And how does just letting them continue to walk all over the rights of others help?
They need to be deprogrammed, sure. But once again, they are the ones seen as sympathetic, a week after a racially motivated shooting, where the shooter was the one we all were meant to sympathize with. How about they accept responsibly for the way they’ve utterly fucked us all over year in and year out?
Meanwhile the rest of us “deserve what we get” for now bowing to their desire to make us less than human and disposable.
I do feel like it’s being a wee bit generous to Trumpers, though. It’s a death cult motivated not by a desire to self-harm, but because their desire to hurt certain other classes of people outweighs their own desire to prevent self-harm.
But yeah, still need to deprogram the death cult, either way.
They tried to over throw the government. You know what happened to people of color who tried to checks notes literally do anything that wasn’t showing full subservience to white people? Entire communities were wiped out for far less than what happened on the 6th.
At some point, if we don’t come to terms with all of this and finally deal with white supremacy as it actually exists, we will no longer have a country. We came close this year. Very close. There needs to be accountability and an understanding of how this happened in the first place.
Why? they’re not addicts. they made the choice to support a man who ran on flat out racism. They made the choice, and they’re continuing to make the choice to support these ideologies.
And BTW, “throwing them in jail” was perfect fine when the drug addiction was crack and it was seen as a problem in the Black community (which, of course, it wasn’t a Black problem, but was in part made a Black problem by the media).
You give him far too much credit. People liked him because he got away with all sorts of shit. Anyone with any sense could see what he was from day one. He opened his campaign with a racist screed against Mexicans. People made a choice to support that. They went into that with their eyes wide open.
Again, I don’t see Dean arguing that. De-programming and addiction rehab don’t advocate welcoming the person back unconditionally, and the same should apply here.
I agree that it’s galling to see fascist followers as victims in a sympathetic sense, but I’m not sure we necessarily have to do that in the case of this cult. For example, in the case of a grifter who preys on a mark’s greed or sense of entitlement I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the latter even as I express disgust for the former. Biff took exactly this kind of con game, at which he excels, and played it out on the national stage.
There definitely have to be consequences. Letting participants in an attempted putsch off easy is historically a really bad idea, for example. But beyond assigning consequences for harmful behaviour, treating the MAGAts as cult members who need to be de-programmed (and not without consequences there as well) is an approach worth exploring.
Yeah, we have to collectively acknowledge that the self-harm is just a side effect of the white supremacy. That is ultimately the “death cult” that needs to be reckoned with.
I was just reading the NYTimes article from Sunday about the police response to last year’s BLM protests, blaming poor strategy and “lack of training” for the disastrous police response, and getting increasingly angry. Based on what’s come out since, yes it’s clear that the police response was uniformly incompetent, and they uniformly used tactics that caused problems rather than de-escalated them, and they had insufficient training in their less-than-lethal weapons, but what didn’t get mentioned was that it was also abundantly clear, even at the time, that the cops were intentionally hurting people, that they were deliberately inflaming the situation (so they could beat up some brown people), because they knew there were no consequences for them. That just feels like synecdoche for conservative politics as a whole right now. It’s (well past) time for some motherf*cking consequences.
This Trumper probably was told long ago that those are lefty propaganda sites, though. It’s part of the problem- they trust sites that reference each other in a circular fashion to “prove” their claim.
I find it ironic that they’re eager to do whatever Trump tells them in the name of freedom.
They aren’t, but cult de-programming draws from and is very similar to the tougher forms of rehab for substance addiction.
That’s the basic appeal in a lot of cults with charismatic leaders, who are always accomplished con artists . Whether we’re talking about Biff or Elron or lesser grifters, the aspirational message is the same: join us, move up the ranks/degrees, and one day you too might live a powerful life free of consequence like Dear Leader.
Fascist cults put an interesting spin on this, because they add: many years ago, during the Golden Age, the cult ruled all and people like you were already high-ranking members because of your skin tone/gender/religion/etc. Join us, help us bring back that Golden Age, and you’ll start high up in the ranks.
For obvious reasons, both pitches are utter BS that usually result in some form of self-harm. However, to people who are greedy or entitled, who feel powerless in normal society, and/or who are ignorant and/or lack critical thinking skills, the promises of the grifters can be very compelling and intoxicating.
