Pics in my Twitter feed this morning of Anti-maskers marching in Montreal yesterday, that bastion of European chic, infiltrated with Trump 2020 signs advocating for more of the meth lab mentality infesting our southern border.
United States has gone insane, like a car crash in slow motion, and those of us on the outside view it all in a transfixed helpless horror, as that vile right-wing virus of insanity infests itself worldwide.
From the trump fluffers, to the trumplicans with their unconditional loyalty to a fiend, Timothy Snyder calls this new breed of fascist like ideology, SADOPOPULISM – basically the appearance of democracy without the pesky actual democratic process.
Today many on the right-wing political spectrum appear at times enslaved by their misguided fears, falling down the rabbit hole of delusional conspiracies based on nothing but fluff and faery farts, pawns in this game of divide and conquer.
Used to be conspiracies were generally harmless diversions, but with the ease of information slithering seamlessly through our lives, they’ve morphed into these dangerous lies and half-truths that are actually killing people, and the President of the United States approves.
Yet, the FBI warned these Right-wing conspiracies are a domestic threat.
The FBI intelligence bulletin from the bureau’s Phoenix field office, dated May 30, 2019, describes “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists,” as a growing threat, and notes that it is the first such report to do so. It lists a number of arrests, including some that haven’t been publicized, related to violent incidents motivated by fringe beliefs.
YAHOO NEWS | FBI document warns conspiracy theories are a new domestic terrorism threat | JANA WINTER, August 1, 2019
QAnon, a tale of a cabal run by Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles, supposedly being toppled by their supreme god-king trump, believed to have been concocted by Russia, but who knows.
Reims of blog posts and extremist news outlets, and YouTube channels devoted to this conspiracy, followed by the lonely and the bored, angry and the scared, looking for all the answers to their woes, I suppose.
Two-thirds of its terrorist incidents last year were carried out by homegrown extremists from the far-right. That rose to 90 per cent in the first five months of this year.
FT.com | QAnon cult shows America should fear the enemy within | EDWARD LUCE, SEPTEMBER 10 2020
This may be a wound that never fully, entirely heals. A dark time, with too many words spit out in rage, or typed, unyielding words, unforgiving words, in response to a barrage of unprecedented chaos.
Grappling with the same ol’themes, of equality, hierarchies, prosperity, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The problem is how you get there, and who they mean by ‘we’; all the people, or just some people?
To some, this totalitarian regime is what they most desire. The strong man in charge, stomping on those who want more truth, more empathy, more compassion, spitting in our faces their infected gobs of misinformation and lies they’ve been fed by cons and cheats who think nothing but of their own profit shares and, frankly, they are not paid to care.
This is no longer about just some useful idiot reality TV star who was installed by foreign powers as president of those now so un-united states.
No, no. This is bigger than one man, its roots lie way back in history.
Some say we are heading to the exit door of capitalism, right now we are in the corridor of this post-capitalist mind field of elephant dung, brushing aside the flies attracted to the stench, these magats feeding off the pre-digested ‘facts’ they’ve been fed by Q, are the misguided soldiers in this war to prevent our escape.
We watch this upside-down-land they inhabit, and listen to the deranged things they believe… and I often wonder who these people were before they drank the Kool-Aid? Were they always this delusional? Is this a mental health issue festering within our midst?
There are theories on whom these people are, how they came to be, what mechanisms inside them set them up to fall so fully into these sorts of confidence games, of far right movements of fear and loathing.
Why? Nature or nurture? Where they raised to be so gullible, or was it hardwired in? Genetic flaw?
New research from various studies suggests that right-wing extremists lack intelligence. One study from the University of Ghent in Belgium found evidence that deficits in emotion understanding and emotion management are related to right-wing and prejudiced attitudes.
Emotional ability was measured with three tests: the Situational Test of Emotional Understanding, the Situational Test of Emotion Management, and the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test.
The researchers found that individuals with weaker emotional abilities — particularly emotional understanding and management — tended to score higher on a measure of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.
Right-wing authoritarianism is a personality trait that describes the tendency to submit to political authority and be hostile towards other groups, while social dominance orientation is a measure of a person’s preference for inequality among social groups.
PSYPOST.org | People with lower emotional intelligence are more likely to hold right-wing views, study finds | ERIC W. DOLAN SEPTEMBER 3, 2019
So, maybe the right-wing extremist have deficiencies in how they process emotion, difficulty in handling extreme situations, unable to manager their fears. Some become thugs masquerading as patriots who believe that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is reserved only for those who they believe deserve it.
Some hanker for those hierarchies of old, back when everyone knew their place. Back in merry ol’England, or the caste structure in India, these ‘patriots’ embrace this, and in fact believe the rules don’t apply to the wealthy and powerful, for starters. In this new mixed up land they inhabit, seems now it’s ok for police or military to be used as tools of the government to bully the public into submission at all costs, that rights and privileges apply only to those who they deem fit, or the right pigmentation and annual income… the scale slides depending on the spin du jour… and of course on what the regime needs them to believe.
This right-wing militant mindset of magas is a dangerous combination of fear and superiority, ignited by a twist of fate that prevented them from emotionally connecting with the world? Maybe. Incapable of properly managing those days of roller coaster rides our lives sometimes take, and all the emotional upheaval a crisis ignites inside our fragile minds, and bodies, and they embrace the guy who says he can make it ALL go away.
EXHIBIT A: the conspiracy nutter screaming bloody murder at the front of a store because they refuse to wear a mask in the midst of a pandemic, these law and order folk seem to believe they can just follow whichever laws they agree with.
So, maybe these people are broken in some fundamental way, incapable of discerning they’ve been duped, more or less now believe they have justification for their more violent extreme tendencies.
Now, certainly not all Trump followers are right-wing extremists. Yet, the current right-wing movement is beset with those who cling to a white supremacist and/or nationalist mindset, and trump is their god-king. Basically, the new trumplican party, while full of manipulated lab rats unable to discern fact from fiction, do have a very, very dangerous faction whose sole priority is to start a civil war to empower this regime.
And, I wonder if all the trumplicans are onboard for that? Do they really want to be associated with this? I honestly am not convinced that all of his followers are aware of what they are in for if this guy gets 4 more years.
Political violence tends to strike in countries where it has happened before. It feeds on discrimination, social segregation and inequality — which provide reasons for grievance while making it hard for divided populations to understand each other. Polarization exacerbates these conditions while blocking societies from solving their problems.
WASHINGTONPOST.com | The U.S. shows all the signs of a country spiraling toward political violence | RACHEL KLEINFELD, September 11, 2020
This is the fundamental struggle I see around me, as so many now harbour these conspiracy nutters within their own family and friend groups. More and more I read of those shutting the door on long held relationships, because they just can’t handle the level of batshyte lunacy any longer. You know, enough is enough.
I still wonder, will at some point the veil of lunacy rise, the blinders come off? Will some one day see they were horribly misled? Probably some, and some may never be able to face their delusions for what they were, some because they’ll be dead.
I blame some of this, in part, on the industrial revolution, which led to governments focusing education to create the mindless worker, to suppress the emotional or intellectual intelligence of its workers, as neither were especially useful for their ends. Thus, many educational benchmarks from many right-wing policies are designed to discourage intelligence, in favour of blind allegiance to dulled down manufactured minds.
And so now as the world moves forward into a high technologically based economy, with new and evolving industries changing the landscape, instant access to information from all sorts of sources, nefarious and otherwise, there remains these remnants bred for a time and place that is gone, and they are terrified of what they just do not understand.
by PaulaB 