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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Excellent Read: On Confronting Stove Minivan, Nascent MAGAt

Excellent Read: On Confronting Stove Minivan, Nascent MAGAt

by Anne Laurie|  July 14, 20235:17 pm| 86 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, GOP Death Cult, Information Warfare

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This may be the Rosetta Stone of the political context of our times.@DanaHoule https://t.co/av93jsL23P

— Bradley Greenburg (@BGinCHI) July 14, 2023

..He was exerting an active effort to not know things that could be easily known, and to demand to be convinced out of deliberate ignorance, not because he was interested in having his ideas challenged, but because he demanded a world in which he got to decide what was real.

The link from a long-term Friend of the Jackals was enough to get me to read the whole thing. A.R. Moxon, on that long-ago ‘friend’…

Remembering the first time I knowingly encountered the befuddling thing I would eventually know as MAGA.

It was 2008, on Facebook.

It was my old college buddy, Stove Minivan.

(Names have been changed to mock the guilty.)

(Link at the end of the thread to avoid throttling) pic.twitter.com/mgNKpCUA14

— A.R. Moxon (@JuliusGoat) July 14, 2023

Minivan was a nice enough guy. He was easygoing; a happy guy with a frequently deployed smile. I don’t recall much anger from him, nor many strongly held opinions. I wouldn’t call him a philosophical type. No deep late night talks with Stove Minivan is my recollection…

So then what happened is twelve years or so later I got on The Facebook, and Stove Minivan was there, too, and before long, we were friends again, he and I, and so were me and my other college friends, and them with him, and … look, you know the drill. It was The Facebook…

Anyway, before long I noticed something about Minivan. Even though his feed was full of pictures of him and his lovely family, and he was smiling in them just the same as he always had in college, he was angry.

He was *enraged*

What was he angry about? The Demonrats…

Minivan’s worldview wasn’t particularly coherent, if you want to know the truth.

I couldn’t help to notice that the Demonrats weren’t actually doing many of the things that Minivan thought they were doing.

And I noticed other things.

For example, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the policies Minivan supported were directly *causing* the sorts problems that made Minivan so angry.

And I couldn’t help but notice that well-sourced information enraged him more than pretty much anything else…

This was all pretty distressing to those of us who had known Minivan back in the day, before he had become so obsessed with Demonrats.

So, a lot of us, myself included, did exactly what The Facebook wants.

We engaged with him.

At the time my belief was, you defeated bad ideas with better ideas, by confronting the bad ideas directly with the better ideas. Debate was for changing minds. You presented your ideas, they presented theirs, you countered, they countered, eventually everybody saw the truth…

Minivan escalated any correction, however calmly stated or bloodlessly presented, into scorched earth territory. He rejected all proofs by rejecting the source outright as irrevocably tainted by bias, or he’d spiral into non sequitur, spamming our feeds with more misinformation.

He would claim he never said things he had just said, even though the statements were still there for anybody to read, one comment earlier in the thread.

He’d claim that I said things I’d never said, as anyone foolish enough to read through our conversations could discover.

He demonstrated a complete dedication to his ignorance and anger, and a total disinterest in anything like observable truth that contradicted his grievance.

It was confounding and unfamiliar behavior to me, at the time.

At the time…

Minivan was not somebody whose intentions could be trusted. He was not operating in good faith, and I believe he well knew it, because many of his favorite sources of information have written instruction books on how to engage with people in bad faith.

Minivan was not debating; he was using debate to inject his counterfactual beliefs into the discourse, which were designed to further marginalize already marginalized people while simultaneously cloaking himself in self-exonerating grievance…

You can probably get an idea where this is going, but seriously: It’s worth reading the whole thing.

ETA: Entire post on Threadreader here.

A.R. Moxon’s SubStack (readable to all) here.

(Thank you, commentor Bill Arnold)

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Reader Interactions

86Comments

  1. 1.

    dm

    July 14, 2023 at 5:25 pm

    Can’t read the whole thing, since Twitter only let’s you see just the linked post, these days.

  2. 2.

    Sparkedcat

    July 14, 2023 at 5:28 pm

    Twitter will not allow me to “read the whole thing”.

  3. 3.

    OzarkHillbilly

    July 14, 2023 at 5:30 pm

    It’s worth reading the whole thing.

    It might be worth it, (and I can because “I’m spaecial” but I don’t have the stomach for it.

  4. 4.

    japa21

    July 14, 2023 at 5:32 pm

    Read it all.  I know a couple Stove Minivans.  Extended family.  Avoid when possible.  Recently I had a dream (nightmare?) where I was trying to converse with one of them.  Not reassuring.

  5. 5.

    John

    July 14, 2023 at 5:32 pm

    You might as well reprint the whole thread here if you want people to actually read it. Elon believes that making his site harder to use is a brilliant way to make it profitable.

  6. 6.

    John Cole

    July 14, 2023 at 5:34 pm

    That thread is frightening because I know about a dozen of them from college. I’ve unfriended about that many, too.

  7. 7.

    Lapassionara

    July 14, 2023 at 5:34 pm

    I’ll never understand their enthusiasm for Trump. “Thank you, Lord Jesus, for President Trump.” The man who mocked disabled people, who bragged about his sexual conquests, who met with Putin privately, leaving the meeting looking like a whipped puppy.