They voted for a mainstream candidate who won their parties primary. They voted for him, because he espoused their culture war ideas, which are rife with white supremacy.
Fascism was a mainstream political view that has gotten a revival in recent years.
I just find this smacks of so much more making excuses, rather than looking at our institutions to try and figure out how this could have come about. It’s more putting it on the individual, instead of finally stripping ourselves of this poisonous world view that has dominated our country for centuries.
Yes. That marked the GOP’s final transformation into a death cult, a process that began in the late 1960s.
It’s also frequently and accurately characterised as a death cult ideology. That they can become mainstream and accepted or at least acquiesced to by an entire nation-state is one of the things that makes them so disturbing and later leads us to ask “how did this happen?”.
I’m not making excuses. I give no quarter to fascists or their enablers. But Dean’s framing of RWA followers as cultists who might be de-programmed is an interesting one.
This goes without saying. It’s a both-and thing, where we acknowledge that white supremacist sexist institutions are supported by and benefit a whole lot of individual voters in a democracy who are drunk with the prospects of power and lack of consequence they offer. Sometimes those institutions can be destroyed or reformed without their input, but just as often in our liberal democracy we have to contend with their obstruction of those processes via Republican elected officials (AKA high priests of the death cult).
The power dynamics need to shift. America needs actual hate speech laws on the books. I think that one thing that needs to happen on the road to getting laws against hate speech in America signed is that we need to do away with academic lines of thought regarding speech and discourse such as the “Marketplace of Ideas” and “Counter Speech With More, Better Speech”.
The “Marketplace of Ideas”, where people with various ideas are supposed to argue and the ‘best’ ideas will eventually rise to the top, that whole thing is a fallacy. In actual marketplaces, things are actually rendered obsolete. In the “Marketplace Of Ideas”, nothing ever goes obsolete. Vile ideologies and other horseshit have to be fought against constantly.
Then there’s “Counter Speech With More, Better Speech”. This only works if the person you’re talking to is willing to listen to what you have to say. It really only exists in stuffy debate halls. Trumpists, nazis, and white supremacists aren’t interested in good-faith debate. Any ‘Hallmark Channel Original Movie’ moments where the racist asshole gets shown the error of their ways and has a sudden change of heart are very few and far between. Marginalized groups are eternally put on the defensive both online and in real life against people who want them to stop existing.
Codifying hate speech laws gives marginalized groups advantages in their fights against the trumpists, nazis, and all-around assholes. The Popehats of the world who act like the universe would implode if some speech that’s currently legal in the U.S. were criminalized? The people who act like the First Amendment has actually been applied equally at any point in the history of this nation? They deserve to go pound sand.
There is no mystery as to how this happened. Our leaders have allowed themselves to be bought by monied interests and given ground on a decent life for ordinary Americans until they have no hope for change and have become supremely vulnerable to liars and conmen. Right now they may be massively confused about who is responsible and who they’ve been told to blame, but even so they will know and understand a better deal when offered to them. Democrats playing at Republican lite won’t make a difference in their lives. They don’t need “deprogramming”, they need transformative change.
I remember how his presidential campaign imploded after he committed the unforgivable sin of *checks notes* sounding kinda funny when he screamed at a campaign rally.
22 years later, Trump literally bragged about sexual assault on camera and people were totally cool with it.
Some people make decisions by using critical thinking, some people make decisions purely by emotion. We can’t change that second group. But we can press to make sure to that everyone who is qualified to vote actually does get to vote.
I like Governor Dean, and one of my biggest problems with President Obama—who I also really, really like and admire and respect—was his dismantling of the 50 States Strategy.
But I’m thoroughly annoyed at his utterly gratuitous Dr. Seuss comment, and the fact that he accepted the bullshit framing of the right. The decision was made the copyright holders, for pete’s sake—it’s not like some mythical Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street megazord formed and forced them to do it.
My son thinks the United States is going to have to fight another Civil War soon, and maybe accept that parts of the current country don’t want to remain in.
I’m not sure he’s wrong.
You know what happened to people of color who tried to checks notes literally do anything that wasn’t showing full subservience to white people? Entire communities were wiped out for far less than what happened on the 6th.
