Understanding the average wingnut

[kratos12]

Since late 2001 I have posted on a public site that generally has been dominated by right wingers.

Over the years I argued with, was insulted by and even physically threatened by people whom I initially believed could be reasoned with but now believe are completely divorced from reality.

One of the highlights of this almost decade long attempt to reason with this small segment of my fellow Americans came in during the run up to the Iraq invasion. I was making the daily argument that A) There was no evidence that Iraq posed a threat to the US and B) That even if the will to harm us was present they did not possess the capability to do so. In return I was peppered with "It's the WMDs stupid!". Later when it became apparent to most (if not all) that Iraq did not posses WMDs the wingnuts at this board never once acknowledged their error. Even when pressed with Bush's own admit ion that no WMDs were present the nuttiest of the wingnuts refused to acknowledge that at the very least they may have been mistaken.

It was at this time that I started to question not only my adversaries grasp of the facts, but also their grasp on reality.

The following years saw me wasting hours of time and effort attempting to civilly engage these people in rational discourse on the topics of the day. It was frustrating and depressing as no matter how badly the facts reflected the failure of their heros, ideology and policies they collectively just dug their heels in deeper and deeper, became angrier, more insulting and less respectful of any posters who did not share their philosophy. During the 2008 election the insanity rose to an alarming level when posters who i disagreed with but respected started to rationalize the Palin candidacy.

After Obama took office the strain of being exposed to these people became too much to bear. Every single event, no matter how trivial was portrayed as evidence that Obama was the devil incarnate. Posts would spring up about his blackberry, where he had lunch that day, what he was wearing......and their "Beckian" analysis was always the same, whatever Obama said and did PROVED he was a muslim extremist-communist-Nazi-who was trying to destroy America.

So I finally gave up and came to the conclusion that those on the right have no interest in fact or a rational discussion based on those facts. They are rigidly dogmatic, so much so that concrete factual repudiation of their positions simply serves to reinforce them. There is no other way to describe this mindset than insanity.

There is no reasoning with crazy folks, the quicker our Democratic leadership accepts this and stops trying to reach out to them the faster they (at least the small minority of those who have a shred of sanity left) will abandon their ever shrinking and extreme base and return to the fact based world.