Things aren't just bad; they're *weird.*

[Ocelot II]

I'm old. I've lived through - and remember well - Nixon, Reagan and Bush. They were bad presidents and many members of their administrations were bad; some even went to prison. These administrations were bad because they were dishonest, dumb and dangerous. At various times they lied to the public, implemented domestic and foreign policies that were harmful; some benefited corruptly and personally. But they were regular, normal bad, not weird bad. I couldn't stand Nixon, Reagan and Bush and their various loathsome minions because they were nasty, corrupt, dishonest and harmful, as politicians sometimes are and always have been, from time to time. But I never thought any of them were actually crazy. I never thought what was going on then was weird, the sort of weird that makes you go, How the fuck can this actually be happening?

And none of those administrations and presidents, as bad as they were, caused millions of people to go completely nuts, join a personality cult and start believing demonstrably mad things. Some believed stupid, unprovable things, like Saddam Hussein had WMDs, because they were lied to. But believing that thing was nothing like believing the government puts chemicals in the water that makes people turn gay or that Hillary Clinton was running a child abuse ring from the basement of a pizza parlor. There have always been goofy conspiracy theories but not ones that millions and millions of people actually believed. And TFG himself is a very weird guy, just apart from also being a very bad guy. Maybe it's the effect of social media, but I don't remember a time when bad was also really, really weird. Where did all this pathology come from?

[BComplex]

1. Mostly the crazies support religious beliefs that are somehow intertwined

with their craziness.

[Ocelot II]

2. But oddball religious beliefs have been around forever,

and by no means all of the weirdness is based on religion. What I don't get is how millions of people, not all of whom are religious fanatics, have started believing things that are demonstrably false and can't be persuaded otherwise, no matter how much evidence they are confronted with.

[MuseRider]

4. It is like they have nowhere else to go

so tfg HAS to be right, he is right isn't he? Thanks, I thought so....and they cannot go back from that. Is it ego? Maybe some. It blows my mind. Us old hippies were taught not to trust the man and we didn't. That was not perfect either but I know very few of us who were not willing to say, Oops and look harder at what we once believed and CHANGE it. This is like the stories came down from the heavens and they cannot be refuted or you will turn into a mosquito or something. It really does all look very familiar with family members who are very very religious. I do not think anyone could ever reason them out of what they think their God has told them.

[wnylib]

17. That fits the religious nutters.

But I know a number of MAGAs who adore Trump and have never been in a church or part of a religion in their lives. Some of them openly despise religion. But they believe that Trump is a great businessman and good ol' boy because he "speaks plainly."

He does not speak plainly, of course. He rambles, contradicts himself, and conflates, dissembles, and sows confusion and chaos. What they mean by speaking plainly is that he uses coarse language and acts boorish in ways that they admire because it's what they do or wish they felt free to do. He appeals to their desire to express the worst side of their nature.

My neighbor is a good example. Says he has never had and never will have anything to do with "that damned church BS." But he raves about all the good things that Trump has done, like putting migrants and "illegal" people in their place and stopping them from bringing their drugs and crime into the country. He insists that Trump saved the economy from Obama's "wreck" and that Biden is destroying what Trump accomplished financially because Trump is a great businessman and Obama and Biden are not.

He has nothing against LGBTQ+ and is friends with a RW trans neighbor of ours. He believes the Hunter Biden conspiracy crap and Hillary's e-mails. Etc, etc, etc.

I know this because he rattles it off on a gish gallop without stopping for air.

Another sad case is a guy I used to work with. He is not even slightly religious. He used to be a Democrat before Trump. I ran into him in a store in 2019, just before covid. He said about Trump, "I kinda like the guy. He talks like 'regular' people." He said the border stories about migrant children were just anti Trump propaganda. He was fighting for a disability claim due to a back injury and knee surgery. So he showed me a letter that he was sending to Trump to ask for help in his claim. It was so pathetic.

