Something has been bothering me since the FBI raid at Trump’s wannabe palace Mar-a-lago. I know we leftists are the “love and peace” types, but the fear of these MAGA republicans is straight up embarrassing.
And before you try to Joe Biden me, I’m clearly talking about a specific fringe group of republicans. Talk about people getting offended over microaggressions, amiright?!
Were the January 6th hearings a waste of time?
We need to start here because it’s at the root of what’s going on and what inspired this post.
For those of you who were doing intergalactic travel on January 6th, 2021, we had a little problem in Washington D.C. A bunch of Trump supporters came from all over the country to protest at the capital because Trump managed to convince them that the election was stolen. A significant number of these protestors turned into rioters and stormed the United States Capitol building.
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t stop watching it.
My eyes were glued to the screen with one thought in my mind: “I literally cannot believe that this many people are committing crimes over a conspiracy theory with 0 evidence.”
I’m a major advocate of free speech, but January 6th has really given me, and I’m sure many others, something to think about. This was clearly words turning into action, and a lot of it was due to misinformation spread via social media as well on right-wing news outlets.
Recently, they wrapped up the Jan 6th hearings, and who knows if anything will happen. Trump dodges charges like he’s Neo in the Matrix. There were quite a few bombshells, and more shady stuff is still happening. Like the Secret Service guy who was going to testify that Trump didn’t lose his mind in the car has now had a change of heart.
Throughout the trial, I saw a bunch of center-left and center-right people saying these hearings were a waste of time. I don’t (or didn’t) totally agree.
I’m an evo psych nerd and like reading books about how societies form and how we work in groups. One of the main things is that punishment is a signal to the group. It keeps norms in place and says, “Hey, if you do what this person did, we’re coming for you too.”
So, even if Trump doesn’t get in trouble for January 6th, I figured it at least sends a signal out that we won’t just sit back and let it go.
The problem is that it did not have that effect.
Riots in the streets
Since the raid on Trump’s place, people have been freaking out, and now I’m convinced that some (not all) of Trump’s followers are basically members of a cult. Which is absolutely insane because Trump is such a goofball.
After the FBI raided his house, a guy legit went to an FBI office thinking he was going to do something with his gun. He fucked around and found out. By the time it was over, he was dead, and the investigation continues.
Side note, I’ve been reading books with my son about thinking errors so he doesn’t become someone who believes ridiculous things. After this guy was killed, I told my son this story because I like to give him real-life examples of how flawed thinking can ruin your life or get you killed.
I had a pretty harsh criticism of Steve Hassan’s book The Cult of Trump, but after this guy went to the FBI building and sacrificed his life, I was like, “Alright. Maybe it’s kind of like a cult.”
The amount of people who have become human shields for Trump while he doesn’t give a single fuck about them is mind-blowing. But people continue to do it.
Well, recently, big headlines were made from another goofball, Lindsey Graham. In an interview, he said that if Trump is prosecuted, there will be “riots in the streets”. He then doubled down on his comments.
Is Graham dumb? Yes. But is he wrong about this? Probably not.
What’s troublesome is that Trump proved a winning formula: question the election results month before it happens, and your supporters will think you were right if you lose.
Kari Lake, running for office in Arizona has been doing this for months now, and she’s playing a twisted game:
I spend 90% of my reading time trying to learn about how people experience so many flaws in thinking, and I don’t think I’ll ever get it. She’s clearly playing a “heads I win; tails you lose” game, and her supporters, much like Trump’s, do not care.
There a millions of people around the country who hear this rhetoric, and it doesn’t even phase them. Do you know how scary that is? These people are driving on the freeway next to you. They serve you food. They own businesses. They’re teaching kids. They’re rasing kids. They’re helping our society function.
Meanwhile, there’s something in their brain that is absolutely broken.
Although I’m not a fan of the viral content style of interviewing your opponents to make them look stupid, I still watch it every now and then. I don’t like the content because it’s clearly showing the worst of the worst of your opposition to create a caricature of the entire side. But at the same time, it’s fascinating watching the dissonance.
Like in this new clip from The Good Liars:
That guy could be a janitor or he could be a business owner. And he legit has no problem saying, “If Trump and Hillary commit the same crime, only one should be convicted.”
