then factor in that these people listen to Limbaugh or Hannity or Shapiro (which isn't reading, just listening) or that their news comes from Facebook memes or 200-character Twitter posts, all of which tell them what to think while insisting that they're actually free, independent factors, and that it's libtards who are sheep.
Being illiterate, then, means that their ability to break down duplicities or think about something for more than 10 seconds is severely inhibited, and it also affects their abilities to form strings of connected/complex thought or even intelligibly articulate themselves (it's one way I explain how the Qanon "narrative" has shifted so dramatically over the years and actually *grown* its base). Go on YouTube and watch 35-year-old white dudes in their car ranting about Democrats and you'll notice something: 1) they all think they're free thinkers, 2) they all repeat the same phrases verbatim, and 3) they can't adequately fill in the gaps between their talking point phrases, largely because they don't know what they're talking about, so they huff and puff and say things like "I mean, this is just crazy," or "It's ridiculous," or "I mean, come on!"
I'm not exaggerating when I say it's a crisis. The world is a complex place, and the problems plaguing it are more complicated than "Democrats bad." But you've got a good chunk of the population who are (rightly, in some instances) very pissed off, incapable of expressing themselves in anything more than adolescent tantrums, and being fed a steady stream of very simple and easily digestible right-wing propaganda. And I don't know how we get out of it, because people really hate reading.
All very well observed, especially the bit about using exclamations like "I mean, this is just crazy” to “fill in the gaps between their talking point phrases” instead of logic chains. It’s like no one ever demanded to know the reason behind their assertions. Which, given the state of education in this country, is no shock.
Shitty as the nation's education system surely is, I think it's more the environment and now-widespread nihilism. There's a shit ton of people who jut don't care about facts and reality, sometimes understandably, sometimes not.
I'd like to punch up on that theory for a bit. I was just a lowly resume writer in our grand experiment with market-driven capitalism (some pretty fine gaslighting there in and of itself). When I gave up it was because narcissists were filling way too many corporate slots, but it wasn't nearly the problem it is today.
Everyone is writing to the test now, and the test is whether or not you can please your boss. Reports are written to please supervisors, executive summaries are written to please CEOs, news stories are written to please the media owners. Nothing is written objectively or without an underlying agenda.
No one repeats jargon more than the professional management class. Increasingly back in the day resume keywords became more important than actual work history. Did you possess the vocabulary to join our club? Not vocabulary that allowed you to communicate truths more clearly, but gaslighting jargon meant to obscure the truth about whatever was being discussed.
Moving back to the country was a slap in the face to me because I thought I'd rid myself of the weasel words, that I was communicating honestly and directly. Then every new neighbor I met invariably said at some point (early on) that they didn't go to college and didn't pay much attention in school. This was their way of letting me know they didn't know what I was talking about. Using simpler words didn't help as they lacked the context to process events other than how ultimately those events would cost them somehow.
If the world was consistently explained to us with objective news written in transparent language, I don't think you'd see so many people retreating into mindless mantras and stock rejoinders.
Read ANY news story today with an eye towards whether or not you come away with it understanding WHO is involved, WHAT exactly happened, WHEN this began, etc. Good luck with that.
I'm not sure what you meant by your opening, but I think you're making a similar point to mine, with the exception that you're focusing how the winners win in such a society, not on how the non-winners adapt. Of course now money and bullshit *both* talk. And I can sympathize with country folk who read it and weep, though it doesn't mean I will accede to their stated desire to fuck up me and mine to avenge themselves. (And no one does accede to it -- the ones who seem to, for the most part, simply do a flattering impersonation of it to scam them. Present company excepted, of course.)
Thanks to an ever more, state-forced extractive economy, employees are ever more scared of being screwed by an employer so increased compliance and, well, fear. An obscene percentage of decent jobs lost as a result of the financial crisis were replaced with shit.
