Tigers are among the most beautiful animals on earth. It's no wonder that some people are fascinated by them and feel a desire to keep them as pets. However, tigers are not domesticated animals. Small tiger cubs will soon grow up to weigh hundreds of pounds, and they can easily overpower and kill a person. Furthermore, because tigers are endangered, it is especially important to the overall tiger population and the ecosystem for more tigers to live in the wild.
Don't get a tiger
Tigers are stunning creatures, but their care and feeding is a delicate matter that requires heroic effort. They can kill their human keepers, they are difficult to capture once they've escaped, and because of this, a license is generally required to keep one. If you are inclined to keep a cat, an animal shelter will have a small one for you. (Millions of unwanted cats are euthanized in the United States each year.) If you are inclined to help tigers, a good start would be a donation to a wildlife charity or to an organization like the Shambala Preserve that takes large cats from people "who realize they have purchased an animal they can no longer handle".
For kids, check out the book Big Cats Are Not Pets! by Julie S. Marzolf.
But if you do have a tiger, and if you're married, I guess you should write a tiger custody agreement so you know who will take care of it in the event of a divorce.
Tigers can turn on their human keepers
Tigers occasionally maul their keepers. In 1998, in Florida, a tiger put Richard Chipperfield in critical condition. It was shot by Graham Chipperfield. The brothers were trainers for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
In 2003, Antoine Yates was mauled by a 500-pound tiger that he secretly kept in his apartment in a Harlem housing project. His brother found him injured on the floor and brought him to the hospital. To capture the tiger, police had to rappel down the side of the apartment building with a tranquilizer gun. Yates served six months in jail for endangerment.
He fondly explained his relationship with the tiger, "Ming": "To be close to such a beautiful animal 24 hours a day is magical. I began to really understand a big cat. At that point I was ready to disconnect from the world."
Also in 2003, a leashed white tiger mauled Roy Horn during a performance in Las Vegas. Horn, who had performed with tigers for three decades, lost enough blood to put him in critical condition.
In December 2013, a circus tiger mauled its trainer, Danny Gottani, in front of spectators in Madrid, including Gottani's own mother. Gottani had nearly two decades of experience with tigers. His injuries were not life-threatening. A spectator captured cell phone footage of the mauling.
Tigers are difficult to contain
One might think that the risk could be minimized simply by keeping the animal in a cage. It's not quite that simple. It's one thing to put a tiger in a box, and another thing to keep the box sealed.
In 1893, the Walter L. Main Circus Train derailed in Pennsylvania as it traveled downhill, leading to the escape of many exotic animals. One tiger entered a barn where it killed a cow and scared away the milkmaid. The farmer, Alfred Thomas, shot it.
The obvious danger presented by captive tigers was alluring to one depressed man who climbed into a tiger enclosure in China in a suicide attempt in 2014. (The tiger dragged him but refused to eat him.)
In the wild, tigers rarely bother humans. However, once a tiger learns to stalk humans as prey, it becomes a menace. A Royal Bengal tiger killed 10 people in Northern India over just two months in early 2014 and remained on the loose. Villagers were intent on finding and shooting the rogue animal, but it is easier said than done.
Celebrities who are known to have tigers
Tigers are expensive, and celebrities sometimes purchase them as status symbols or curiosities. These arrangements are usually short-term, as keeping a tiger is a lot of work.
An article in USA Today in 2003 reported that Michael Jackson kept two tigers ("Thriller" and "Sabu") on his Neverland Ranch; Mike Tyson kept three tigers at home ("Kenya," "Storm" and "Boris"); and Paris Hilton kept a mostly untamed tiger ("London"). All of these tigers were subsequently sent to live elsewhere. Hilton, whose TV show is ironically called "The Simple Life," wisely said of her tiger: "I don't have it anymore...[It] got too big, and if it ever got loose I'd be in so much trouble."
A four-month-old female tiger cub was given to Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko during her presidential campaign in 2009. Tymoshenko became a political prisoner, and the tiger, who had been named "Tigryulia" during its stint as campaign mascot, was sent to a zoo, where it gave birth to four cubs in 2012.
