Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/22/the-cruelty-is-the-point.html
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Nice set Ben! Are you broadcasting from your mom’s basement in Whitefish on the community TV channel?
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Seeing people being delighted by cruelty like this fucking turns my stomach.
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The Republican Party, and their hangers-on, are disingenuous, bad faith actors.
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Laugh it up, kapo boy. Those cruel thugs and bullies you shill for have you on their hit list, too, guaranteed.
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Ben Shapiro is like the Hanna Barbera Smurfs cartoon from the 80s. If you haven’t seen it for a while you turn it on expecting it to be comically problematic, maybe even cute in a nonsexual sort of way, but then the goddamn voice, man, it goes right through your head.
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No, they are very very faithful to their cruel, heartless, soulless religion of hate and debasement. That is part of why they will never ever turn on Il Douche. They have had a taste of what it is like to have their hate fed, and know no one else will give them that. They need to be overwhelmed at the polls by folks who have ethics, but that will not cure the illness. They have tasted the honey sweet hate they love so, and will lust after it no matter what happens in 2020. Best we can hope for is to shove them back under the rock they crawled out from.
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There was never any doubt about it, there was just a question of how long the rest of the GOP would go along with it, would they finally jettison the last remaining bits of “compassionate conservatism” (which was more branding than action) and embrace the dark side to stay in power? Seems they have.
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Ben is just the latest in a long line of anger hucksters who profit from rage. They carefully say awful, nasty things that aren’t quite libelous or that will get them rejected from society.
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I tend to harp on about Rush Limbaugh a bit, but I remember the first time I heard him in the late 80’s, and I’ve watched how he has basically set the tone for what the GOP is now-- a disregard for inconvenient facts, blatant dishonesty in the service of agenda, impugning the other side for the very sins your own party commits, and gleeful sadism. In Limbaugh’s wake came others who magnified his shtick (Michael Savage, Mark Levin), and he enabled the existence of Fox News by showing this kind of thing could be profitable. When the GOP took the House of Representatives in 1994 they made Limbaugh an honorary member, that sealed the deal. It was power and propaganda over morality and honesty from then on.
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Serwer’s article said the same thing I’ve been saying since Trump entered the race in 2016. His core supporters are semiliterate trash whose political stance is nothing but thinly disguised and sometimes blatantly open hate. They voted for Trump and continue to support him despite the fact he is hurting them, because they think he hurts people they don’t like more. They want to beat up on dark skinned people and Muslims and lots of others, but they don’t have the guts to do it openly, so they support him because through him they get a very sick, vicarious thrill of being hurtful. Anyone who still speaks in support of Trump at this point needs therapy.
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I did a write up in the forums here in 2017 equating Trump voters with the Venezuelan voters that put Chavez in power. Many of these supporters are ignorant and genuinely believe blatant lies because they’re desperate for change, even if that change only brings ruin to everyone. If they end up worse off than before they’ll still be happy because the people they hate and envy also suffered. The fact that in Venezuela there’s still people that firmly believe in Chavez’ vision years later should say something about Trump voters. There’s still plenty of room for this country to go down before it hits rock bottom, so it’s absolutely imperative to put up a fight against the corruption.
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Something I often think about is how many “Ted Bundys” are out there.
I have been fascinated by him (the “passing as normal while being terrible” part, not the killing women part) for a while.
Ted Bundy after all , in addition to killing scores of young women, was a rising star in the Republican party and used that to get into (shit tier) law schools:
After graduating from UW in 1972,[49] Bundy joined Governor Daniel J. Evans’ re-election campaign.[50] Posing as a college student, he shadowed Evans’ opponent, former governor Albert Rosellini, and recorded his stump speeches for analysis by Evans’ team.[51][52] Evans appointed Bundy, ironically, to the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Committee.[53] After Evans was re-elected, Bundy was hired as an assistant to Ross Davis, Chairman of the Washington State Republican Party. Davis thought well of Bundy and described him as “smart, aggressive … and a believer in the system”.[54] In early 1973, despite mediocre Law School Admission Test scores, Bundy was accepted into the law schools of UPS and the University of Utah on the strength of letters of recommendation from Evans, Davis, and several UW psychology professors.[55][56]
I wonder how many people like him realize if they don’t do the hands on work, they can scale up their cruelty so much more. I thought about this a lot when I lived in a certain large East Coast city, and it worries me more than it should.
I think we need to think more about, for lack of a better term, the psychophere - the collective mind of our global brain, which includes many folks who are not nice people. The data on personality disorders shows sizable numbers - if even 2-5% of your electorate is actively what in other generations may have been called evil… that has cascading effects on society.
To be clear, mental illness ≠ personality disorder, and not even everyone with a personality disorder is nessecarrily “evil”. But I think that what we’d now term, say, malignant narcicism or antisocial personality disorder might have been described pre science as “evil”.
Are all Trump’s supporters evil? No… but I think there are a lot of, for lack of a better term “psychic vampires” who feel they don’t have control over their own lives and thus want to hurt others to feel powerful, or simply feel entitled to better things at the expense of others.
Sorry for the wall of text. If anyone has a psych background I’d love to chat here in the comments or via PM about this - the intersection of true crime, abnormal psychology, and politics is very interesting to me.
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I think it’s a little more than that. It’s really that these people are forming their own fascism around Trump. It’s odd how Eco’s work on this (Eternal Fascism) is something that is practically followed like clockwork by people. It’s like there’s an inherent factor at least under modern conditions which produces fascist movements like this. I’ve had discussions with my mom in terms of Trump and other political matters and she’s just… different now than ever before. Obviously, it’s her over exposure to Fox News but I think there’s even something to be said about the rhetoric most generally referenced by Republicans today versus the past. They can’t be inspirational so they’re confrontational. And that feeds into the fascist tendencies that have been brewing for a long time in this country.
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Unregulated capitalism that produces extremes of inequality. Right-wing populists always show up under those circumstances to offer any explanation for people’s woes other than the real one, and the conservative establishment is happy to enable them (because “we can control the fascists” and “this time it will be different”).
Ben, as a gateway between establishment conservatism and the alt-right, is especially foolish, because sooner or later right-wing populists always ask their audience to consider “the Jewish question”.
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And yet he proclaims “Talent on loan from God!” Ugh, I have serious guilt about my many years as a republican.
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It triggers a part of the brain that urgently seeks out a locker in which to stuff him.
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I didn’t know UPS had a law school, but I wouldn’t imagine it would be very good.
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He wouldn’t be the first nerdy conservative or Libertarian victim of bullying in school who decided to become a bully himself when he had the opportunity in adulthood. This type of white man makes up the supposed intellectual core of modern American movement conservatism.
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