I'm 72 years old, and one of my firmest social beliefs, to which I still adhere, is that people have, on average, become more stupid during my lifetime. For a long time I wondered how that could be. Education? A good one is pretty easily available if you want it. Do we really think the schools are worse, intellectually, than they were 150 or 250 years ago? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a willed quality about it: some people want to be stupid and want everyone else to be stupid as they are. That's not education but politics and culture.
It’s not just Trumpkins. One thing I’ve learned and that’s help keep me employed through the long decades is that in general, people have no idea how to do research. I grew up ore-Internet and so had to grok such quaint antiquities as the Dewey Decimal System and how a microfilm reader worked and how to use a phone to make, y’know, a *phone call*. To information to find another number, even. Nowadays with the web life is simple. Since I’m the guy who can somehow magically come up with information I get asked to find something at least once a week. My secret? Google. I do kind of miss libraries tho...
I dunno. After all, nothing they say re the Insurrection Act makes sense. First of all, it doesn't mean what they think it does, as anyone can tell just by googling it and reading its text -- it only applies when rebellion or civil unrest has made it "impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States . . . by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." So [a] it grants no authority so long as the courts are open; and [b] it only allows use of the military to enforce existing federal law. Second, a look at the image Callesto posted makes clear that the bill it describes *wouldn't* have nullified the President's authority under the Act; it would only have required him to send a document to Congress when he invoked it. If you can get past both of those, what's a little failure to control-F?
A lot of shit Donnie's pulled should have been blocked but wasn't. These devolved... things want to act on imaginary meaning of law, who's going to stop them? Now, were we a developed nation, it would be one thing. But we're really just a shithole failed state now, so, you know, whatever.
First, upvoted for the callback to the greatest DEVO song that DEVO never did.
Second, the Right has always been reality-inverse to some extent. Iraqi WMDs, Whitewater, and the like. But the era of Qanons seems to have driven them into an actively reality-ADverse space, where even confronted with evidence, or at least signs of their beliefs being bullshit, they throw up their shields and retreat into "It's crazy". How DO we deal with the fact that half the electorate is this willfully ignorant?
Second: Maybe there are two basic emotional yin-yang orientations to the world: a), that you and your loved ones prosper; b) that your enemies suffer. And since MAGA are not prospering, they at least want option b). That's why 'tribal' has proved such a useful word. And it makes Marcotte's point all the more telling.
Third: I've been assuming (and writing ad nauseam) that MAGA has never been a political movement, but a religious one. Hence "cult." Hence all the magical (or MAGA-cal) thinking about Trump-the-hero, etc., etc. Hence their dogged ignoring, not only of objective facts and proved documentation, but *their own common sense.* They not only *want* to believe in their fictional, magical version of Trump and etc., they *need* to--which is to say, through events and decisions, some of which are of no fault of their own, and some of which are very much of fault of their own, the fundamental stability of their lives (and personalities) depends on hewing to all this bullshit and turning both blind eyes to everything else.
They care about what's true, but only secondarily. Primarily they care about how to sustain these necessary illusions. They're Wily Coyote who's run off a cliff. The one thing he mustn't do is look down.
Fourth: Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland deals with all this and is very good.
Fifth: How is all this possible? Because Isaac Asimov was right: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
Many on the left/liberal side have a need to find some simple, rational explanation for what, to us, is inexplicable: why do Trump supporters exist? What Trump people believe and why they believe it has been a vast media endeavor for years now (despite countless Cletus safaris to Heartland™ diners, the NY Times is still clueless). But, IMO, the response to "What are the reasons that people support Trump?" is "All of them, Katie."
I'm a big fan of Amanda Marcotte but your linked essay on Trump supporters is much, much more on target, IMO. Marcotte reduces Trump supporters to those who "never believed he was an honest man" and who see themselves as "in on the con." For some percentage of them, this is clearly true. However, you identify, among other things, hatred of who they have been brainwashed to believe are their enemies as a key motivator. Which is also true. (Trump sometimes thinks they're in on the con, too.)