Tigers are endangered in the wild. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2011 that more tigers live in captivity in the United States than roam wild in all the world: "Because of a flourishing trade in exotic animals, there are an estimated 5,000 privately owned Bengal tigers in the U.S. There are only 3,600 Bengal tigers left in the wild."
In addition for the demand for tigers as pets, the demand for products made from slaughtered tigers leaves them vulnerable to hunters. For example, on Sept. 4, 2012, the HuffingtonPost reported: "Police have seized four baby tigers and more than 100 pangolins being transported in a car in central Vietnam...Tiger bones are used in Vietnam to make a traditional painkiller that sells for several hundred dollars an ounce." Superstitions about the curative properties of tiger products thus sadly contribute to the animals' decline.
This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Feb. 27, 2014.
Tiger image by Eddy Van 3000 from in Flanders fields - Belgiquistan - United Tribes ov Europe (Sleeping beauty, dreaming of lots of meat.) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
President Trump recently distributed the following information, presenting it as a personal accomplishment that proves he is more competent or effective than his predecessor, President Obama. Here's why it is a mistake to use this information to make a point about who is more effective than whom.
Screenshot taken from the Washington Examiner the morning of Dec. 29, 2017. The article was dated Dec. 23. A factual error in the information circulated widely online before the media outlet corrected it.
Seemingly forgetting that the war against ISIS is about an international coalition defeating a common enemy, Trump self-promotes an argument that he is a better commander-in-chief than his predecessor. This is problematic on several levels. The war is about the freedom and safety of the people of Syria and Iraq; it should not be presented as a pissing content between Trump and Obama. It is morally repugnant to do so and, in its blatancy, it undermines U.S. credibility as a leader in international security. Also, credit for any successes needs to be shared with the dozens of countries who have served as coalition partners.
The numbers show that about the same area of land was liberated from ISIS during the first 11 months of the Trump administration as during the final 28 months of the Obama administration. Trump seems to want us to infer that his military campaign got the same results twice as fast. He is treating these numbers as a businessman looks at a balance sheet. This is a misunderstanding of how military campaigns work. Square miles are not dollars; they are not identical and interchangeable. Terrain, for example, plays a role in how difficult it is to conquer land. So does the civilian population you have to work around. And, of course, the level of resistance from enemy fighters is crucial. The chart reflects the U.S. Defense Department's assessment that Trump only had to contend with 35,000 ISIS fighters when he took office; it does not reflect how many fighters Obama's administration had to deal with at the outset nor how many additional fighters entered the fray during those years. The numbers indicate that the military sped up the rate at which it conquered land, but one possible explanation is that conquering land became easier.
Similarly, if half the number of bombs are required to capture the same amount of land, that suggests that the nature of the combat has changed. Bombs suggest an air war; ground combat may use fewer bombs. Indeed bombs are expensive for the country that drops them and they are destructive of lives and property on the ground, yet they may also be cheaper and less destructive than alternative weapons. Therefore, the military has its reasons for using or not using them. The way this information is presented, it appears at first glance that the international coalition used half the violence to conquer the same amount of land. This is not necessarily true. They used half the amount of one kind of violence. Other types of weapons and tactics are missing from the chart. Furthermore, the decision about whether to use bombs is not always up to the U.S. president. Most, but not all, bombs in this conflict have come at U.S. direction and expense. The second-most prolific bomber is Britain's RAF.
The numbers show that twice the number of people were liberated from ISIS under Trump as under Obama. That only means that the land taken from ISIS in 2017 was twice as densely populated as the land taken in 2014-2016. It probably reflects the 2017 victory in the Iraqi city of Mosul, a city whose population has been estimated between one and two million.
In listing the number of U.S. deaths, remaining ISIS fighters, and "people freed," an important category is missing: Iraqi and Syrian civilian deaths. Inevitably, in any war, some innocent people intended to be freed are killed in the conflict. In Iraq alone, where documentation of civilian deaths is spottier than in Syria, the U.S.-led coalition confirmed its responsibility for 971 civilian deaths in 51 incidents during the Obama administration (the end of 2014 through 2016) and 1,119 civilian deaths in 56 incidents in the beginning of the Trump administration. Iraq also has a number of civilian casualties for which responsibility is “contested”: 63 incidents under Obama and 213 incidents under Trump. (Source: Airwars) This gives a more complete picture of the human cost of war. Reducing the number of ISIS fighters in a territory with millions of inhabitants does not come without a price, and the president ought not to seem glib about it by erasing those casualties from the record as he claims to be a better commander-in-chief than his predecessor.