  8. 8.

    trollhattan

    July 14, 2023 at 5:37 pm

    @dm: ​

    @Sparkedcat: ​
    Thread displays for me in Firefox with Nitter extension installed. Geez, nearly posted with Firefox written with a u.

  9. 9.

    Tom Q

    July 14, 2023 at 5:40 pm

    I’ve sent this thread on to multiple people I know.  It’s essential to understanding the times we live in.

  10. 10.

    mrmoshpotato

    July 14, 2023 at 5:43 pm

    He was *enraged*

    What was he angry about? The Demonrats…

    Minivan’s worldview wasn’t particularly coherent, if you want to know the truth.

    Who wants to see my surprised face?

  11. 11.

    schrodingers_cat

    July 14, 2023 at 5:46 pm

    @John Cole: What do you do if they are family (or in-laws)?
    I have several bhakts in the family

    *bhakt = devotee

  12. 12.

    mrmoshpotato

    July 14, 2023 at 5:47 pm

    @Lapassionara:

    who met with Putin privately, leaving the meeting looking like a whipped puppy. 

    And the smile on Putin’s face that just screamed, “The fat orange one knows he’s my bitch.”

  13. 13.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2023 at 5:48 pm

    @Lapassionara:

    Their worlds have zero reality. They live in a world that gives them a position of what they consider victimhood. It’s a world they create because of the victimhood. My take is that for some people the world is so big that it’s overwhelming. In my youth it was rare to fly across the country. It was done, but relatively speaking it was expensive, and far rarer than today. Now one can fly around the world in far less than 30 days, let alone 80 days. For many people the concept of the modern world is overwhelming and leaves them no place to live. And no it doesn’t have to make sense, it’s human lack of thought and understanding, replaced by terror. And we have a political party and news organizations that seem to believe and enhance this concept. Likely for the monetary rewards of/by those scared shitless. They buy guns so when the apocalypse arrives they will be ready. Their world has expanded, to their great horror. Their brains haven’t, to our great horror.

  14. 14.

    Bill Arnold

    July 14, 2023 at 5:49 pm

    Here’t the threadreader version, which anyone can read.

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1679817901350567936.html

    Long, so won’t copy/paste in a comment unless somebody asks.

    Ah substack link at the end: https://armoxon.substack.com/p/one-about-the-atmosphere

  15. 15.

    Lapassionara

    July 14, 2023 at 5:59 pm

    @Ruckus: I saw a news item that said people, when asked what percentage of the population is trans, estimate the number at 21%. The actual percentage is around 1.9%. Of course the world will seem scary if you live in a fact-free environment and can make up any bogeyman you want to be afraid of.

  16. 16.

    different-church-lady

    July 14, 2023 at 6:00 pm

    But engagement. Engagement is always good, right? You create a toy — sorry, tool — you create a tool for engagement and have it run around unfettered and everyone engages and everyone’s better off. Right?

  17. 17.

    different-church-lady

    July 14, 2023 at 6:00 pm

    @Lapassionara: holy fuckin god people are stupid.

  18. 18.

    mrmoshpotato

    July 14, 2023 at 6:05 pm

    @Bill Arnold: I couldn’t make it through all that craziness.

    Didn’t see anything about Crazyass Minivan now being in jail from participating in the Insurrection.

  19. 19.

    Delk

    July 14, 2023 at 6:12 pm

    I got rid of all of those people about two years into Obama’s first term. Life is too short.

  20. 20.

    Jay

    July 14, 2023 at 6:12 pm

    @different-church-lady:

    NAFO’s success comes from shit posting, not engagement.

    They either block you. or violate the TOS, you report them and get them kicked off the service.

    https://nitter.net/NAFOMemesCenter

    Nobody in NAFO gives a single “benefit of the doubt”. They are showing you who they are.

  21. 21.

    Martin

    July 14, 2023 at 6:12 pm

    I’ve been noodling about at a framework (I’m sure it’s not novel) of how conservatives pursue good/evil vs how liberals pursue right/wrong, the former notions of ‘good’ being externally defined. I’m not sure that they aren’t interested in having a personal ethical worldview or whether it’s just too hard to have one in the GOP (as it can be in a religious group), but this delegation to authority and just going along with what the church says or Trump or whatever is pretty universal. I sometimes wonder if this is really just a group of people that never really had the ability or never practiced anchoring their worldview in their own personal beliefs, and so when the internet came along and gave them all of these authorities beyond their church or their neighbors or Dan Rather or whatever, they pretty much just couldn’t cope with all of these randos that now had a microphone as big as one of their authorities, and in the chaos of this they sort of all collectively agreed to this fall in line with one or a handful of narratives just to make some kind of order of it all, and every so often some conservative just bounces hard off of it and becomes an MSNBC contributor.

    But I never hear an argument from conservatives that isn’t anchored in the Bible or Trump/DeSantis/Reagan or history ‘well, that was fine in 1947’ and so on. They can never make the case for some policy in the immediate moment only using the immediate impact and an argument that they possess themselves.

    Democrats have increasingly gone the other way – less deference to authority which to conservatives is just chaotic moral relativism – with no clear signaling of what is right, because there’s no leader saying what is right and what is wrong – we all hash it out on an individual level, which also makes it hard to grasp at times and make it feel like you’re always doing it wrong.

