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The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult


Hugo Stiglitz

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44 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

What's the good news about the RP? 

Did you not read the article? There’s a group of moderate republicans that are working with moderate democrats to pass legislation where there is agreement, instead of every single republican just being an obstructionist. The progress is small, but at least it’s something. 

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:


The only good news you could hear about that party is if they all join the Guyana Punch caucus.

Maybe for another thread, but I think after we're done hand-wringing and claiming all Republicans to be fascist enablers...there are some centrists on both sides that quietly go about the work of governing and legislating.  In addition to each party's moderate/centrist caucuses, there are a number of narrowly focused caucuses and task forces that make for very strange bedfellows.  Subjects as specific as Armenian Issues Caucus...and the co-chair of that Caucus?  You guessed it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Pallone

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1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

You know, I did a fuck ton of dumb shit in my youth.  None of it ever came close to spray painting swastikas. So, as much as I would like to say, boys will be boys in this situation...sorry no.

The most we did was some pranks on rival schools (TPing, shoe polish slogans on windows, stealing of a statue), and the closest we could have come to being seriously suspended was hanging a banner on the press box at the shared football stadium that said "Clements Sucks Donkey Dong" or something to that effect (which is funny because our school had plenty of aggy, probably more than the other school).

That shit would probably get kids labeled as terrorists or sex offenders these days.

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1 hour ago, YGIFS said:

but I think after we're done hand-wringing and claiming all Republicans to be fascist enablers...there are some centrists on both sides that quietly go about the work of governing and legislating.

With all due respect, the above is deeply flawed.

1. Pointing out that the MAGA-GQP is fascist and theocratic is not mere hand-wringing or a claim. It's an observation of a blatant empirical truth. Hell, the Christian/Creationist theocrats are up front with America being ruled by the Bible. I grew up in Texas. I've seen the desire for Christian domination for decades, especially in Dallas. MAGA and Trump are not blips on the political radar. Reagan and Falwell got all this rolling along in the 1980s with the so-called Moral Majority, the precursor to MAGA. They are creationists bent upon attacking evolution. Ross Perot foreshadowed Trump as billionaire businessman, the all-knowing, all powerful wise man.

2. MAGA-GQP are not really legislating or governing? Tell that to women in America and Texas. Hell, the Christian theocrats got Roe overturned, with a Supreme Court they stacked. They legislated a bounty on abortion-seeking women in Texas. They are coming for contraception. They are targeting the LGBTQIA communities. They are openly racist. Abbott is busing migrants out of the state, a clear fascist signal that worse is coming. They worship Trump, Musk, and crave dictatorial/autocratic leadership over a militarized and regimented society, terrified and armed to the teeth. The whole battle over Kevin McCarthy was a mere struggle for more power among the most fascist of the GQP. More anti-science is coming.

3. I could list more, but those are clear examples of fascism and theocracy. It's not hand-wringing, yet it seems too late for a warning. Any GOP-Republican (or conservative) not denouncing the above is a fascist/theocrat or an enabler. Either way, the result is the same. 

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I didn't mean hand-wringing as a polity.  I meant on here, CR, where every Republican is a fascist enabler.  Centrists of both parties have little choice but to work together to get stuff done.  Yes, the MAGA extreme will continue their onslaught of moronic bills and appointments.  But that politico article shines a light on what quietly goes on in D.C. and a handful of statehouses around the country.  I am well aware of the christian nationalism and MAGA grip on their party.  But we forget there's like 50 center to even liberal Republicans in the House who nobody knows about, who don't post on social media, or go on FoxNews.  And the Democrats on the Hill embrace the opportunity to work with them, and rightfully so.  Not saying they deserve to be celebrated, but if your party's leadership can work with them, we can at least acknowledge they're not so far gone.  They actually did quite a bit of work together in the last Congress. 

Of course, to your point, that all comes to end this Congress.  The infighting and extremism by the Freedom Caucus/MAGA/GQP factions will attempt to silence and punish members working with Democrats on anything.  But members of the Republican Governance Group and other moderate to even liberal caucus groups are regularly called upon by Democrats to guide legislation.  They may be even more important than ever in this upcoming shitshow.  They are to shoulder blame for Trump and MAGA and all...but they also help keep Capitol Hill running.