Charlie Kirk tweeted this information from the Washington Examiner on Dec. 27 at 3:14 p.m. and it was immediately retweeted by the president. In the original version of the information that was tweeted and retweeted, the arithmetic has an obvious error. If only 17,500 square miles were “held by ISIS” at the end of Obama’s administration, Trump could not have caused 26,000 square miles to be “liberated from ISIS” (unless he had lost ground to ISIS and then had to reclaim it). Accordingly, the Washington Examiner acknowledged their own mathematical error and corrected their article with an erratum. The president followed up at 6:09 p.m. with a tweet of a visual meme with a corrected number and a text caption that made his point without explicitly referencing the number in question. He did not acknowledge that he was correcting an error, but you can see the error for yourself since, as of Dec. 29, neither Charlie Kirk nor the President had deleted their original tweet with the wrong information. (Screenshots below were taken from the president's Twitter page the morning of Dec. 29. Red arrows are superimposed to highlight the error and subsequent correction.)
I do not argue that the President should waste a single hour of his time figuring this out. Instead I argue that he should not waste untold hours of everyone else's fact-checking time by tweeting things that either he does not understand or that he does understand and about which is happy to mislead everyone else.
Update: News broke on 14 February 2019 that President Trump would declare a national emergency to get funding for a border wall with Mexico on the grounds that terrorists are crossing the border. This is not true.
"In the United States since the 9/11 attacks, 455 jihadist terrorists have been charged or convicted or died before they faced trial. Not one of these terrorists crossed the southern border....And anyway, the vast majority of terrorists don't enter the United States at the southern border or anywhere else, because they are already in the country. Of the 455 jihadist terrorism cases since 9/11, 84% involved US citizens or permanent residents, and every lethal terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 was carried out by a US citizen or legal resident....And there isn't a case since 9/11 of a terrorist being arrested at the border, according to New America's research." (Peter Bergen, CNN, 14 February 2019)
Furthermore, "the United States has seen a steep decline in the number of jihadist terrorism cases over the past four years," Bergen says, since "the geographical caliphate [of ISIS] is almost entirely gone and ISIS recruitment has slowed to a trickle."
And on 17 February 2019, CNN reported that over a thousand well-funded ISIS fighters had simply relocated to Iraq: "More than 1,000 ISIS fighters have likely fled from Syria into the mountains and deserts of western Iraq in the past six months, and they may have up to $200 million in cash with them, according to a US military official familiar with situation."
The United States has a long history of debacles, mistakes, and catastrophes in the Middle East. But Donald Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds manages the near impossible. It incorporates all our past failures and then goes a step further by actually placing us on the side of our enemies while embracing their worst characteristics.
This time, we have joined the Axis of Evil.
It "is a new kind of low point," Rothkopf argues, because it "combines every single type of error noted above [in a list of U.S. foreign policy failures in the Middle East] and some new ones."
Worth emphasising the scale of the disaster Trump has wrought in the week since his call with Erdogan. 1. Revived Isis. 2. Cemented Assad’s grip on Syria. 3. Handed Russia yet another geopolitical windfall. 4. Betrayed the Kurds. 5. Immeasurably harmed US power. Thread 1.
The Kurds lost thousands of people defeating Isis. Trump has driven the Kurds into Russia's arms. The Russians mocked them (at the UN last week) for ever having trusted America, even while the US and Russia voted together against Europe to prevent a humanitarian pause. 3.
On October 16, 2019, asked about why he removed U.S. troops from northern Syria, Trump said: "It's been going on for a long time. Syria may have some help with Russia. And that's fine. It's a lot of sand. There's a lot of sand over there. So, there's a lot of sand that they can play with."
In 2025, where are we?
I hate to say I told you so but… I told you so.
#mythofantiwartrump
After a while he says suddenly in the half-darkness: "What actually is time?"