    We had this phenomena with how students engaged with our open-ended critical thinking elements. Almost to a one, the students that were straight A, high standardized test score students would hit this part of the curriculum and really, really struggle. That they were suddenly handed a real-world problem with no accepted solution, so they’d have to both come up with a solution and then defend why it was a good solution given the constraints and elements they were prioritizing (the old good, fast, cheap, pick any two) and there’d usually be this moment where they’d just break down and demand someone tell them what the right answer is. And it’s like, ‘buddy, there ain’t one, that’s the fucking point’. Meanwhile it was the B students who didn’t grind their SAT prep that usually walked into that exercise and were like, oh, yeah, easy. They were never that invested in that external validation – and they had other things in life that mattered to them than nailing the SATs, but it meant they were a lot more practiced at committing to the thing they valued and then defending it, where the other students weren’t.

    The students only segregated by grades and the like because that’s how college admissions work (in case you’re wondering why USSCs merit argument is so fucking stupid) but you really want the B students making the judgement calls and the A students working for them dotting all the ‘i’s, but that’s not how anything actually works.

    So when I see guys like DeSantis who went to Harvard and then into the Navy, like, this is a guy who needs someone to tell him what to eat for breakfast, because he legit can’t work out what the right answer is on his own.

    That’s minivan – he’s got his marching orders and he does not have it in him to disobey.

  22. 22.

    NotMax

    July 14, 2023 at 6:12 pm

    Upping the anti. (That’s not a typo.)

    It’s trans adults, too: GOP candidates now back trans medical restrictions for all ages.

  23. 23.

    trollhattan

    July 14, 2023 at 6:13 pm

    Gavin Newsom has a thing to say to obstructionist school board.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom is intervening in a recent decision by a Southern California school board to reject social studies curriculum over its inclusion of gay rights activist Harvey Milk, marking his latest attempt to thwart book bans in the Golden State.

    Newsom announced Thursday that the state would be purchasing the rebuffed textbooks and distributing them to students in the Temecula Valley Unified School District “in short order.” His office also unveiled that the governor plans to sign legislation that would prohibit the restriction of teaching materials for political reasons and levy fines against any school district that fails to provide adequate instructional materials. “We’re all worried about access to information,” Newsom said in a video speaking directly to the parents in Temecula. “Your kids have the freedom to learn and you have the freedom to access those books — the same books that hundreds of thousands of other kids throughout the state are accessing.”

    The Temecula Valley Unified School Board — a majority of whose members were backed by a conservative evangelical pastor — voted in May to reject new elementary social studies materials over a brief mention of Milk. School board President Joseph Komrosky referred to California’s first openly gay elected official as a “pedophile” and questioned why he would be featured, calling it “morally reprehensible.”

    This was the latest move by the school board’s newly minted conservative majority to roil teachers, parents and students. In December, the board passed a resolution banning the teaching of critical race theory in its schools. Critical race theory is the study of how racism continues to shape key institutions, such as the criminal justice system, banks and housing.

    The board’s decision on the textbook got Newsom’s attention in early June, when he called Komrosky’s comment an “offensive statement from an ignorant person.” Newsom said many of the district’s 11,387 students have now been left without a textbook for the start of the new school year on August 14. And the short supply of textbooks available will be outdated versions published in 2006.

    https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article277293478.html#storylink=cpy

    Newsom continues to surprise, and I mean in a good way.

  24. 24.

    Shana

    July 14, 2023 at 6:15 pm

    @Ruckus: There’s a comic strip that runs in my local paper called Prickly City where the main characters are a Democratic coyote and a Republican girl who are friends. It’s relatively soft pedaled but there. It’s clearly written by a Republican because the Democratic coyote is always saying or being accused of standing for ridiculous stuff that no Democrat does.  I suspect it was added to the WaPo to counteract Doonsbury.

  25. 25.

    trollhattan

    July 14, 2023 at 6:15 pm

    @NotMax: My surprised face is at the cleaners. Waiting for the forthcoming campaign to overturn Griswold.

  26. 26.

    Citizen Alan

    July 14, 2023 at 6:16 pm

    @John Cole: A good friend of mine shocked me be revealing that a mutual friend who, 20 years ago, was an anarchist and practicing Satanist, and who is the godfather of 2 trans children, has become a hard-core anti trans and raging bigot. And all apparently because he got tied up in traffic in Atlanta due to a BLM protest. My friend is appalled.

  27. 27.

    Citizen Alan

    July 14, 2023 at 6:18 pm

    @Lapassionara: it’s because they worship the devil and delude themselves into thinking the devil is Christ.

  28. 28.

    Sister Golden Bear

    July 14, 2023 at 6:18 pm

    @NotMax: That was always the plan. The “but the children!” was always merely a ruse to mainstream anti-trans repression. It’s been documented by exposes on the pro-trans genocide groups that got ahold of internal communications

    @trollhattan: Right-wing influencers are already talking about going after Lawrence and Griswold, among many other rollbacks.

  29. 29.

    trollhattan

    July 14, 2023 at 6:19 pm

    Can she pay in Stepford Bucks?

