I enjoy the occasional conspiracy theory content for entertainment - it’s fascinating psychology to me. If I could get a PhD in it, I could do a 200-page thesis this weekend.
Between this and ol’ neck-hole, the T voters started off really just salivating ready to get out their guns and start mowing down anyone left of alt-right Rwanda-style. When the obvious profile of “nut with a gun” pointed the finger back at people like them with mental health issues and guns, it forced a lot of what it normally forces - some sort of delusion of “DeepState-CIA-Massad-FBI-Unilever-SCJohnsonWax-Soros wanted (insert name here) dead because of (insert batshit crazy thing here).”
They have such a level of group-think and us-vs-them bias that it’s genuinely incomprehensible that someone “on their team” could do anything bad to anyone. Self-reflection and wondering things like “oh…should we have gun regulation?” is tantamount to self-castration to them. That’s not an exaggeration.
As a group, under-educated rural voters that trend towards conspiracy mindsets (for 20-40 years, long before MAGA was a thing) have spent so long gaslighting themselves into thinking that nothing bad can happen IRL with no conspiracy behind it unless it fits into their “when do we get to use the guns?” Turner Diary (which was rope, but that’s not important) genocidal moment, nothing else is possible. Only conspiracies and the terrible atrocities of liberals happen. Nothing else. Ever.
So when the Butler, PA guy doesn’t fit the “Evil Satan-worshiping Urban Youth DemoRAT with a gun!” model, the default position is “See? ThEy almost succeeded!”
Then fast-forward a year and once the Epstein stuff comes back around, which makes the whole house of cards wobbly, they’ve dug themselves into such a deep hole mentally, there’s no coming back from it. Just throwing one MAGA personality into the pit after the next because they’re all connected to Israeli money, so they’re burning their own talking heads faster than new ones can rise up the ranks. So at this point, everything to them is a psyop, everything is false flags and mind control and the CIA because the reality that Republicans and wealthy people are huge shitbags doesn’t fit their 2 allowed modes of thinking.
I enjoy the occasional conspiracy theory content for entertainment - it’s fascinating psychology to me. If I could get a PhD in it, I could do a 200-page thesis this weekend.
Between this and ol’ neck-hole, the T voters started off really just salivating ready to get out their guns and start mowing down anyone left of alt-right Rwanda-style. When the obvious profile of “nut with a gun” pointed the finger back at people like them with mental health issues and guns, it forced a lot of what it normally forces - some sort of delusion of “DeepState-CIA-Massad-FBI-Unilever-SCJohnsonWax-Soros wanted (insert name here) dead because of (insert batshit crazy thing here).”
They have such a level of group-think and us-vs-them bias that it’s genuinely incomprehensible that someone “on their team” could do anything bad to anyone. Self-reflection and wondering things like “oh…should we have gun regulation?” is tantamount to self-castration to them. That’s not an exaggeration.
As a group, under-educated rural voters that trend towards conspiracy mindsets (for 20-40 years, long before MAGA was a thing) have spent so long gaslighting themselves into thinking that nothing bad can happen IRL with no conspiracy behind it unless it fits into their “when do we get to use the guns?” Turner Diary (which was rope, but that’s not important) genocidal moment, nothing else is possible. Only conspiracies and the terrible atrocities of liberals happen. Nothing else. Ever.
So when the Butler, PA guy doesn’t fit the “Evil Satan-worshiping Urban Youth DemoRAT with a gun!” model, the default position is “See? ThEy almost succeeded!”
Then fast-forward a year and once the Epstein stuff comes back around, which makes the whole house of cards wobbly, they’ve dug themselves into such a deep hole mentally, there’s no coming back from it. Just throwing one MAGA personality into the pit after the next because they’re all connected to Israeli money, so they’re burning their own talking heads faster than new ones can rise up the ranks. So at this point, everything to them is a psyop, everything is false flags and mind control and the CIA because the reality that Republicans and wealthy people are huge shitbags doesn’t fit their 2 allowed modes of thinking.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
The longer the Concorde fallacies marinate, the harder that cognitive dissonance hits.