George puts his glass down in astonishment. "The pepper of life," I reply. The old rascal can't catch me so easily with his tricks. Not for nothing am I a member of the Werdenbrück Poets' Club: we are used to big questions.
Riesenfeld disregards me. "What's your opinion, Herr Kroll?" he asks.
"I'm a simple man," George says. "Prost!"
"Time," Riesenfeld continues doggedly. "Time, this uninterrupted flow — not our lousy time! Time, this gradual death."
Marcel Proust:
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country.
Douwe Draaisma:
In hourglasses the grains of sand increasingly rub one another smooth until finally they flow almost without friction from one bulb into the other, polishing the neck wider all the time. The older an hourglass the more quickly it runs. Unnoticed, the hourglass measures out ever shorter hours. This chronometric imperfection hides a metaphor: 'For man, too, the recurring years fly past more and more quickly, until finally the measure is full. Man, too, is increasingly permeated by impressions.
Abraham Joshua Heschel:
Indeed, we know what to do with space but do not know what to do about time, except to make it subservient to space. Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.
E. B. White:
She is at that enviable moment in life [I thought] when she believes she can go once around the ring, make one complete circuit, and at the end be exactly the same age as at the start.
Charles Ray Goff:
But why are we so important? We have only 613,200 hours to live if we live to the age of seventy. We sleep a lot of that away; then there are four or five early years that we can't remember; also, there's a lot more time that's wasted in useless activities. And so we really don't have many years to live. This leaves us wondering why all this fuss about our importance.
Zora Neale Hurston:
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Michael N. McGregor:
Although the trip lasted only a month, it stayed with him the rest of his life. When someone asked in his later years how long he traveled with the Cristianis, he answered, ‘Even till now.’
Charles Baxter:
Any writer can learn how to use a request moment to enliven a story. King Lear asks his daughters to tell him how much they love him. The ghost of Hamlet’s father has a series of requests for his son. Lady Macbeth asks, or tells, her husband to fulfill his fate. A request — a demand — forces a character into action, or dramatically charged inaction, as in the case of Hamlet. One character turns to another character and says, ‘There’s something I want you to do. Oh, and by the way, the clock is ticking. I want you to do it by Friday.’
Terry Pratchett:
Your whole life passes in front of your eyes before you die. This is called living.
George Packer:
By 50, the obvious fact of your own decline is easily mistaken for an intimation of the world's.
E. M. Cioran:
When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, ‘What’s your rush? Your can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down.’
Jeanette Winterson:
I keep pulling at the rope. I keep pulling at life as hard as I can. If the rope starts to fray in places, it doesn't matter. I am so tightly folded, like a fern or an ammonite, that as I unravel, the actual and the imagined unloose together, just as they are spliced together — life's fibres knotted into time.
Art Greer:
Happily retired people spend their time doing what they've always enjoyed doing, only more of it.
Anthony Doerr:
He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.
Andy Andrews:
Why do the ages of our world’s greatest civilizations average around two hundred years?
Why do these civilizations all seem to follow the same identifiable sequence — from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, and finally from dependence back into bondage?
Peter S. Beagle:
"Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?"
"No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns."
Paul Virilio:
To what utopia and, more importantly, to what uchronia, to what new relationship with time?
A. E. Osworth:
"And now, a partial list of things that happen so we can move time forward very quickly to the important bits. The end bits. The bits we remember and take with us, instead of the bits that are simply bits: ..."
Sources
Erich Maria Remarque. The Black Obelisk (1957). USA: Crest, 1958. p. 46.
Marcel Proust. Swann's Way (Du Cote de Chez Swann, 1917). Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1921). New York: The Heritage Press, 1954. p. 5.
Douwe Draaisma. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past. (2001) Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans in 2004. Cambridge University Press, 2005. p 201.
Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1951. p. 5.
“The Ring of Time” by E. B. White. Reprinted in Understanding the Essay, edited by Edward O. Shakespeare, Peter H. Reinke, and Elliot W. Fenander. USA: The Odyssey Press, 1966. p. 186.
Charles Ray Goff. Shelters and Sanctuaries: Christian Hope in a Time of Confusion. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1961. p. 18.