    July 14, 2023 at 5:27 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard

    Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) must pay a $122,200 sanctions penalty for pursuing a “frivolous” lawsuit seeking to overturn her 2022 midterm defeat, The Messenger reports.

  30. 30.

    Martin

    July 14, 2023 at 6:24 pm

    @trollhattan: I mentioned this yesterday, but I’ll repeat it today for those who aren’t familiar with CA education standards.

    In 2011 the state passed a law that required teaching the contributions of CA LGBTQ+ individuals in the curriculum. It’s a required element like multiplication – you have to teach it. And it’s not new – 12 years now.

    4th grade is the CA state history module. Everyone makes a CA mission out of macaroni and gives a report – that kind of thing. So 4th grade is where this law first gets applied, and you kind of can’t comply with the law without covering Milk – it’s like trying to teach the contributions of black Americans and leaving out Harriet Tubman or Rosa Parks. The Temecula board voted to be out of compliance with the state mandatory curriculum, so yeah, the governor is on pretty solid ground with this.

    I wish he’d do the same for housing policy and start tipping up non-market 5+1s in Huntington Beach residential neighborhoods and then take the money out of their tax allocation.

  31. 31.

    Curtis

    July 14, 2023 at 6:25 pm

    @Martin: Jonathan Haidt likes to argue, based on survey data and cluster analyses, that there are a certain number (5) of moral concepts around which we organize our behavior and rhetoric.

    Those five concepts are harm (do no harm), fairness (things should be fair), loyalty (should be loyal to group), authority (obey authority), and purity (don’t do gross things).

    He also argues that, by and large, liberals strongly adhere to the harm and fairness concepts. Conservatives somewhat agree with those two concepts, but also strongly buy into the other three (loyalty, authority, and purity), which are all also very group-oriented, sometimes to the detriment of the first two precepts of harm and fairness.

    I think it’s too neat and clean of an organization, but it’s not a bad start to trying to understand all that moral weirdness, especially at the extremes.

  32. 32.

    Alison Rose

    July 14, 2023 at 6:27 pm

    @Lapassionara: 21%!!!!!!! JFC.

  33. 33.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2023 at 6:27 pm

    @Martin:

    Like I said, they want to live in a pre-world. And that never actually existed, it only seemed like it because they didn’t interact with a lot of people. Sort of like a lot of people didn’t interact with black or brown people. But if you lived somewhere like a major city in most any state but especially in say CA you got exposed, like it or not. And unless you were a complete and utter asshole you saw that the color of one’s skin or the religious angle or small town is the only town angle made far less difference than those bullshit angles. And if you got exposed at a young age that made it easier. Sure not everyone got the exposure or the concept, but the number that did is not anywhere near insignificant. And life moves on. But if you didn’t get the 24 hr scaredy cat news that can only tell you that the world is falling down because of mumble, mumble, something, then you are not going to be scared right down to your socks about the things that might happen on the 5th tuesday of the 14th month.

  34. 34.

    O. Felix Culpa

    July 14, 2023 at 6:32 pm

    @John Cole:

    For me, it’s high school classmates. I made the mistake of trying to engage in dialogue with them on FB in the early days, with the same results as the author’s. Ended up having to block them.

  35. 35.

    VOR

    July 14, 2023 at 6:35 pm

    My in-laws have fallen down the MAGA puke funnel. Last night she was posting on Facebook about how the cocaine at the White House story was the most important thing happening. Why? “Because”. No seriously, her response was that you would know why it was the most important thing if you had done your research and read all the proper information sources.

  36. 36.

    mwing

    July 14, 2023 at 6:37 pm

    I had one facebook friend, a guy from high school, not even a friend of mine at the time, but a pretty normal guy, who took a similar path.
    But then he took himself off that path, and hasn’t been on Facebook for years.
    I think it was some combination of:

    1 This guy knew he was alienating his more normal facebook friends and old schoolmates, and for whatever reason, was more genuinely bothered by  that than Moxon’s guy, he may also have been influenced by his more normie wife.

    The few times I responded to him I did so in  a non-confrontational “let us all reason together” way, and in this guys case it sort of worked, in that he would at least remain civil, while still saying “well if A isn;t true, what about B, if B isn’t true what about C, etc. “.
    That is, he actually responded kinda Ok to being talked to respectfully, which I understand not everyone does.

    2 This was also someone who had quit bad habits in the past. From hints , excessive drinking, years before. And also saying directly, smoking, as a middle-aged guy.
    And as a middle-aged guy, he decided to get  himself physically together and did.
    So I think there was an element of, a guy who recognized bad spirals even if it was not about physical addiction.
    mw

  37. 37.

    Doug R

    July 14, 2023 at 6:38 pm

    @dm: Here’s the substack long version that he links to in the thread:

    https://armoxon.substack.com/p/one-about-the-atmosphere

  38. 38.

    Martin

    July 14, 2023 at 6:40 pm

    @Ruckus: But even if that world never really existed, it existed on TV, and TV is still authoritarian. That script was reviewed and carried an ad demographic and a profit motive. So even if it was fictitious, it was endorsed by important people, and that’s good enough.

