Steve Mnuchin stole Cesar Sayoc's house

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/26/roosting-chicken-bomber.html

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Was this before he executive produced Wonder Woman?

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That swamp…

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Wow, the webs just go on and on. 6 degrees indeed.

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But her emails

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It’s incredible enough that this MAGABomber is the cliche conspiracy theory nutjob/stochastic terrorist, but now he even fits the cliche of Republican politicians screwing over Republican supporters yet the supporters just take it and continue to hate on the Democrats.

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That may actually be the most distressing part if this whole shitshow. So much of our electoral theory revolves around self-interest. The Trumpkins seem to have none of that. So long as it upsets liberals and the Dear Leader likes it, they are all in, even if it completely tbrows them under the bus. I just cannot grasp this mindset. Economics and morality are no longer factors, only tribal identity. Fuckingfuckingfucking shit.

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This!

the whole situation is such a fucked up joke on reality that I keep expecting people to pop out of somewhere yelling “That’s a hell of an act, what do you call it?” “The Aristocrats!”

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next on season eight of Game of What The Fucks

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Stockholm syndrome is a bitch.

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The GOP base: suckers who hear the thief say “look at that baddie over there!” and do exactly that while he picks their pockets.

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I think there’s more to it than sheer stubborn tribalism in the face of reality. I suspect that Sayoc was watching Fox religiously (and listening to Breitbart, etc. etc.) before his house was foreclosed on, while his house was being foreclosed on, and after his house was foreclosed on. He’s been living in an alternate reality and flat-out doesn’t know he’s not working in his own self-interest.

I think there’s a vast, vast population of people who simply have not gotten any of the memos everyone else on the planet has gotten. What looks simply like crazy behavior looks a little less crazy when you posit that these people are actually responding to a different script.

(Could I be wrong? Sure, and I’m not trying to defend any of these fools. But I have a strong suspicion that their being utterly misinformed is more of a factor here than many suppose.)

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Sure, but imagine the different outcome if Obama had aggressively pursued the Wall Street Gamblers that caused the crash, and the vultures that took advantage of people in the midst of the crisis. I think trump would have had a hard time getting traction with a lot more people if justice had been served.

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Thing is, tribalism is what took them to those sources of — well, we can’t really call it “information,” can we? Fox and friends’ fans are self-selecting.

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“The Trump Administration!”
“The Republican Party!”
“America!”
(For some reason I’ve been reminded of that joke on a regular basis since Trump got elected…)

“Sheer stubborn tribalism in the face of reality” is as good a description as any for Fox News, though (so long as “in the face of” doesn’t mean “having to face”). This is the nature of the US right wing now - selling a culture war, selling an identity, that’s divorced from both reality and the policies that conservative voters actually don’t want for the most part (and definitely aren’t in their interests). That requires creating an alternate reality and a stronger partisan identity to get them to ignore the inconvenient bits, which is what Fox does.
It functions to both convince people that the policies which aren’t in their interests actually are, while simultaneously convincing them the policies are the fault of the Democrats (or at the very least the negative consequences of those polices are).
So yeah, they’re responding to a different script, but it’s also crazy.

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Totally agree; that’s exactly why I’m not trying to defend them. But I think that having chosen to go down that rabbit hole, they are now not even working with the same data points as everyone else.

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I agree, but only up to a point. How would Fox have spun that information if events had actually gone that way? What would Fox viewers have come to “know” about it?

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Years ago, in the eighties, my father was screwed over by a family friend who owned a large development business. My father did about $15,000 worth of work and asked his friend for the check, he said, “I’ll have it for you tomorrow.” The next day, his business declared bankruptcy. It was a completely legal move, of course. The thing is, the other guy’s personal bottom-line wasn’t affected at all. He was and is still one of the richest people I know. I’ll tell you this though: That 15,000 (that was worth way more in the eighties) affected my father, his handful of employees, and my family more than I could ever convey. This story is the single biggest reason why I would never support Trump. And it drives me crazy when people are ignorant of the countless ways the system can screw them over despite temporarily lowering their taxes a little bit. This is a pretty amazing article IMO.

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