There aren't more Kitzingers and Cheneys waiting in the wings.  But they stepped out from the shadows when their country needed them.  Not to romanticize a chunk of their voter base or their own careers, but the country needs more Kitzingers and Cheneys and they will be culled from the moderate ranks just as those two were.  Call them whatever you want, I won't defend them.  But a Republican Civil War is only fun to watch if the somewhat-more-sane side is well equipped.  They'll have enough of a challenge being threatened by their own party.

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You brought sparkling water to a tactical op?

”yeah, why?  I get thirsty.”

 You ever notice in all those spec ops documentaries and video games, nobody is drinking carbonated beverages?  Why do you suppose that is?  We’ll get the rest Of your myriad horrifically Bad life choices after that 

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14 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

That blue and pink XXXL "camo" shirt makes me think we should start our own version of the Gravy Seals for these events, with rainbow camo, Groucho Marx sunglasses, and water guns.  We could bring mimosas.

Man, I haven't thought about Harry Knowles in years. 

image.thumb.png.0207dae7beac35453bb09e079a005607.png

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1 hour ago, crash_davis said:

These fine human specimens are protecting your rights to play military dress up. I imagine the only qualification to join these badasses is playing Call of Duty.

 

I suspect the guy wearing camo and the hawaiian shirt doesn’t really understand the purpose of camo. Or maybe his mom forgot to wash his camo shirt.

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This is a really good write-up on the quandary we find ourselves in when ONE SIDE is batshit bonkers. I'd really like to understand though why THAT SIDE has embraced the lunatic fringe whereas the Tories haven't in Britain (although they did buy into the whole Brexit thing).

Are Americans just uniquely paranoid and stupid? If so, why?

 

Asymmetrical Conspiracism Is Hurting Democracy
In the past decade, conspiratorial thinking has shifted from a worrying factor in Republican politics to a defining feature.

As an American living in Britain for the past decade, I’ve had a front-row seat to two dysfunctional democracies hell-bent on embarrassing themselves. President Donald Trump warned that a hurricane was “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” Prime Minister Liz Truss failed to outlast a lettuce at Downing Street. These years have not inspired confidence in democracy.

In Britain and the United States—and across most faltering Western democracies—this democratic dysfunction is routinely chalked up to a catchall culprit: polarization. The reason our democracies are decaying, we’re often told, is that we’re more divided than ever before. And that’s true: Polarization is worsening. Debates over Brexit and Trump tore citizenries—and families—apart.

But Britain’s and America’s democratic woes are not at all the same. The problems in American democracy are worse. That’s because a particularly insidious disease has infected the core of its political system, one that is not present to the same degree in other rich democracies: extreme conspiracism. Other countries, including the U.K., have polarization. America has irrational polarization, in which one political party has fallen under the spell of conspiratorial thinking. Polarization plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral. The battle for American democracy will be a battle over reality.

Within the modern GOP, conspiracy theories—about stolen elections, satanic cults, or “deep state” cover-ups—have replaced policy ideas as a rallying cry for Trump’s MAGA base. Trump’s disciples have developed an encyclopedic knowledge of a dizzying cast of characters, along with a series of code words for alleged cover-ups. They rattle off their accepted wisdom about conspiracies that most people have never heard of, such as “Italygate,” the absurd notion that the U.S. embassy in Rome, in conjunction with the Vatican, used satellites to rig the 2020 presidential election.

In Britain, far fewer people believe in conspiracy theories. According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent. Seventeen percent of Americans agree with the statement that “a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles has taken control of parts of the U.S. Government and mainstream U.S. media,” compared with 8 percent of Britons.

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What’s really troubling about this political moment in America, though, is not merely the spread of conspiratorial thinking in the general population. It’s also that the delusions have infected the mainstream political leadership. The crackpots have come to Congress.

When Kevin McCarthy finally became speaker of the House this week, one of the first photos to circulate was a selfie taken with Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former QAnon believer who once blamed a wildfire on Jewish space lasers.

Writing a similar sentence about modern British politics would be impossible. There’s just nothing like it. Instead, in Britain, conspiracy theorists are ostracized by the political establishment. Politicians may disagree about policy, but those who disagree about reality face real consequences.

Last week, for instance, Andrew Bridgen, a conservative member of the British Parliament, tweeted a graph from a conspiracy-theory website, spreading false information about the risks of COVID vaccines. The vaccination program, Bridgen wrote, was “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.” The response was swift. Bridgen was condemned across the political spectrum. His own party expelled him. The Tories, Britain’s ruling conservative political party, didn’t want to be associated with a conspiracy theorist.