And hard to believe as it is, some of them really do love the guy. A recent WAPO article quoted the mayor of once-safe Tangier Island now ravaged by COVID: "I love Trump as much as any family member I got." There are books written about Trump's -faith- for chrissakes and millions of evangelicals make up a huge part of his base. When his fans talk about Trump, it's apparent that for many of them he is a chimera, a phantom with whatever attributes and virtues they want and need him to have, but bearing no relation whatsoever to the piece of shit he really is. Sheer self-delusion is yet another a reason (and why many of his fans would never bother to look up the Insurrection Act claim -- it wouldn't occur to them that it -could- be fake.)
I don't know what percentage believes what, and for most it's probably a combination of reasons, but all's I know is this: one day someone will write a dissertation on the topic, and she'll still be criticized by wingnuts for calling herself "Dr."
Ugh, that story: "Most are fiercely devoted to President Trump, who called Tangier’s mayor to tell him not to worry about rising sea levels." LOL. If you've been down the Eastern Shore and to the island and peninsular communities you can see the soggy front lawns at high tide.
The United States of America is collapsing - so is the rest of the world. Flight from reality?
Climate change. No one, and I mean not me, not you, not anyone, is dealing with it in any manner that will make a difference. The world is headed straight on into frequent natural disasters, food emergencies, rising seas, mass migrations and refugees, water wars... you get the idea.
The irony kills me. And right - the great majority of people can't find time in their day of just surviving to do the long range planning needed to respond to the climate catastrophe and the Powers That Be (TPTB) don't give a fuck.
So we're all fucked. Humanity in a nut shell. And people wonder why I have misanthropic tendencies.
Hey, look at the bright side. We could be dead sooner rather than later and it'll be someone else's problem (and take your pick of problems!); and on the other hand, we all may be stoned by suppertime! if we aren't already now. Oh, and by stoned, you can choose the biblical sense, if you know what I mean. Yuck it up. Yuck! and yuck-yuck-yuck. Tears, laughter, alright I'm crawling back in my cave.
I don't think that failing to check things you hear from people you trust is that Trumpist, or rather particularly Trumpist. Though ad hominem argument is logically invalid, we seem to be built to use it as the primary method of truth assessment—this saved a lot of time and energy back when we were in small bands (with strong sanctions against liars), and I'd hazard is part of the social technology that helped us become half-assed masters of this globe.
It may not be Trumpist but it's not ideal. I expect you'd agree that we who hold aloft the torch of reason should try to at least get our facts straight and admit when we've been had. I will agree that our lapses are not equivalent with the everyday malicious lying of political operatives -- though in that, as in everything, they try to say it is.
The 'lust to see Trump kill his opponents' is a selling-point, and part of the vicarious freedom you get when identifying with the Powerful Leader. Even in a misogynist dictatorship you'd quite possibly hang for killing your wife, and you'd definitely swing for killing your boss, and maybe for killing that guy who cut you off at the intersection, but you can identify with the Leader who is Free.
(I realised this as a riff on someone else's brilliant 'Fascism is Anarchism for one man.')
Election fraud! It's always been a thing, almost more feature than bug but its intrinsic to the system and that human beings are involved. But besides re-raising the issue that if Team Donnie are alleging specific acts of fraud, then they surely have proof (a/k/a knowing what they're talking about) (then again, their standard bearer has based his career on being full of shit and getting rewarded for it so why not his (His??) followers?). Which they repeatedly fail to produce.
As for the deranged cohort amongst the GOP, well, they've been tripping on their fantasies since at least the 1990s. Talk about swooning from the vapors...
As for the ammosexuals who want to kill the commies and take back the country, well, I'm on record as saying that that coup happened long ago.
If there's a silver lining at all to this, the fact that they can't even be bothered to use the search function to check on what they're being told is consistent with their general gormlessness and fecklessness. In other words, the wingnut tendency toward incompetence is our saving grace. If a few of them actually knew what they were doing, we already would have a Reich Wing State.