  39. 39.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2023 at 6:50 pm

    @Martin:

    I did get the Navy time. I met a lot of guys that didn’t live in the big city. But one of the things was that they joined to see more than what they could driving around their small towns. Some of them didn’t know how to take it in or if they should risk it. But at least a number of them did see more, did see that there are small towns and big cities everywhere and that the world is not six blocks in the middle of nowhere.

  40. 40.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2023 at 6:52 pm

    @Martin:

    Yep.

  41. 41.

    Martin

    July 14, 2023 at 6:54 pm

    @Ruckus: Yeah, I mean my dad went into the navy to get out of going to Nam and there are all manner of reasons why people go in. But you get out of Harvard with a law degree and run straight into the Navy to become a Gitmo JAG. I mean, c’mon, he’s got a WHOLE other thing going on there than 99% of the folks in the navy. He wasn’t in there to see the world.

  42. 42.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2023 at 7:18 pm

    @Martin:

    Been to Gitmo 3 times. We tied up at the pier. I walked to the fence. 20 ft tall with lots of barbed wire at the top, gun towers every so often and 8 ft away another 20 ft tall fence with lots of barbed wire at the top. That’s my total report on Gitmo.

    Lots of men joined the navy to avoid Vietnam. Most of the younger enlisted men did for that reason. I did. I joined was told that I’d get a letter telling me when and where to report. How soon? Don’t know you’ll know when it comes. 2 days later they announced the draft lottery. I figured my number would be 300, just because it would. Wrong again, it was 18. I was going. It was fun. I’m lying. It wasn’t all that bad, I got to cross the Atlantic 6 times, I got to do 3 NATO cruses in the North Atlantic, go above the Arctic Circle, way above. Got to watch a Russian ship like the US ship I was on follow us about 1/4 mile back, 1/4 mile away follow us for days and it would go away when a tanker came up to refuel us. Then come back and follow us some more. Good times. Good and not so good memories. Like when we almost had a mutiny because of the crappy food and not much of it.

    I survived, I learned a lot, met some good and some great people. I would have been fine if I’d missed it, but it was not near as bad as it could have been. I’m 74 yrs old, my life didn’t go anyway near the way I wanted but as a life it hasn’t been all that bad. Met some really great people, got to see a lot of the world, didn’t get shot or blown up, my health is reasonable, and better than a number of people I know, I’m reasonably comfortable, if just barely, I’ve got good healthcare and a reasonable place to live. All in all not bad.

  43. 43.

    Another Scott

    July 14, 2023 at 7:22 pm

    @dm: @Sparkedcat: @John:

    If one replaces “twitter.com” with “nitter.net” in a Twitter URL, you can see it (and the whole thread).

    Nitter.net version (with all the tracking junk including after the “?” stripped out as well).

    HTH!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  44. 44.

    japa21

    July 14, 2023 at 7:23 pm

    @Ruckus: My best friend in HS also joined the Navy for the same reasons you did.  Ended up on the river boats in Vietnam.

    Went into the Navy a very conservative, somewhat racist person.  Came out if not liberal, at least not as conservative and and definitely with much fewer racist tendencies.  I don’t think anyone can totally rid themselves of that, just work to make sure any residual racist thinking is minimized.

  45. 45.

    persistentillusion

    July 14, 2023 at 7:24 pm

    @Ruckus: My great-uncle joined the Navy to escape North Dakota in the 40s.  He loved it; was in for 25 years, retired an Admiral and never went back to North Dakota.  Oh, also helped capture the U-505.  Fun guy.

  46. 46.

    Chip Daniels

    July 14, 2023 at 7:28 pm

    My wife had a Facebook friend back in 2008 who was a very devout Christian lady, who was all in on Ben Carson, and who vehemently insisted she could not, would not, every under any circumstances ever be able to vote for Trump.

    (You know where this is going, don’t you, dear reader?)

    Anyhoo, so Carson drops out, and her Facebook feed gets quiet for a few days. Then she starts in with “wondering” about the rest of the candidates, then slowly starts musing about how a flawed vessel could actually be the Lord’s chosen vessel because He works in mysterious ways, then slowly but sure, well Trump is bad but has some good points, and within two months, was a raving MAGA.

     

    It was actually frightening, to see someone slip into a cult this way, to see in real time how propaganda and ignorance and hatred all combined to make a woman who in all other respects perfectly decent and kind, turn into the sort of person who would be right at home at Kristallnacht or in those pictures of women screaming at those little girls integrating a school, completely deranged and sure that she was doing the Lord’s work.

    The wife finally had to sever connections just to keep her belief in humanity intact.

  47. 47.

    NotMax

    July 14, 2023 at 7:33 pm

    @Alison Rose

    Same people convinced foreign aid costs a kajillion dollars.

  48. 48.

    Subsole

    July 14, 2023 at 7:35 pm

    @NotMax:

    Of.

    Fucking.

    Course.

  49. 49.

    Martin

    July 14, 2023 at 7:35 pm

    @Ruckus: My dad volunteered for sub duty. Figured that was the last place anyone would shoot at him, and expect him to shoot anyone else. He said it wasn’t pleasant, but wasn’t terrible. He resents being part of the US war machine and one long-term health problem from the experience, but had some positive takeaways as well. He reamed out a Lt who forgot to pull the hatch closed on the way down on a dive and he had to jump up there with another guy and close it, nearly losing the ship in the process.  Screaming at that guy and not being punished for it is one of his better memories.