Zora Neale Hurston, quoted in the Associated Press, quoted in The Week, Sept. 26, 2014, p. 17.
“Undoings: An Essay in Three Parts.” Charles Baxter. Colorado Review, Spring 2012, Vol. 39, No. 1. p. 106.
Terry Pratchett, quoted in TheBrowser.com. Quoting The Week, July 18, 2014. p. 15.
George Packer in The New Yorker. Quoted as "Viewpoint" in The Week. Feb. 22, 2013. p. 12.
E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, quoted in Simon Critchley. Suicide. Thought Catalog, 2015.
Jeanette Winterson. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001. p. 210.
Art Greer. The Sacred Cows are Dying: Exploding the Myths We Try to Live By. New York: Hawthorne Books, Inc., 1978. p. 93.
Anthony Doerr. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2014.
Andy Andrews. How Do You Kill 11 Million People?: Why the Truth Matters More Than You Think. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2011. p. 46. Citing Andy Andrews, The Heart Mender (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 141-42.
Peter S. Beagle. The Last Unicorn. (1968) New York: Penguin, 2008. p. 5.
Paul Virilio, with Bertrand Richard. The Administration of Fear. Translated by Ames Hodges. Les editions Textuel, 2012. Translation: Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012. p. 77.
If you say, Disagreement is a social problem, your interlocutor is prompted to respond, I agree. Perhaps that's why, as Thomas Zimmer writes, "The least controversial thing one can do in American politics is to decry 'polarization.'"
Of course "polarization exists as an observable phenomenon in distinct areas and dimensions"; the problem, Zimmer says, is with "a narrative" that "dogmatically demands we put it at the center of our interpretation of the present and accept it as the key challenge the country is facing today." By tending to ignore counterexamples of non-polarization, it highlights "what historian Matthew Lassiter has rightfully criticized as an 'artificial red-blue binary.'"
First of all, many Americans share values, including across liberal and conservative identities. Placing the focus on ordinary American voters who supposedly have diametrically opposed viewpoints (maybe they do, maybe they don't, so what?) may simply serve to obscure the problem that "authoritarian reactionaries [are] taking over one of the major parties." Zimmer posits: "Every serious scholar and observer of American democracy, politics, and history agrees that a return of Donald Trump to the White House would constitute an acute threat to the future of democracy and constitutional government in this country. Would we really be better off if Democrats *didn’t* see him and the party that has elevated him as a major problem?" See here: "One party is dominated by a shrinking white reactionary minority that is rapidly radicalizing against democracy and will no longer accept the principle of majoritarian rule; the other thinks democracy and constitutional government should be upheld. That's not 'polarization.'"
Secondly, where among ordinary individuals the left-right gap is indeed "very wide, and has been widening," for example "on guns, pandemic response, the question of whether you should accept the results of an election your side doesn’t win or stage a violent coup," the blame doesn't lie on both sides; rather, "this has been almost entirely a function of conservatives moving sharply to the Right." So for example, on acknowledging climate change as an urgent problem, "Democrats aren’t moving to an 'extreme' position, certainly not by international comparison – they are getting in line with what is the position shared by nearly all serious experts in the world. Meanwhile, a sizable percentage of Republicans is drifting further away into fantasy land."
The excellent civil war history Battle Cry of Freedom meticulously accounts how the rise of a new technology (newspapers) empowered wealthy slavers to gin up race hatred + panic among poor whites so they would fight and die to protect the slaver’s wealth. I think of that maybe three times a day.
Jonathan Haidt explains in a recent essay that we become politically polarized when centripetal or centrifugal forces are imbalanced. These are the forces that draw us together or pull us apart.
“Imagine three kids making a human chain with their arms, and one kid has his free hand wrapped around a pole. The kids start running around in a circle, around the pole, faster and faster. The centrifugal force increases. That’s the force pulling outward as the human centrifuge speeds up. But at the same time, the kids strengthen their grip. That’s the centripetal force, pulling them inward along the chain of their arms. Eventually the centrifugal force exceeds the centripetal force and their hands slip. The chain breaks.”
