I question the standards of anyone who supported Trump after the obscenity that was Birtherism. Trump lied and lied and lied. His supporters should be forced to watch a tape loop of Trump from 7 or 8 years ago -- the interview where he claims to have a team of investigators in Hawaii tracking down the birth certificate hoax -- "and you won't believe what they're finding out." No, scratch that. By definition, the Trumpsters are incapable of seeing the man for what he is. I want to be fair toward those who support this guy, but I just can't see the justification. That the news media must report the crazy, deceitful, ugly things this man says is more than I can stand most days. He's cured me from tuning into live news feeds. That anyone in the country would listen to this liar is outrageous. That he's actually competitive in the Presidential race -- currently embattled, but competitive -- is madness.
Looking from afar my sense is it's a desire for change from the past that Trump tapped into.
Yeah. It's called white supremacy.
When Trump goes I think there are still problems that need addressing - like in any society. It wont be all fixed when he goes.
At the heart of all bigotry is a combination of ignorance, deep insecurity and profound self-loathing. That's why it's so easy to manipulate bigots. All you have to do is agree with them and give them permission to openly hate; to tell them they were
right in their assumptions and that, more importantly, the people that
taught them to hate--their parents and grandparents--were all "good people" etc. Ignorance is strength. I mean, Orwell spelled it all out, but he was just using the autocratic playbooks of Hitler and Stalin.
That and cognitive dissonance. If your parents and grandparents are ignorant bigots then it can't be that they are bad people, because they're your parents and grandparents. So it must be something ELSE wrong, or that being a bigot isn't wrong. It's exactly how cults operate.
It's endlessly ironic that the same group of people in America who were so easily manipulated by the "red scare" of the fifties and whose children Reagan exploited in the eighties to rise to power are now the ones who have been turned into willing traitors by Trump now that there is an
actual Russian invasion, albeit on an evolved battlefield.
And all it took was permission to take pride in being full of hate and ignorance. To be
proud of being terrible people and no longer allow anyone to insist they be better people. To eschew shame and personal responsibility. Your hate-filled parents taught you the right things, not the wrong things! And all the lies of white supremacy; that it's not about oppressing others--whites are the
real oppressed group, etc.--are all just permission to love your bigotry and bigoted parents/grandparents.
It's brainwashing, but it's being conducted on people who have already opened their own skulls and stand ready with their own wet sponges just waiting for someone in authority to tell them to begin scrubbing in unison. They're the bungled and the botched looking for a cliff to jump off of so long as someone tells them it's in their best interest, because they aren't intelligent enough to figure out it's the exact opposite.
And we who are intelligent enough can only watch them do it. Over and over and over again. Dunning-Kruger Darwinism.
So, yeah, it won't be "fixed" because they're too ignorant to know they're broken and too lazy to give a shit about it in the first place, so anyone that comes along and lies to them about how their flaws are really their strengths--as they bend them over and stick it in--will always get their votes.
We see this
exact dynamic played out over and over and over here by the usual suspects. We all know who they are--they know who they are--and yet, it's all just the same sophistry and appeals to the same fallacies over and over and over again and no matter how many times the same idiotic arguments are shredded, they just keep repeating them as if nothing ever counters them and there is an unseen audience that they are playing to, even if that is just ultimately themselves. Again, exactly like a cult.
Endlessly bizarre. The human zoo.