Meanwhile, America’s political right is the leading global source of COVID conspiracy theories. The more outlandish, the better. Two years ago, in Ohio, in an almost exact parallel to Bridgen’s remarks, Republican State Representative Jennifer Gross compared mandatory vaccination to the Holocaust. Then Gross went much further. She effusively praised the testimony of a quack expert who claimed that vaccines magnetize people, such that spoons will stick to your forehead following a shot. “What an honor to have you here,” Gross fawned, after the alleged expert testified that vaccines can “interface” with 5G cell towers. Gross faced no primary challenger and was recently reelected, with 64 percent of the vote.

Rather than getting expelled from the Republican Party or becoming pariahs on the right, conspiracy theorists have become GOP stars. Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and a former top intelligence official, has falsely suggested that COVID-19 was created by George Soros, Bill Gates, and the World Health Organization to steal the 2020 election. In a separate statement, he argued that Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the best-selling book Sapiens, was part of a plot to alter human DNA and turn us into cyborgs.

Flynn should be an irrelevant laughingstock. Instead, he’s headlining right-wing conferences and commanding huge audiences. Flynn recently shared a stage at the deranged ReAwaken America event with Eric Trump—during which one speaker alleged that “demonic satellites” control voting in America. Donald Trump, America’s conspiracist in chief, spoke to the conference by phone.

 

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Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the links between evolution and human storytelling, has come up with a simple, compelling explanation for why people are innately drawn to conspiracy theories. We are, in his words, a storytelling animal. Our minds have evolved to latch on to stories to make sense of a maddeningly complex world.

Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are some of the best stories out there. They’re thrillers. Many would make great blockbuster films. And to debunk a conspiracy theory is to tell someone that there is no story. It’s trying to convince a person who has made sense of patterns—by squinting at them through the fun-house mirror of conspiratorial thinking—that those patterns are meaningless. That’s not a message the storytelling animal wants to hear.

All humans of all political persuasions are susceptible to conspiracy theories. Millions of Americans, on the political left and the political right, believe in them. But conspiratorial thinking is thriving especially on the right because it’s sanctioned, and endorsed, from above.

This asymmetrical conspiracism has been going on for a while now. The historian Richard Hofstadter noted how “the paranoid style” took root on the right in the mid-20th century, starting with McCarthyism and continuing  through Barry Goldwater’s rise in 1964, shortly after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

 

Spoiler

In the past decade, conspiratorial thinking has shifted from a worrying factor in Republican politics to a defining feature. This is partly because of Trump himself, who peddled countless debunked conspiracy theories, including that climate change is a hoax invented by China, and the lie that Ted Cruz’s father had links to the JFK assassination. As Trump took over the party, his conspiratorial lies became Republican orthodoxy. And that opened the door to conspiratorial influencers, who started inventing new lies.

Deranged grifters profit from what the writer Kurt Andersen has called the “fantasy-industrial complex,” in which media provocateurs, including Infowars and Fox News, have cashed in on political messaging defined by a conspiratorial mindset.

They prey on susceptible individuals, particularly those who are lonely and bored, browsing alone, and finding online communities to replace real-world ones. People with paranoid personalities are particularly vulnerable, as are those with a Manichaean worldview—a perception that the entire world is a battle between good and evil. At the ReAwaken America event, one speaker advanced the outlandish claim that the election was stolen by demons.

Alone, polarization is damaging but manageable. When polarization merges with deranged conspiracy theories, then democratic breakdown becomes far more likely. One purpose of democratic government is to allow citizens to solve problems through compromise without resorting to violence. Modern Republican conspiracist politics undermines those aspects—solving problems, compromising, and avoiding violence.

To solve a problem, you first must agree it exists. Democracy therefore requires a shared sense of reality. Instead, America has splintered into a choose-your-own-reality society, in which citizens self-select into whatever version of the world they want to inhabit, reflected back at them by media outlets that earn most when they challenge worldviews least. Conversely, in Britain, the BBC continues to dominate broadcast-media market share, and outlets that push conspiracy theories have tiny audiences. Moreover, left-wing and right-wing politicians both watch and agree to be interviewed by the BBC, whereas in the U.S., politicians gravitate toward friendly partisan media outlets.