The “good kind of identity politics,” according to Haidt, is exemplified by MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech that ”framed our greatest moral failing as an opportunity for centripetal redemption.” Identity becomes centrifugal “when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions” identifying which groups have power over which others and furthermore when you say that they must “fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male.” When students are told to examine everything “in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people....This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.”
Polarization is a problem insofar as it prevents people from working together to maintain a democracy. “Here," Haidt says, "is the fine-tuned liberal democracy hypothesis: as tribal primates, human beings are unsuited for life in large, diverse secular democracies, unless you get certain settings finely adjusted to make possible the development of stable political life.” Therefore the Founding Fathers of the United States designed a constitution as if it were “a clock that might run forever if they chose the right springs and gears.” They “built in safeguards against runaway factionalism, such as the division of powers among the three branches, and an elaborate series of checks and balances. But they also knew that they had to train future generations of clock mechanics. They were creating a new kind of republic, which would demand far more maturity from its citizens than was needed in nations ruled by a king or other Leviathan.” Today, however, “our government is divided into two all-consuming factions, which cut right down the middle of each of the three branches, uniting the three red half-branches against the three blue half-branches”.
Haidt referred to a previous essay in which he argued that polarization was caused by the following trends. In his words:
The two parties purified themselves ideologically
As politicians polarized, so did many Americans
The urban-rural divide grew into a gulf, reflecting diverging interests and values
Immigration was rising, leading to larger racial and ethnic divisions
The net effect of all these trends is that partisans dislike one another more intensely
Meanwhile, rule changes and culture changes in Congress made it harder to maintain cross-party friendships
The media environment changed, making it easier for partisans to confirm their worst suspicions, and putting greater pressure on politicians to play to the extremes
As the costs of campaigns increased, politicians have become increasingly afraid of offending their party’s donors
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States lost a common enemy that had once unified the country
The end of the Cold War coincided with the baton pass from the Greatest Generation to the baby boomers, who may be more prone to hyper-partisanship
Nina Khrushcheva has a more specific observation about clock mechanics. She applauded moments in U.S. history where politicians defended the procedural checks and balances even against other pressing moral demands, such as when "Secretary of State Daniel Webster supported the Compromise of 1850, despite his hatred of slavery, in order to save the union" and when "Robert Taft denounced the Nuremberg Trials, despite his hatred of the Nazis, to defend the fundamental US legal principle that a person could not be criminally charged on the basis of a retroactive statute." (Both of these examples were featured in President John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.) She notes the current initiative in late 2017 "to pass a tax bill that would benefit America’s wealthiest households at the expense of saddling the country with more than $1 trillion in additional debt" and she implies that the process could have benefited from "thorough public committee hearings" and with less willingness on the part of politicians to "trade their honor for the approval of their tribe."
the lack of a "common language to discuss good and evil" and the rise of "Christian neo-fundamentalism"
less face-to-face interaction due to technology and class segregation
institutional and bureaucratic failure
media portrayals of the world as a mean place
breakdown of family leading to emotional insecurity
too much state intrusion
Being open to changing one's beliefs according to evidence
Various recent studies have found that American conservatives are more likely to share fake news, more prone to self-deception, and less likely to change their beliefs in response to evidence. They use simpler language and many of them are falling prone to authoritarianism. This is discussed in a July 2020 New York Times article.
Starting fights
Legal actions for political purposes can worsen polarization. In May 2018, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said: "It's important that we not exacerbate the dysfunction and the polarization in the society that helped Donald Trump rise to power in the first place." He explained that impeachment needs to be an action taken to rectify a specific abuse. "If we were to use the impeachment power simply as a substitute for buyer's remorse, saying 'We thought this guy was terrible, but he's even worse,' if we were going to use it against ambient badness, rather than clear abuse of power — we would really use the impeachment power to undermine, rather than save, our democracy."
YouGov opinion polls in August 2018 found dramatic differences between Republicans and Democrats regarding opinions toward the n-word slur against black people. 90% of those who voted for Hillary Clinton, but only 53% of those who voted for Trump, agreed that white people should never use this word. Trump voters were even less likely to use the word "racist" to describe this behavior; while 86% of Clinton voters agreed that "it's racist for whites to use" that word, only 33% of Trump voters thought so. And while 86% of Clinton voters "wouldn't vote for [a] candidate who said it," only 26% of Trump voters held themselves to the same standard. The Washington Post story points out that, only twelve years previously, this gap barely existed; then, "55 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans said that the n-word was offensive."