I think the media's problem is they keep trying to find reasons for Trump support besides ''This REALLY pisses off liberals/leftists'' and there just aren't any.
I think the fuck you fracts thing isn't new at all. There is a short video from Myth Busters where one of the guys looks at the camera and says (after an experiment obviously didn't turn out as he'd expected): "I reject your reality and substitute my own." Of course he was making a joke.
I also vaguely remember a short essay by Slacktivist from maybe a decade ago about, in his previous job, trying to convince evangelicals that P&G was not Satanist by providing them evidence (didn't work).
Where I'm going with this I think is that this denial of reality been around for some time, but it might be reaching critical mass.
Where is the Right's Comet Khoutec when we need it?
Comet Khouhotek, I believe. (I remember that!)
Burl Ives had a song about it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dFFEigA6Kc
Holy great raving pogo-sticking Jeebus! That is just, well, really something!
Very snazzy. Burl Ives could really rock, baby.
Kohoutek, if IRC.
Probably. It's been a long time.
Huh?
When Khouhotek went streaming past the Earth last time, a bunch of cultists committed suicide thinking that the comet was a starship come to take them away.
This will sound weird but what makes things different now is the general divorce of most Americans’ livelihoods from simple cause and effect — our economy has gotten strange, rewarding things that seem to have no value or negative value (which they see on their taxes) and penalizing valuable traits like self-reliance and community. Used to be you had to use Jesus to con a son of the soil, because his workday experience gave him a grounding in common sense; no more.
Divorced from reality is an apt description of much of the economy. These days, I make part of my living installing high-end avionics in people's personal airplanes. With the economy in the shitter, I thought I would be facing a layoff as there would be no demand for avionics.
Yet, I am currently booked out to next June. WTF?
Can't go broke serving the 1%.
I wonder if there's a connection with the way it's so hard to tell how machines work any more, like a car or a typewriter or a piano. Everything's sealed up and run by transistors, and it's all become magic unless you're a programmer.
That's another good point. We are divorced from process in so many areas.
Mass psychopathy.
I find generally that greater complications of life go along with a dumbing of he masses. Whether they're connected or not is beyond me. But as I've ranted endlessly, I think a problem is the disintegration of the establishment press. Publishing bullshit was the model but they -- not just Fox -- have gone beyond that, return to BS-based scenarios again and again -- that everything is the Dems' fault while nothing the Republicans do warrant criticism; treating a pathological, completely unfit POTUS as normal to any extent; that there was any recovery from the 2008 collapse of any significance as opposed to one limited to a controlling, corrupting elite; that the GOP is not a party of honest to god traitors; and so on and so forth. Newspapers' suicide by gross business mismanagement doesn't help either.
As for nut jobs, their brains have been turned to some sort of oozy mass by decades of lies from right wing media.
They didn’t check because 1) they wanted it to be true, in order to feed their bile stores and 2) their go-to 14 year old wasn’t around to show them how. (“CTRL - how do you even pronounce that?”)
Happy Festivus, everyone!
Yeah, this. What those of us with brains aren't factoring in is they *want* to believe this in substitute for reality. We didn't argue them into this corner and we won't argue them out of it. They *want* to be in the corner growling and snapping at, and trying to maul, democracy. Only thing to negotiate is the length of chain allowed them.
I've long maintained that one of the biggest crises America faces is that most of the population is functionally illiterate.
I don't mean that they can't recognize words on a page, it's that they can't read anything that forces them to think for even five seconds. If they read anything at all, it's The Federalist-level crap---just dumb talking point text that tells them *what* to think. Then factor in that these people listen to Limbaugh or Hannity or Shapiro (which isn't reading, just listening) or that their news comes from Facebook memes or 200-character Twitter posts, all of which tell them what to think while insisting that they're actually free, independent factors, and that it's libtards who are sheep.