    I don’t think he ever laid eyes on a Soviet ship, but he followed quite a few of them. They’d pick them up coming out of Murmansk and follow them around wherever.

  50. 50.

    Captain C

    July 14, 2023 at 7:36 pm

    @Ruckus:

    They live in a world that gives them a position of what they consider victimhood. It’s a world they create because of the victimhood.

    And since they are victims, anything they do to defend themselves against their (imaginary) oppressors therefore becomes morally ok, which is how they happily do horrible things they (mostly-at minimum-falsely) accuse the objects of their hate of doing to them.

  51. 51.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2023 at 7:39 pm

    @japa21:

    I used to know a guy that was sent from boot camp to a river patrol boat in Vietnam and he became the forward machine gunner. On his first day. You really do not want to know any of his stories. We had a commenter here that was drafted into the Marines, went to boot camp in San Diego, Camp Pendleton for one week and straight on to Vietnam. There are likely more of us with Vietnam era stories.

  52. 52.

    wmd

    July 14, 2023 at 7:40 pm

    You engage to defend the vulnerable – attempt to let them know that they are harming people that they care about… yes sometimes they will say they’d rather see their child commit suicide than be able to express their identity, but that exposes their extremism.

    You don’t engage thinking you will make a lasting change on their worldview. At best you will provoke some compassion for a subset of those being harmed.

  53. 53.

    japa21

    July 14, 2023 at 7:42 pm

    @Ruckus: My friend had a few stories to tell and would say it’s better we didn’t hear some of the others, for which I was grateful.

  54. 54.

    Manyakitty

    July 14, 2023 at 7:44 pm

    @Bill Arnold: thank you!

  55. 55.

    Citizen Alan

    July 14, 2023 at 7:44 pm

    @Lapassionara: Actually, that 21% might be a little low … if your definition of trans includes skinny guys with long hair who are in the drama club and women who wear pants and know how to change a tire. Ultimately, transphobia includes everything that challenges gender norms. A week or so back, wasn’t a 9yo cis girl chased out of a ladies room because she had short hair and some Karen thought she was a boy.

  56. 56.

    Steeplejack

    July 14, 2023 at 7:59 pm

    Redacted. Late again.

  57. 57.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2023 at 8:04 pm

    @japa21:

    Depending on what size of boat you get stationed on really would change how much your world view might change. I was on a ship with 300 men, in tight quarters, without enough fresh water for showers. Lived in a room about 40 ft square with half a guided missile magazine, a steam sterilizer and 2 tables that could be used as operating tables, stairs, passageways and 80 bunks and lockers, 3 high. You became friends with people or you were a pariah. And that isn’t good under those circumstances. One often worked in tighter areas than one slept in. In the North Atlantic in winter it was cold, in the Caribbean in the summer it was sweltering. Often officers thought that their shit didn’t stink, and it didn’t. It did often reek though. Lifers (career enlisted) were often worse. On occasion much better.

    I consider anyone who didn’t have to go to be extremely lucky. The military in wartime is not a lot of fun. For some it was a hell of a lot worse than for me. I walked away. I spent 2 months in a Navy hospital and I use the VA, I know many who had to be carried. And Vietnam was not our last war, not even close. I’ve met people who will be paying for their time in the military for the rest of their lives. All I have to do is think about it. All a lot of people have to do it try to forget it.

  58. 58.

    Geminid

    July 14, 2023 at 8:06 pm

    The Epoch Times is a vector for political crazy, I think. They spread a lot of free copies around so as to suck people in.

    That newspaper “captured” one of my customers during the pandemic, and she’s subscribed to Epoch Times for a couple years now. The pandemic made a lot of people more susceptible to unfounded beliefs in general, I think.

  59. 59.

    Miss Bianca

    July 14, 2023 at 8:10 pm

    @different-church-lady: My nap-addled brain thought you were saying “enragement”. Then I realized it was “engagement” and then I realized we were talking about the same thing.

  60. 60.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2023 at 8:10 pm

    @Ruckus:

    All a lot of people have to do IS try to forget it.

    Damn fingers don’t have a mind of their own. Damn fingers.

  61. 61.

    Snarki, child of Loki

    July 14, 2023 at 8:13 pm

    EAIAC, so we should figure that 21% of GOPers are secretly trans.

    Particularly the foaming-at-the-mouth MAGAt types.

  62. 62.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2023 at 8:14 pm

    @Lapassionara:

    Thing is that a lot of asinine not news is out there and people hear and see it. And they are told how bad things are by idiots and fucking assholes. And told and told and told. It must be TRUE! Right?

  63. 63.

    Soprano2

    July 14, 2023 at 8:22 pm

    I think it’s what I’ve always thought – TFG hates the same people they do, and he gives them permission to hate openly. That’s how you get people who were bemoaning the coarsening of society in 2015 putting bumper stickers with the word “fuck” on them on their pickup in 2023.

  64. 64.

    Marc

    July 14, 2023 at 9:07 pm

    @Geminid: The Epoch Times is a vector for political crazy, I think. They spread a lot of free copies around so as to suck people in.