I guess that explains why they don’t care that Black people get harsher convictions for the same crimes as white people, but that’s a topic for another day.
If you watch that video, the guy doesn’t even flinch when asked directly if that’s what he’s saying. His brain is so broken that his logic makes 100% sense to him.
But I digress, let’s get to the main point.
Should we be afraid of these people?
Hell no.
I am so annoyed watching people say, “We shouldn’t prosecute Trump because his supporters will riot.” And now we see how mini-Trumps are using his playbook. Are we supposed to just sit back and let them walk all over our democracy so they don’t get upset?
Although I’m not a police abolitionist, I’m pretty damn close. But since we throw money at police departments like the deficit and social programs don’t matter, I’m happy to let them handle this.
I don’t know if you remember the BLM protests (and I’m specifically talking about protests, not riots), but cops were literally hitting people with their cars and shooting people with rubber bullets. There was one video of them just marching and pushing this super old man to the ground who was just standing there.
I was telling my girlfriend last night, and I’m not proud to admit this, but I’d have such an immense amount of schadenfreude if this happened to the right. After watching a month of BLM protestors get assaulted by the cops while the right defended it, I would not mind this happening.
I’d definitely speak up and say that it isn’t cool, but I’d be lying to you if I said I wouldn’t get a little enjoyment as well.
And I think some of you are lying if you’re clutching your pearls at the fact that I said this.
The only problem I see with them rioting if Trump gets prosecuted or if that nutjob in AZ loses her election is that we can’t trust the cops. If you remember January 6th, we witnessed that the calls were in fact coming from inside the house. The police on January 6th just let the rioters walk right in.
So, if this were to happen across the country, we’d most likely see a lot of cops letting it happen, and that’s kind of messed up, but I’m willing to roll the dice on that one.
Again, part of living in a society is showing its citizens what is and isn’t okay. Trump has done a lot of things that aren’t okay and has yet to be held accountable.
On a larger scale, this is a bigger issue in the United States. The rich and the powerful get away with crimes all of the time, and on the rare occasion we can actually hold one accountable, we need to do it. I’ve been reading a lot of books about how the richest people in the country commit so many crimes and barely have any consequences.
Anywho, I had to get that out of my system. If you’re scared of these dorks rioting if Trump gets prosecuted or if anyone else on the right doesn’t get their way, oh well. That’s much better than creating a new norm that one side gets to do whatever they want because we’re afraid of how they might react.
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"I told my son this story because I like to give him real-life examples of how flawed thinking can ruin your life or get you killed."
One of the most common ways that flawed thinking gets people killed is that our anger starts fights we can't win. The contrast between Putin's attack on Ukraine (underplanned, undersupplied, undermanned) and China's impending attack on Taiwan (building toward it for decades, working on their food security as a measure against anticipated blockades, building naval infrastructure in Sri Lanka and the Horn of Africa to secure access to Gulf oil) is a good place to start.
“I literally cannot believe that this many people are committing crimes over a conspiracy theory with 0 evidence."
I work among Republicans, and I have heard very similar statements from them in regard to [riot of your choice]. They're not insane, generally, although the whackos get all the press. Trump presided over an economy with rising real wages and rising stock markets* while pulling back from foreign wars, and even the ones who thought the man was personally horrible thought that he was delivering pretty good results. You're going to find that there are literally billions of people who are tolerably sane and quite functional who nevertheless see the world very differently than you do**.
"Should we be afraid of these people?"
They're better at getting organized, they grow most of the food, and they have most of the guns, so I'd be at least a little cautious. They're a lot less dependent on urban intellectuals than vice versa. As Jon Stewart put it, the eternal fate of the noble and enlightened is to be brutally crushed by the armed and dumb. It's not for nothing that Voltaire described history as the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.
*Much of this is lucky timing, but Trump's aggressive positions on trade and immigration actually do seem to have improved the labor market for the working class.
** This morning I overheard a coworker I like, respect, and to some degree admire use the phrase "spiritually bankrupt". I don't think worse of the guy, but it's fairly obvious that he and I tend to reason from very different premises.