Even if politicians can agree a problem exists, the Manichaean nature of conspiracy theories—and the extreme claims embedded in conspiratorial cults such as QAnon—makes compromise unlikely. Trying to find shared ground with a fellow American who disagrees with you on health care or taxes is one thing, but if you believe that Democrats are harvesting children to suck their blood, then working together on, say, democratic reform becomes much harder. Granted, elected Republicans on the whole don’t truly believe those more outlandish claims, but some of their core voters do, and that puts pressure on them to treat Democrats like evil enemies rather than legitimate political opponents.

On January 6, 2021, thousands of deluded insurrectionists attacked the Capitol because of lies spread by Trump and his acolytes. But the bigger problem was inside the ranks of Congress itself, as most House Republicans voted not to certify the election based on those debunked theories. These were the conspiratorial insurrectionists in suits—and they’re now in charge of the House of Representatives. What will they do now that they’re in power? Launch countless investigations into COVID vaccines, deep-state cover-ups, and the elections that they wrongly claim were stolen. Governing will be put on hold for two years.

Until modern Republican politics stops systematically empowering crackpots, America’s democratic dysfunction cannot be considered equivalent to the mere polarization that exists in peer countries such as Britain. In Britain, the political system is broken in ways that are more easily fixed. When reality shifts, people change their minds—and someone as incompetent as Liz Truss gets booted from office in just 42 days.

Unfortunately, loosening the grip of conspiratorial thinking in politics is extremely difficult; it means trying to make the storytelling animal give up on one hell of a story. But here is one nugget of wisdom for how to start, drawn from H. L. Mencken: “The way to deal with superstition,” he wrote, “is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.”

QAnon is crazy. The notion that vaccines cause spoons to stick to you is moronic. Anyone who tells you that a best-selling historian is part of a secret plot to turn you into a cyborg is, with insincere apologies to Mike Flynn, a complete idiot. In the battle for reality, ridicule is a powerful weapon.

 

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2 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

That blue and pink XXXL "camo" shirt makes me think we should start our own version of the Gravy Seals for these events, with rainbow camo, Groucho Marx sunglasses, and water guns.  We could bring mimosas.

I'm game.  Next time these clowns gather at the Texas Capitol, we could meet in pastel shirts, tactical sweater vests, and long version water guns and claim we're there to help preserve 'Murica.  Obviously they'd pick up on it and get pissy with us, but DPS does a pretty good job of difusing up there.  I doubt anybody's gonna open fire.  Best case, they put their weapons down and try to pick a fistfight.  It's been twenty years since I beat up a guy in front of his kids.  I think I got one more in me before I hit 50.  Plus, we'd make the news...maybe turn it into some revenue for the Wreath Fund or NIL.  

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11 minutes ago, Willfully Horn said:

Gotdammit. Not my aloha shirt,

I always knew Lumbergh was a closet ProudBoi/MAGA shithead.  "And tomorrow is Hawaiin shirt/insurrection day...so if you wanna wear an aloha shirt...feel free."  

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Last sentence of the Atlantic article above

Quote

 In the battle for reality, ridicule is a powerful weapon.

The problem with this is that they just go right back to their echo chambers and reinforce what they were just ridiculed about. As long as they have people telling them they are right, they will not be deprogrammed.  I don’t really know how you fix it. I fear you cannot. 

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We're not trying to deprogram or fix them.  Ridicule works for the same reason being ostracized from the pack/tribe has always worked.  Sure, 2% of the time they lash out violently towards you or some innocent person who is defenseless.  But 98% of the time, they withdraw in shame, wallow in misery, develop an eating disorder or substance abuse issue and the situation just works itself out naturally.  25mm of his voters, our fellow Americans, are too far gone.  They will never be the people we loved, called friends, enjoyed as neighbors, collaborated with as co-workers.  they are lost to time.  Let them drift away, hope they don't hurt others, and they'll kill themselves off soon enough.  You don't see a lot of hate-filled, obese 90 year olds.  For a fucking reason.  

Don't be sad because they're over as humans.  Smile because it's proof God loves us but doesn't care what happens anymore.  He dropped us off with our new step-siblings and we offered to play or make lunch, and all they wanna do is torture small animals and throw rocks at the handicapped kid down the street.  