    Epoch Times is published by the Falun Gong, Chinese right wing (alleged) crazies who are brutally suppressed by the Chinese government.

  65. 65.

    Jacqueline Squid Onassis

    July 14, 2023 at 9:11 pm

    I’ve had 3 of my very own Stove Minivans.  One I excoriated and then blocked in… 2010 maybe?  He’d become a writer for  Breitbart and, I later found out, paid to troll his friends on fb.  Another I humiliated after she went around the bend and started making weird political comments in a thread about one of those stupid word problems.  I think she blocked me.  Those 2 were, like minivan, always monsters.

    The third, however, wasn’t always a monster.  In fact, she’s still an empty husk who becomes a caricature of her peer group in order to gain acceptance.  I finally blocked her just after Jan 6th when she started claiming it was all a false flag operation.

    I feel a little sorry for fascist #3 but, in the end, a fascist is a fascist no matter the cause and she can fuck herself with a rusty spike just like the other two.

  66. 66.

    Jacqueline Squid Onassis

    July 14, 2023 at 9:15 pm

    @schrodingers_cat: Well, the in-laws did it for me.  They didn’t even bother to tell us about the niece’s wedding cuz they’re “just not comfortable with Jacqueline.”  You know, because I transitioned.  It was a mistake on my part to be civil to those piety signaling fundie trash for 25 years.  If I had it to do again…

  67. 67.

    dm

    July 14, 2023 at 9:27 pm

    Thanks for the links to Moxon’s substack & to the news about nitter.net — the latter let’s me peek at the few people on Twitter I pay attention to, much appreciated.

  68. 68.

    Geminid

    July 14, 2023 at 9:33 pm

    @Marc:  I have respect for the Falun Gong. The Epoch Times does not do them much credit, though. They print some truths about the Chinese government, but their treatment of American politics is very destructive, I think.

    And I don’t know who actually controls that newspaper, or their place in the Chinese diaspora. I just know there is a lot of money being spent by someone. They give out a lot of free copies, and they have much less advertising than my rural county newspaper does.

  69. 69.

    bbleh

    July 14, 2023 at 9:36 pm

    @Curtis: @Martin: not a close student of it, but “moral foundations theory” seems to me to be a close cousin of “five factor theory” (sometimes six), which is an attempt to categorize personality along defined dimensions.  I like MFT, i think it explains a lot very simply (for a theory, that’s good), and there are studies that indicate that self-described “conservatives” and “liberals” value various dimensions of “morality” distinctively differently.

  70. 70.

    sab

    July 14, 2023 at 9:39 pm

    In 1972 I had a gay boyfriend  that I knew was gay.

    He went on with his life. I went on with my life.

    Planet eddie is a toxic piece of work.

  71. 71.

    bbleh

    July 14, 2023 at 9:47 pm

    @Ruckus: @Martin: as to authoritarians, who have been accurately imo described as “relentless sociotropic boundary-maintainers,” I have long maintained that a major — even the major — motivation for them is FEAR, including fear of the different, fear of the complex, and fear of the uncertain.  For whatever reason (maybe they weren’t held enough as infants), they are fearful, and they seek familiarity, simplicity and certainty.  If and as they can, they restrict and define their world to the familiar, simple and certain.  And because they can’t always do that, some of them take refuge in an authority figure, whom they trust to make things simple and certain, eg a religious text, or a religious leader, or a political leader.  The leader figures it out for them and all they have to do is go along.  And then they surround themselves with people who do likewise, and everything is as they want it.  Cultism is the extreme version, but a lot of what these people pursue is a mild version of it.  And of course, it’s a mistake to engage with cultists, because you’ll never change their minds — you’ll never even dent them — and you’ll reinforce their belief that they are of the elect and you are an Other, and therefore that it is even more important for them to do and say and think as required to be one of the elect.

  72. 72.

    Chetan Murthy

    July 14, 2023 at 9:52 pm

    @Curtis: It’s been a long time since I read Haidt, but my memory is that, yes, he focuses on those things (loyalty, authority, purity) for cons.  But his *presentation* is hopelessly slanted toward them, to the point where it was pretty clear to me that “I’m a liberal just *explaining*” was 100% bullshit.  He’s an apologist for the bastards.

    He describes “purity” in terms of the conservative “disgust” reaction, and, y’know, I get that: I’ve been disgusted by things too.  But I can think past the disgust to understand whether it’s appropriate to feel that, and can shut it down for long enough to make decisions.  The truth is, conservatives can’t do it, and Haidt has never in my knowledge called them out for that.

    Quite simply, he judges cons and libs by different standards.  We’re supposed to be all understanding of the cons’ feelings and all.  To which I say, “fuck your feelings, Cletus.”  I don’t think he understands that libs can be just as judgmental as cons can be, just as filled with hatred for the bastards.

  73. 73.

    E.

    July 14, 2023 at 11:08 pm

    Thank for highlighting this really fine writing. I read his piece on Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, also. I thought he had insightful things to say about dealing with these people.

  74. 74.

    BellyCat

    July 14, 2023 at 11:30 pm

    @Martin: Please subscribe me to your newsletter.

  75. 75.

    BellyCat

    July 14, 2023 at 11:35 pm

    @Martin: To add, extrinsically motivated people (your “A” students) generally prefer vertical organizations. Intrinsically motivated people (your “B” students) generally prefer horizontal organizations.