That guy used to be intelligent enough to know that Presidents don't handle disability claims. He used to see through BS in people. But he grew up with a very abusive father and continues (unsuccessfully) to try to have a relationship with him. He sees Trump as a daddy figure. I told him, "Trump is not your father." He looked stunned.

The religious fanatics are just as nuts as those two examples of non religious Trumpers. They share distorted reality issues, some through religion, some without it.

[MuseRider]

22. Agreed.

I have a cousin who is closing in on 80? Maybe 75. She and I finally, and thankfully had our final split. It was over vaccines. She is not stupid, she lives in the manse connected to the church she bought. Of course there is no real service there...definitely a tax break for her cats do attend her service, just a bit about her and the rest of my coo coo family. She could not believe I was not worried about getting a chip in my arm from the covid vaccine. This chip she was worried about made you infertile. Did I say she is closing in on 80? I will be 70 the end of the year so we are both absolutely infertile now. I made all the other arguments first about how chips could not travel to your uterus like that but she never bought it at all. There are women in other countries that get pregnant and one day that will be Jesus returning so we must keep ourselves fertile. Crazy, she is also a lawyer, not practicing thank goodness. I just feel the need to try to figure it all out because these people will do anything to get someone who supports their looney tune ideas in office. They are everywhere.

[walkingman]

3. I blame most of it on Reagan. He was not the first to bring religion into American politics but

he made it part of his agenda with the embrace of Jerry Falwell, he basically had a war against unions, deregulated everything in site, supply-side economics, greed is good, government is the problem, etc.

Without him I don't think we would have had either of the Bushes.

Trump is just a con-man who used the Reagan playbook to attract the racists, homophobes, religious nuts, and white supremacists to get elected and make everyone aware of just how many of those people really are in America. There are lots of them.

[LakeArenal]

5. I think they feel the are victims of government because...LAW!

[Elessar Zappa]

6. I'd say

the spread of conspiracy theories is related to people not being able to smell bullshit when they come across it on the internet. The CTs really spread as social media expanded. Plus there’s uncounted Russian bots out there sowing misinformation.

[EndlessWire]

7. I think it was always there.

We just didn't see it until they were given permission by Trump to deviate from societal values that most of us were working for. They have been given permission and encouragement from those in power to ramp up their hatred until we can't recognize them anymore.

They can't see it themselves, not even with the shock of going to jail. They get constant instruction, direction, and mass formulation from the King of Fools himself, Trump, and his many minions.

Usually, many years later, you look back at your own behavior and go, "Why in hell did I do that??" This time, it will be too late to explain it away in order to fix the many lives that have and will be ruined. They are being used and don't even realize it.

[albacore]

8. HST knew the answer.. the weird folks have turned pro.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

12. I think it's more like: smart PROS have turned up the WEIRD factor via social media primarily

... for disruption.

tRump is a disrupter, but a chaotic one, unlike say Bezos, who was a creative disrupter of retail commerce.

Putin used social media to destabilize and polarize the US, via Prigozhin's web brigades in St Petersburg.

Rich people have incentives to disrupt and polarize the electorate because they think they can get CONs in by gerrymandering, denying water bottles in voting lines, and other tricks. To some extent their tricks have succeeded. Certainly they have magats in a perpetual state of outrage.

[marybourg]

9. In the case of tRump, clearly from a backlash against

all the social changes since the 60’s. Maybe this is how people behave when they feel their society’s underpinnings are being attacked. They lose all moral and common sense constraints in a desperate attempt to turn the clock back to a time when they felt in control. They’ll apparently say and do anything, competing with each other in their disrespect for all norms, in order to regain the old order. It’s the old “the end justifies the means”.

And when a potential cult leader appears, and says the things they’re thinking but were too embarrassed to say, they compete with each other in a race to emulate the cult leader. I suspect that now that they have won most of the battles, the crazy will abate.

[summer_in_TX]

16. Anonymity online seems to draw out the worst.

Even in Dem-leaning groups, I saw an increase in incivility in discussions on posts. I once loved Democracy for America. When I went back to it after being away for awhile, it had an uncaring culture.