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9 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

We're not trying to deprogram or fix them.  Ridicule works for the same reason being ostracized from the pack/tribe has always worked.  Sure, 2% of the time they lash out violently towards you or some innocent person who is defenseless.  But 98% of the time, they withdraw in shame, wallow in misery, develop an eating disorder or substance abuse issue and the situation just works itself out naturally.  25mm of his voters, our fellow Americans, are too far gone.  They will never be the people we loved, called friends, enjoyed as neighbors, collaborated with as co-workers.  they are lost to time.  Let them drift away, hope they don't hurt others, and they'll kill themselves off soon enough.  You don't see a lot of hate-filled, obese 90 year olds.  For a fucking reason.  

Don't be sad because they're over as humans.  Smile because it's proof God loves us but doesn't care what happens anymore.  He dropped us off with our new step-siblings and we offered to play or make lunch, and all they wanna do is torture small animals and throw rocks at the handicapped kid down the street.  

This.  The point of ridicule - which should be complete, total, and relentless - is to force these people into utter humiliation.  Withdraw back into your shell, drink hemlock, or decide that you are tired of being humiliated and thus you need to abandon your idiocy..... I don't care how you deal with that humiliation.  Pick any of those solutions, but every one of them should remove you from the field of play.

Shunning and humiliating has its place in a functioning society.  Fuck being nice to moronic fascists.  Call them what they are.  Shame them relentlessly.  Shame them in public, at home, at work, with their families, with their friends.  Drive them back under the rocks they came from.  They are waging war against a functioning society.  It's time for society to fight back, as hard as it can.

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28 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

This.  The point of ridicule - which should be complete, total, and relentless - is to force these people into utter humiliation.  Withdraw back into your shell, drink hemlock, or decide that you are tired of being humiliated and thus you need to abandon your idiocy..... I don't care how you deal with that humiliation.  Pick any of those solutions, but every one of them should remove you from the field of play.

Shunning and humiliating has its place in a functioning society.  Fuck being nice to moronic fascists.  Call them what they are.  Shame them relentlessly.  Shame them in public, at home, at work, with their families, with their friends.  Drive them back under the rocks they came from.  They are waging war against a functioning society.  It's time for society to fight back, as hard as it can.

Problem is they’re all under the same rock now, so they give each other confidence in their positions. So you don’t chase them back to their isolated hole, you chase them back to their echo chamber of millions. 

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2 hours ago, YGIFS said:

We're not trying to deprogram or fix them.  Ridicule works for the same reason being ostracized from the pack/tribe has always worked.  Sure, 2% of the time they lash out violently towards you or some innocent person who is defenseless.  But 98% of the time, they withdraw in shame, wallow in misery, develop an eating disorder or substance abuse issue and the situation just works itself out naturally.  25mm of his voters, our fellow Americans, are too far gone.  They will never be the people we loved, called friends, enjoyed as neighbors, collaborated with as co-workers.  they are lost to time.  Let them drift away, hope they don't hurt others, and they'll kill themselves off soon enough.  You don't see a lot of hate-filled, obese 90 year olds.  For a fucking reason.  

Don't be sad because they're over as humans.  Smile because it's proof God loves us but doesn't care what happens anymore.  He dropped us off with our new step-siblings and we offered to play or make lunch, and all they wanna do is torture small animals and throw rocks at the handicapped kid down the street.  

 

it appears a lot of them already have an eating disorder.

 

 

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9 hours ago, Pescado_Rojo said:
8 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

Gotdammit. Not my aloha shirt,

It so fucking pisses me off as I have half-a-dozen really nice Hawaiian shirts that I used to wear a lot more.

4 hours ago, Bullneck said:

Oh, noes!

2132.jpg?width=1200&quality=85&auto=form

His politics aside, Tom Selleck actually served in the military and does quite a bit for veterans, unlike most of these inbreds.

Magnum P.I. was insanely important to a helluva lot of Vietnam vets.

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12 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

It so fucking pisses me off as I have half-a-dozen really nice Hawaiian shirts that I used to wear a lot more.

 

6 hours ago, TheRealRonWeaver? said:

Sassy Office Space GIF by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

Why should I change my shirt? They're the ones who suck.

 

8 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

Gotdammit. Not my aloha shirt,

83384DE1-D4D2-40B3-BB97-EE60FA9C6673.gif.24af198b951e0558e31ce890c1ec7fd4.gif

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