Being illiterate, then, means that their ability to break down duplicities or think about something for more than 10 seconds is severely inhibited, and it also affects their abilities to form strings of connected/complex thought or even intelligibly articulate themselves (it's one way I explain how the Qanon "narrative" has shifted so dramatically over the years and actually *grown* its base). Go on YouTube and watch 35-year-old white dudes in their car ranting about Democrats and you'll notice something: 1) they all think they're free thinkers, 2) they all repeat the same phrases verbatim, and 3) they can't adequately fill in the gaps between their talking point phrases, largely because they don't know what they're talking about, so they huff and puff and say things like "I mean, this is just crazy," or "It's ridiculous," or "I mean, come on!"
I'm not exaggerating when I say it's a crisis. The world is a complex place, and the problems plaguing it are more complicated than "Democrats bad." But you've got a good chunk of the population who are (rightly, in some instances) very pissed off, incapable of expressing themselves in anything more than adolescent tantrums, and being fed a steady stream of very simple and easily digestible right-wing propaganda. And I don't know how we get out of it, because people really hate reading.
All very well observed, especially the bit about using exclamations like "I mean, this is just crazy” to “fill in the gaps between their talking point phrases” instead of logic chains. It’s like no one ever demanded to know the reason behind their assertions. Which, given the state of education in this country, is no shock.
Shitty as the nation's education system surely is, I think it's more the environment and now-widespread nihilism. There's a shit ton of people who jut don't care about facts and reality, sometimes understandably, sometimes not.
I'd like to punch up on that theory for a bit. I was just a lowly resume writer in our grand experiment with market-driven capitalism (some pretty fine gaslighting there in and of itself). When I gave up it was because narcissists were filling way too many corporate slots, but it wasn't nearly the problem it is today.
Everyone is writing to the test now, and the test is whether or not you can please your boss. Reports are written to please supervisors, executive summaries are written to please CEOs, news stories are written to please the media owners. Nothing is written objectively or without an underlying agenda.
No one repeats jargon more than the professional management class. Increasingly back in the day resume keywords became more important than actual work history. Did you possess the vocabulary to join our club? Not vocabulary that allowed you to communicate truths more clearly, but gaslighting jargon meant to obscure the truth about whatever was being discussed.
Moving back to the country was a slap in the face to me because I thought I'd rid myself of the weasel words, that I was communicating honestly and directly. Then every new neighbor I met invariably said at some point (early on) that they didn't go to college and didn't pay much attention in school. This was their way of letting me know they didn't know what I was talking about. Using simpler words didn't help as they lacked the context to process events other than how ultimately those events would cost them somehow.
If the world was consistently explained to us with objective news written in transparent language, I don't think you'd see so many people retreating into mindless mantras and stock rejoinders.
Read ANY news story today with an eye towards whether or not you come away with it understanding WHO is involved, WHAT exactly happened, WHEN this began, etc. Good luck with that.
I'm not sure what you meant by your opening, but I think you're making a similar point to mine, with the exception that you're focusing how the winners win in such a society, not on how the non-winners adapt. Of course now money and bullshit *both* talk. And I can sympathize with country folk who read it and weep, though it doesn't mean I will accede to their stated desire to fuck up me and mine to avenge themselves. (And no one does accede to it -- the ones who seem to, for the most part, simply do a flattering impersonation of it to scam them. Present company excepted, of course.)
Thanks to an ever more, state-forced extractive economy, employees are ever more scared of being screwed by an employer so increased compliance and, well, fear. An obscene percentage of decent jobs lost as a result of the financial crisis were replaced with shit.
I'm 72 years old, and one of my firmest social beliefs, to which I still adhere, is that people have, on average, become more stupid during my lifetime. For a long time I wondered how that could be. Education? A good one is pretty easily available if you want it. Do we really think the schools are worse, intellectually, than they were 150 or 250 years ago? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a willed quality about it: some people want to be stupid and want everyone else to be stupid as they are. That's not education but politics and culture.