I've seen it here to a degree, but thanks to the moderation team setup, it hasn't taken over the culture. There's a lot of caring people here.

I used to speak up on DFA about the importance of treating one another civilly even in an online space, but was dismissed for interfering with free speech rights. But it wasn't the content that concerned me, it was the callousness and sneering tone that disturbed me. That doesn't build or keep community. I'm glad DU works hard to do it.

Wish other social media would make it a priority to ensure users treat one another with respect even when disagreeing. Normalizing the disrespect causes it to spread. Pushing for politeness makes the world better than letting the worst of ourselves go and spread that.

It's out of control with the R's. But it could easily go haywire in Dem groups too. It has before.

[DBoon]

10. They have always been here

You have had flying saucer nuts, people who believe the end times are around the corner, people who believe in psychics (remember Edgar Cayce?), etc

What the Republicans have done is organized the crazies and molded them into a political force. We have a major political party that is insane at its core. Deliberately insane.

[TexasBushwhacker]

13. But with social media, they find each other

and don't think they are crazy or perverted or racist, because they've found other people who think like they do.

[ecstatic]

11. Unregulated social media + systematic exposure to toxins + guns +

long-term covid damage = ???

[Joinfortmill]

14. Yup, really weird and dangerous too.

[ancianita]

15. The bad got weird bad when

a) media in general left journalistic standards & ethics, and normalized the weird by covering it for profit;
b) the eliminating of the The Fairness Doctrine opened that door;
c) the 24-hour news cycle drove it through, and relentlessly; and
d) the Citizens United dark money networks funded weird bad oligarchic messaging.

I love that you meld bad and weird together to describe today.
But in my opinion, we've studied bad weird long enough. We need to leave the bad weird in its corporate silos.

We'd do better for ourselves and fellow humans to get ready for the climate change that's hitting us and our descendants.
The bad weird will get swept away, anyway, by cascading climate disasters. Covid was our first clue.

I'm with him.

[3catwoman3]

18. Even as a grade schooler, when I saw the bizarre National Enquirer...

…front pages while accompanying my mom to the grocery store, I wondered why anybody would believe bullshit like that (didn’t use that word until later in life).

The basement of the pizza parlor. The child sex slave colony on Mars run by NASA.

Should I feel sorry for or scornful of people who are so gullible?

[LymphocyteLover]

19. I blame FoxNews and rightwing radio and the internet

they have made millions of brainwashed nutjob zombies that were putty in the hands of Trump

[bucolic_frolic]

20. Pathology came from mind control abuse used to twist voters' minds to gain power

When masses of people are told insane things through gaslighting, illogical fallacies, twisted facts, lies, they are soon humiliated into a cult. Fit the last 6 years into those concepts. Child abuse in a pizzeria. Morality doesn't matter. MAGA. QAnon. Red hats and caravans. Safety through an armed society.

People lose their initiative, common sense, logical thinking, ties to reality.

In other words, this pathology as you put it, was manufactured.

[demigoddess]

21. I remember back when Rush Limbaugh used brainwashing technique on his audience. I

had studied brainwashing in high school and he used one of the techniques used for that purpose. Very blatant, I thought, but many people bought into what he said. Todays 'news' is so similar. no wonder
people are buying into weird conspiracies.

[JHB]

23. You clearly have not been paying as much attention to the Right as you might think

What we have now is the product of 50-60 years of conservative propagandizing to take advantage of their audiences biases and bigotries. You have to go back to Goldwater's loss in 1964 and conservative efforts to keep his people in the Republican wheelhouse even though many were from historically Democratic constituencies: Southern Democrats.

Thus Nixon's "Southern Strategy".

Then came the conservatives' extermination campaign against moderate Rockefeller Republicans.

Then sainted Ronald Reagan and (less sainted) GHW Bush, were left untainted because numerous scandals were never vigorously investigated, rode off into the sunset, and even flunkies who clearly had done things that would taint their name were let off the hook and left free for Dubya to put in positions of power.

Then Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh became the gold standards of success in media and political messaging.