    The irony here is that academia is vertically organized.

  76. 76.

    RobertS

    July 15, 2023 at 8:42 am

    @Citizen Alan: I read the post by Moxon, and I think that he’s got a really important insight  here:    These people haven’t changed.

    They’ve been waiting for permission to be their worst selves.

    These people know that their beliefs are indefensible and socially unacceptable, and sometimes destructive to their own families.  Eventually they snap, and the right wing grievance machine makes that easier.

  77. 77.

    RobertS

    July 15, 2023 at 8:52 am

    @Chetan Murthy:

    There are some real differences here – From the left we have “Grow up.   African Americans and gay people are human beings”.

    From the right we have: “I’m going to decide what sort of medical care you get”

  78. 78.

    BellyCat

    July 15, 2023 at 9:13 am

    @RobertS: From the right we have: “I’m going to decide what sort of medical care you get. Why? Because I said so!”

    Exactly. Added the last part because their position, illogical and indefensible as it is with regard to a civilized society and the importance of The Commons, relies solely upon the shitty parent model.

  79. 79.

    weasel

    July 15, 2023 at 11:10 am

    Moxon has rapidly become one of my favorite writers these days.  Usually long winded, but almost always worth the time. Really oughtta chip in a few bucks to his substack one of these days :)

  80. 80.

    boatboy_srq

    July 15, 2023 at 2:13 pm

    In college you could be pretty conservative, honestly. It was a pretty conservative place. But you couldn’t behave like Minivan later would.

    You’d be understood to be a far-right extremist, and people would then treat you like a far-right extremist.

    This actually explains the Reichwing’s war on education in general, and higher education in particular, far better than any other more-superficially-logical depiction of the last four decades. If the author is correct, and these volk have always been like this underneath, then the social pressure pressure in high school and university not to be like this in any public forum is the best cure available to us. And the Reichwing has spent the last four-plus decades whittling that cure away until its ability to defend the republic from this kind of idiocy is all but eliminated. All their complaints about “indoctrination” and “wokeness” and “reverse discrimination” and so on, all the way back to demanding “relevant” course material, have merely been the means to neuter higher learning’s ability to discourage extremism of this kind from surfacing in society at large.

    The US may not need propaganda detoxification as much as it needs universal education. Not universal service; that’s too easily perverted into things like DeathSantis’ “State Guard.” But education. Stopping the rush to hypercapitalist profitability. Taking the time to engage in learning how to learn. And how to debate. And how to express disagreements and differing philosophies while discouraging baser instincts and behaviors. All while turning a politely deaf ear to the whingeing of the MAGAts about how they’re being indoctrinated and programmed.

  81. 81.

    Mobile

    July 15, 2023 at 2:53 pm

    @Ruckus: I spent much of ’68 and ’69 stationed aboard two ships plying Vietnam waters including the Mekong.  I met many of the riverboat guys.  Many died in their endeavors.  Many more lost their minds.  I am guessing that most of these guys, the ones who made it home, were damaged beyond repair.  My best Navy buddy and I met in bootcamp, Great Lakes.  Serendipitously, we were both station together for our next two assignments. After completing our second assignment on the east coast, we were told we could choose our next assignment.  I chose Westpac.  My buddy chose to stay close to home.  I never regretted my time in Southeast Asia.  It was the best experience of my life.  I left home a Republican and returned home a flaming liberal. Decades later my buddy morphed into a MAGA which ended our years long friendship.

  82. 82.

    Mobile

    July 15, 2023 at 3:10 pm

    @Ruckus: I spent several weeks as an outpatient in the orthopedics ward at Oak Knoll Naval hospital in Oakland, California.  On sunny days the orderlies would carry the amputees, missing both arms and legs, out to a grassy section of lawn outside the ward.  There were several of them.  I doubt any of these boys had reached their 25th birthday. There were many double and triple amputees in the ortho ward.  The rehab staff were unmerciful in their treatment of these guys.  They left no room for self pity.  As I had all my limbs, the medical staff pretty much left me alone to do my exercises.

  83. 83.

    Mobile

    July 15, 2023 at 3:15 pm

    @Ruckus: I spent several weeks as an outpatient in the orthopedics ward at Oak Knoll Naval hospital in Oakland, California.  On sunny days the orderlies would carry the amputees, missing both arms and legs, out to a grassy section of lawn outside the ward.  There were several of them.  I doubt any of these boys had reached their 25th birthday. There were many double and triple amputees in the ortho ward.  The rehab staff were unmerciful in their treatment of these guys.  They left no room for self pity.  As I had all my limbs, the medical staff pretty much left me alone to do my exercises.

  84. 84.

    TerryC

    July 15, 2023 at 6:06 pm

    @Mobile: USS Comstock (LSD-19) here, also, later, UDT-13 and DSPRG (top secret).

  85. 85.

    Paul in KY

    July 17, 2023 at 10:45 am

    @Citizen Alan: I blame Obama!

  86. 86.

    Paul in KY

    July 17, 2023 at 11:07 am

    @Martin: Maybe he showed up to interview at the white shoes firms and they said ‘ick’ and he had to go JAG (with a Harvard law degree).

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