Good points. The squeaky rat still has some juice, Daddy-O.
It’s not just Trumpkins. One thing I’ve learned and that’s help keep me employed through the long decades is that in general, people have no idea how to do research. I grew up ore-Internet and so had to grok such quaint antiquities as the Dewey Decimal System and how a microfilm reader worked and how to use a phone to make, y’know, a *phone call*. To information to find another number, even. Nowadays with the web life is simple. Since I’m the guy who can somehow magically come up with information I get asked to find something at least once a week. My secret? Google. I do kind of miss libraries tho...
I kind of miss Google.
Most things can be sufficiently researched quickly online. Doesn't take undue time but the will and desire have to be there in the first place.
And if you're illiterate in certain ways, knowing what words to try in that search can be an obstacle! "LOL" "OMG" SMH.
I dunno. After all, nothing they say re the Insurrection Act makes sense. First of all, it doesn't mean what they think it does, as anyone can tell just by googling it and reading its text -- it only applies when rebellion or civil unrest has made it "impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States . . . by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." So [a] it grants no authority so long as the courts are open; and [b] it only allows use of the military to enforce existing federal law. Second, a look at the image Callesto posted makes clear that the bill it describes *wouldn't* have nullified the President's authority under the Act; it would only have required him to send a document to Congress when he invoked it. If you can get past both of those, what's a little failure to control-F?
A lot of shit Donnie's pulled should have been blocked but wasn't. These devolved... things want to act on imaginary meaning of law, who's going to stop them? Now, were we a developed nation, it would be one thing. But we're really just a shithole failed state now, so, you know, whatever.
Well, as of 8:30 a.m. MST, "Insurrection Act " is trending, and the thread is not of the 'debunking" kind.
"Because, I’m guessing, they’ve gone beyond Fuck Your Feelings, and into Fuck Your Facts." But they don't believe in so-called facts.
TBH, Fuck the Facts was a thing long before Fuck Your Feelings.
First, upvoted for the callback to the greatest DEVO song that DEVO never did.
Second, the Right has always been reality-inverse to some extent. Iraqi WMDs, Whitewater, and the like. But the era of Qanons seems to have driven them into an actively reality-ADverse space, where even confronted with evidence, or at least signs of their beliefs being bullshit, they throw up their shields and retreat into "It's crazy". How DO we deal with the fact that half the electorate is this willfully ignorant?
First: great thread.
Second: Maybe there are two basic emotional yin-yang orientations to the world: a), that you and your loved ones prosper; b) that your enemies suffer. And since MAGA are not prospering, they at least want option b). That's why 'tribal' has proved such a useful word. And it makes Marcotte's point all the more telling.
Third: I've been assuming (and writing ad nauseam) that MAGA has never been a political movement, but a religious one. Hence "cult." Hence all the magical (or MAGA-cal) thinking about Trump-the-hero, etc., etc. Hence their dogged ignoring, not only of objective facts and proved documentation, but *their own common sense.* They not only *want* to believe in their fictional, magical version of Trump and etc., they *need* to--which is to say, through events and decisions, some of which are of no fault of their own, and some of which are very much of fault of their own, the fundamental stability of their lives (and personalities) depends on hewing to all this bullshit and turning both blind eyes to everything else.
They care about what's true, but only secondarily. Primarily they care about how to sustain these necessary illusions. They're Wily Coyote who's run off a cliff. The one thing he mustn't do is look down.
Fourth: Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland deals with all this and is very good.
Fifth: How is all this possible? Because Isaac Asimov was right: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
Many on the left/liberal side have a need to find some simple, rational explanation for what, to us, is inexplicable: why do Trump supporters exist? What Trump people believe and why they believe it has been a vast media endeavor for years now (despite countless Cletus safaris to Heartland™ diners, the NY Times is still clueless). But, IMO, the response to "What are the reasons that people support Trump?" is "All of them, Katie."