It's only weird to people who haven't paid attention to what liberals have been observing about conservatives for 40 years, During which time those attention-non-payers usually rolled their eyes at the liberals and and accused them over-overreacting.

[Ocelot II]

24. I've been paying close attention since the '60s. All that stuff was unquestionably bad.

What I'm talking about is not just bad, scandalous, anti-democratic, racist, all that shitty stuff that started with Goldwater and even before then. I'm talking about the current situation where very large numbers of people have been persuaded to believe things that are not only false, but could not possibly be true or even debatable in any universe. Stuff that's truly insane. It's like millions of people have joined Jim Jones' People's Temple and are lined up to drink the poison Kool-Aid. Talk to TFG's followers; they really believe against all evidence that the election was stolen, that all the claims against him are made-up hit jobs, that there is a "deep state" that's persecuting him, that Hunter and Joe Biden are at the center of a criminal conspiracy involving China, that there is that a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring and who control US politics and the media, and even that members of this group kill and eat children to extract a life-extending chemical. That's the sort of completely crazy stuff that's become mainstream only in maybe the last eight years or so, the sort of madness that once was fringe and regarded by mainstream politicians as nuts. Goldwater and Reagan were bad. They weren't mad. They weren't weird.

[JHB]

25. Not enough, evidently, or it would be all old hat to you

Reviews of the similarities between Rush Limbaugh's dittoheads and Jim Jones's cultists have been pretty much staple since the 80s, at least in liberal circles.

Yes, they were that fucking weird. But as long as they delivered votes to Republicans, they were gold. I don't care if you characterize them as mad or weird. They are what they've always been: self-indulgent shithead who may or may not be aware of how much they are screwing everybody else, but at least for those directly affected, give space for supporting them.

[hydrolastic]

26. There is more of us than them

But they rule. or at least derail everything. I wish it wasn't like the only way anything can get done you have to have the senate, house and presidency

[Buckeye_Democrat]

27. I suspect it's because Republicans tend to be more...

... loyal to other people whom they perceive to be their allies, instead of logic and evidence. They're capable of acknowledging the latter, but it's not as important to them as their tribal group. They'll even happily cite an article from the New York Times if it's favorable for them, even if they previously proclaimed it's full of nothing but "liberal lies".

Republicans used to counter-protest during the conflict in Vietnam, "My country, right or wrong!" Those people were openly admitting that loyalty to their tribe (the USA in that case) was more important to them than any moral principles!

So when their long-time tribal leaders go off the rails, they'll tend to sacrifice logic and evidence even more than usual to defend those tribal allies.

With social media, they get regular reinforcement of the weirdness too. They're even directed to it by computer algorithms used by Facebook and others, since reinforcing stories tend to generate more clicks for increased ad revenue.

I've seen evidence of similar tribalism among some Democrats on DU, but it's definitely not as pervasive compared to Republicans. Almost all of the right-wing authoritarians (which can include Democrats if they demand conformity of thought and behavior) in this country are Republicans.

I think many Republicans could become fascists quite easily, even if their party leaders and propagandists copied the ideas and behavior of the former Nazi party in Germany to a ridiculous extent -- same party name, symbols, uniforms, etc. The evil atrocities too! They'd just need to repeatedly hear that's the "right way" for a stronger party and country, from a multitude of right-wing sources like Fox News, right-wing radio and their specially-tailored social media sources (who try to increase their own click-based revenue with the nonsense). It wouldn't happen quickly, but I think it's very plausible given enough time and tribal repetition.

[bluestarone]

28. Weird it is. Very weird. My thoughts?

Russia, and maybe China decided to use RELIGION as a way to DIVIDE and CONQUER. Along with Social media. (which is in it self another weapon they have) Seems to me that we ALL need to realize how important this whole plan they have IS working. I NEVER thought i'd see 2/3's of the HOUSE RETHUGLICONS become our ENEMIES! The ONLY way i can look at this is, RUSSIA owns them! The shit in their closet must really be something!! God help us if we don't come together for the next election. I mean Federal, State and LOCAL. We gotta be VERY SMART here!!