Hillary Clinton and the Uncomfortable Truth

 

“So many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump,” @HillaryClinton tells me. “There needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members” in the GOP, she adds in our EXCLUSIVE conversation. pic.twitter.com/ImpYIBuQ5j

— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) October 6, 2023

The right-wing is a bit up in arms with Hillary Clinton's statement that Trump's people are in a cult and need to be deprogrammed. Now, for the record, to me this is as benign a statement as calling some portion of the Trump supporters "deplorable"--he literally attracts militia folks and Klan members. If you aren't down with calling out would-be Timothy McVeigh's and the goddamn Klan as "deplorable"--I'm not sure what your standards are, but they sure as hell aren't mine. (Looking at Steve Scalise and Josh Hawley in their whole damn faces.) You either understand civil terrorism is kind of fucked up or GTFO. I'll say John Brown and Weather Underground weren't exactly doing it right--your turn? 

Anyway, Hillary Clinton is by far not the only one to notice that Trump mega-MAGA fan behavior is cultish. They signify via their unique clothing. They silo their sources of information. They believe what their cult leader says to the exclusion of what they might even see with their own eyes. Their religion, their associations, their concept of acceptable speech: all file in line with TrumpThink. 

When comedians and journalists alike do "man on the street" type interviews with MAGA, they sound like people from the Manchurian Candidate talking about Raymond Shaw.: 

“Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

 

Except they say they think Trump is honest, has done nothing wrong, is a good Christian, "shares their values", and is making America great. Trump is a congenital liar, has been criminally-adjacent at least his whole life, and is a racist womanizer. But they have been persuaded he is good by a pretty significant group of experts at making people accept bullshit as buttercream: evangelicals. 

Trump has been using the Religious Right as a fig leaf for his fuckery, and they have no doubt been using him. You never needed to look further than his choice of Mike Pence as his running mate, or his endorsement by Jerry Falwell Jr and his pool boy, to understand what was up with that. The social ties connecting politics and religion for that group are pretty strong. And social ties mean a lot to people--a lot. It's hard to go against your community, especially when your community is heavily-armed and some of them have thought at least once about fire-bombing a reproductive care clinic or a local Democrats congressperson's office. 

Trump has long dealt in conspiracism: birtherism. Climate change denial. He is used to operating where facts don't matter and stories are told that are merely "truthy". They sound right to the people who want to hear them. 

And then of course, the idea of being made to backslide against the faith in Trump is negated by self-reinforcing loops: it's the liberal media. It's the lying press (lugenpresse). It's culture war and you are a digital warrior--don't be waylaid by their "facts".  Fact-checking is biased (uninformed people are more likely to understand and agree with a fact check than misinformed or disinformed people. See also, people who watch Fox News are more wrong about things than people who watch no news at all.). 

They are constructing a whole false reality in some ways.  This is a cult. 

(But also, too, "Facts don't care about your feelings." Step one, state anything you feel deeply to be a fact. Step two, disagree with whatever gets thrown at you as hysterical. This is denialism: climate change, evolution science, whether tobacco causes lung cancer, whether trans people exist: DEBATE ME! How about, no: I won't debate you because I don't care about your feelings and now facts and me both don't care about your feelings?)

But here Hillary Clinton is, trolling, tickling the root chakra of right-wing conspiracist thought: they will be clapped into re-education camps.  FEMA re-education camps in case of emergency. Following the pattern of all Marxist things like the Maoist Xinjiang camps or the ones in North Korea or Vietnam. Because of course, they feel like all libs are Marxists and are gonna fuck them up by reading Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, or whatever other thing at them. Probably in a drag-queen story hour format. This is why they talk about BLM like they were the Bader-Meinhof gang. I mean honestly, if you asked a fucking rando trying to fucking setup a semi-autonomous zone in Portland whether they are following in the footsteps of anybody, they'd probably be more like "No I can't pay rent working full time and the world I live in is polluted and corrupted by billionaires, WTF?" same as G20 protest 27 years ago and shit. 

And they would even be wrong. 