I'm a big fan of Amanda Marcotte but your linked essay on Trump supporters is much, much more on target, IMO. Marcotte reduces Trump supporters to those who "never believed he was an honest man" and who see themselves as "in on the con." For some percentage of them, this is clearly true. However, you identify, among other things, hatred of who they have been brainwashed to believe are their enemies as a key motivator. Which is also true. (Trump sometimes thinks they're in on the con, too.)
And hard to believe as it is, some of them really do love the guy. A recent WAPO article quoted the mayor of once-safe Tangier Island now ravaged by COVID: "I love Trump as much as any family member I got." There are books written about Trump's -faith- for chrissakes and millions of evangelicals make up a huge part of his base. When his fans talk about Trump, it's apparent that for many of them he is a chimera, a phantom with whatever attributes and virtues they want and need him to have, but bearing no relation whatsoever to the piece of shit he really is. Sheer self-delusion is yet another a reason (and why many of his fans would never bother to look up the Insurrection Act claim -- it wouldn't occur to them that it -could- be fake.)
I don't know what percentage believes what, and for most it's probably a combination of reasons, but all's I know is this: one day someone will write a dissertation on the topic, and she'll still be criticized by wingnuts for calling herself "Dr."
Ugh, that story: "Most are fiercely devoted to President Trump, who called Tangier’s mayor to tell him not to worry about rising sea levels." LOL. If you've been down the Eastern Shore and to the island and peninsular communities you can see the soggy front lawns at high tide.
But that extra water will go away. Just tell a few folks to stay out of the water and you'll see, it'll just go back where it belongs.
The United States of America is collapsing - so is the rest of the world. Flight from reality?
Climate change. No one, and I mean not me, not you, not anyone, is dealing with it in any manner that will make a difference. The world is headed straight on into frequent natural disasters, food emergencies, rising seas, mass migrations and refugees, water wars... you get the idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_apocalypse
And we wonder why people are fleeing from reality? It fucking goddamn sucks, that's why.
The old time conservatives were crazy with fear of a single global state, yet now that we have a de facto global neoliberal state, silence.
There will be no effective response to climate change because it doesn't affect the Powers That Be.
The irony kills me. And right - the great majority of people can't find time in their day of just surviving to do the long range planning needed to respond to the climate catastrophe and the Powers That Be (TPTB) don't give a fuck.
So we're all fucked. Humanity in a nut shell. And people wonder why I have misanthropic tendencies.
Hey, look at the bright side. We could be dead sooner rather than later and it'll be someone else's problem (and take your pick of problems!); and on the other hand, we all may be stoned by suppertime! if we aren't already now. Oh, and by stoned, you can choose the biblical sense, if you know what I mean. Yuck it up. Yuck! and yuck-yuck-yuck. Tears, laughter, alright I'm crawling back in my cave.
I don't think that failing to check things you hear from people you trust is that Trumpist, or rather particularly Trumpist. Though ad hominem argument is logically invalid, we seem to be built to use it as the primary method of truth assessment—this saved a lot of time and energy back when we were in small bands (with strong sanctions against liars), and I'd hazard is part of the social technology that helped us become half-assed masters of this globe.
It may not be Trumpist but it's not ideal. I expect you'd agree that we who hold aloft the torch of reason should try to at least get our facts straight and admit when we've been had. I will agree that our lapses are not equivalent with the everyday malicious lying of political operatives -- though in that, as in everything, they try to say it is.
Yes, but I'll still trust what you report more—and be less likely to check-up-on—than what Ann Coulter reports.
The 'lust to see Trump kill his opponents' is a selling-point, and part of the vicarious freedom you get when identifying with the Powerful Leader. Even in a misogynist dictatorship you'd quite possibly hang for killing your wife, and you'd definitely swing for killing your boss, and maybe for killing that guy who cut you off at the intersection, but you can identify with the Leader who is Free.
(I realised this as a riff on someone else's brilliant 'Fascism is Anarchism for one man.')