Back before the Trump campaign, Scott Adams blog sometimes had some interesting insights in to how people think, fail to think, and places in between. It had a fair bit of garbage too, he was always quite impressed with himself, but I found it worth at least skimming.
One of his repeated points was about cognitive dissonance, which in his mind is when peoples beliefs clash with reality or reality slams two beliefs together. What happens is people will make up something that allows them to continue to believe what they want to believe. He though he was immune to this sort of thing by virtue of being so cognizant of the processes.
Then Trump came around it he got VERY interested in that. At first it was really interesting watching him succumb to some of the very things he had been talking about. For example, Scott thought well of immigrants in general, yeah we needed to work on the system but they are mostly good for the USA. Then Trump started talking about deporting EVERY immigrant. Scott said that what Trump was going to do, probably, cause he was so smart, would be something like designating a room in the each post office as non-American Territory. Then he would have all the immigrants come in to this room, not at the same time of course, and then legally admit them back. Now why do this? The answer is to allow Scott to keep both his like of immigrants and his like of Trump.
But as the campaign went on the blog was mostly about how great both he and Trump are which quickly came to far outweigh any actual content.
You may be right, I’m not so sure though. Even if it starts out as cynical manipulation, I think there is a point at which people believe their own bullshit, and when that’s combined with the kind of worldview that Trump & his base (Adams included) embrace in which the power of will is supreme to objective reality, I worry about what these people are capable of.
At this point, though, he’s a goat-fucker. Whether he’s doing it ironically or not.
I remember Tom Tomorrow taking down Dilbert some time in the last century, before, I think, the depth of Adams’ depravity was widely known. It took some digging but I found a copy. source