If you think the 2020 election was stolen even if there was no proof: let's talk about right-wing voter suppression propaganda since 2020. If you think Donald Trump didn't have anything to do with 1/6: why would anyone else have? How was it all the people like Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and other MAGAS were the guys there and charged and incarcerated and there was nary an antifa for miles?  If you still deny the Russia involvement, why are you not listening to what Putin has actually said and looking at how Trump and his campaign(s) and administration literally treated Russia? Why not look at the real world? 

She's telling the truth and also trolling: how actually, would a formal deprogramming go down? The cultists reacquaint themselves with long-lost Facebook relatives?  Let the healing begin over Thanksgiving dinner? Is our worst uncle not afraid we will shed vaccine on him and he will go electric in a way more controversial than Dylan and have our Pride fridge magnets stick to him as a reminder of when he was Daniel in the lion's den? How do we establish lines of communication with the disassociated and chronically butthurt? 

It has to happen within the RW systems and they are too chickenshit right now to do it. Even the formerly trusted can be made anathema if they step outside of pure Trump faith. And the faithful keep their leaders on lock by chastising with the rod and the sword. This means their leaders have to swallow their own ain't shitness and figure out how to rise above.* Get present, tell the truth and shame the Devil. You have nothing to lose but your shame for not having owned up earlier. 

So of course conservatives are going to jump on her for saying the thing. The mirror isn't lying, though. We see the people worshipping the domestic terrorist calf at CPAC and are supposed to understand them as trolling? 

Political violence isn't fun and games times. Civil War isn't a joke. It doesn't make our country great. It isn't cosplay where everyone gets up and washes off the fake blood and goes and has cake and lemonade. It is the story of a failure to communicate and one side committing treason for the sake of unfreedom: anti-Americanism. And yeah, one side is doing it. 

And they need to know this is not patriotism no matter what you hang off your Ram 1500 or the US flag zubas you wear to your Trump rally. If you're banning books, you aren't about Free Speech. If you ban health care, you are not defending anyone's freedom. This is the actual Orwellianism. Saying things are the opposite of what they are. Hoping no one can even think why this is wrong. 

You don't pluck up the flowers from the roots to help them grow or deny kids the right to read about things you think are wrong to "help" them not be corrupted. They come along as all things in their own time and all you can do is prepare the soil.  

Nothing is overcome in a day, and brainwashing camps aren't going to be a thing. I would love is defamation suits finally made Fox News and them step correct, but I don't have a lot of faith that path will only take one suit. 

The Trump people might peel away organically if Trump himself flailed his ass off in the deep-enough shit. They's just....shake out.  In full narcissistic breakdown, the flow away from Trump would be like diarrhea.  I would love to see it.  But I don't know how to make that thing happen inorganically. And maybe a solution to get Trumpers' heads out of his ass is a very vital thing to our Republic. 

Like Hillary Clinton, maybe I don't express myself in a way that helps MAGA understand why or how they are in a cult, and why they need to leave him behind. But someone on that side might hear and know. 

What's faith after all but the trust in things unseen? 

But take this image in. A new life in TrumpWorld? Born-again!

*Just as a post-script, I was leaving out the right-wing counter-media: where the toxic swamp gasses get mainstreamed from little conspiracy sites to Fox News, and the sheer power they have in influencing GOP congress people who see Fox as real news and life in fear of being labelled "RINOs" or worse. But this blogpost was getting ever so long, and that dynamic could probably take up books' worth of observations. 

UPDATE: sheeee-yyiittt:

Normally, you'd just feel sorry for someone whose life is this empty. But this is now a dangerous cult, and has been for a few years. https://t.co/gQw5ufP74l

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 8, 2023

They lurves their flabby Fox News guzzling dingus "uncle" so much they put his head on a new body. Like Ray Milland being grafted onto Rosie Greer's body in The Thing with Two Heads, only without the other head or the body being brown. But kinda? This is a very expensive truck that has been customized for very poor resale. I hate these signifying mental muppets. Also, too, they are Qanon and Tom-Ballard-stans. It's so inaesthetic. I actively hate the visual to bits.