The United States is polarizing faster than other countries
In early 2020, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Jesse Shapiro, Levi Boxell and Matthew Gentzkow, showed research that (according to a news release from Brown University) "present[s] the first ever multi-nation evidence on long-term trends in 'affective polarization' — a phenomenon in which citizens feel more negatively toward other political parties than toward their own. They found that in the U.S., affective polarization has increased more dramatically since the late 1970s than in the eight other countries they examined — the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden." The study shows that "polarization had also risen in Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland in the last 40 years, but to a lesser extent. In the U.K., Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden, polarization decreased."
The US is polarizing asymmetrically
"Another related challenge stems from what social scientists call “asymmetric polarization.” The Republican Party has moved further to the right than Democrats have to the left. And much of the extremism in the GOP has been tactical, where some party leaders have embraced a form of smashmouth partisanship with no guardrails as to what is permissible." (Julian Zelizer, CNN, Dec. 20, 2022)
there is a direct correspondence between the closing of newspapers and the polarization of people formerly served by those newspapers. If you live in a town with a thriving local news ecosystem, you are more likely to vote.
Reporting
Norm Eisen discussed journalistic norms, telling Chauncey DeVega for Salon in May 2022:
"That [old] norm deems that if you're going to provide one side of the story then you have to provide the other side of the story. If something happens, you need to report it neutrally. Editorializing is for the editorial page. The inferences, the interpretation, that doesn't go in the news. But if you have a norm-transgressing figure like Donald Trump, then those journalistic norms have to adapt to that circumstance. We can't be static. That is why journalism in this country is stuck."
At first glance, reporting both sides might seem to reduce polarization. But maybe it's the opposite, since it keeps people stuck in a "debate" that perhaps they don't need to be in. If one side is clearly better (however "better" is defined), then what needs to be done is accept the recommendation of the side, take some action, and move forward, while continuing to listen to objections (if made in good faith) and maintaining nuanced awareness of the situation.
To be clear, I don't think there's much value in being performatively uptight about this stuff anymore. The world's a nightmare. Be a human being. Reporters who spend most of their time trying to convince everyone they've lobotomized themselves are the ones lying to audiences. https://t.co/irTOrtkrIT
"well-documented process of partisan 'social sorting' following the parties’ racial realignment, as Americans from distinct socio-demographic groups came to identify more with one of the two major political parties, leaving us with a Democratic party that is racially and ethnically diverse, suburban and urban, secular and agnostic, and culturally liberal, and a Republican party that is more homogeneously white, Christian, rural, and culturally conservative.
And while the sorting has certainly happened on 'both sides' its outcome has been decidedly asymmetrical, resulting in a Republican party whose homogenous identity alignment gives them exceptional 'group fit.' And when people 'fit' nicely into their social identity category (they look the way most of their team looks, worship the way most of their team worships, live where most of their team lives, and live how most of their team lives), their social identity becomes salient. When an identity is salient, it is easy to leverage, activate, and mobilize through identity threats."
Responding to an October 2023 profile in the New York Times, here's A.R. Moxon talking about the meaning of safety (No Beliefs, Just Intentions, The Reframe (Substack), Dec 17, 2023): One family in the New York Times profile "needed safety. They left their home state because they were being eliminated by their state government." The other "wanted to feel safe. They left their state because of insufficient elimination of unwanted and deliberately abandoned people, and came to a state where the people they would rather not see—people who are in the greatest danger—are nowhere to be seen, almost as if they had been pre-cleared away ahead of time..." Moxon continues: "And I’m told the problem is that both sides are polarized, and both sides actually want the same thing, even though they can’t get over their disagreements over silly politics."
Urban-rural divide?
"Over the past 30 years, the American political landscape has been characterized by a growing divide between rural and urban voters, almost as if they’re on two opposing teams, according to Suzanne Mettler, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).
But the divide is confined largely to white Americans, Mettler and collaborators have found in an examination of the racial and ethnic facets of the trend.
When it comes to politics, Black and Latino residents of rural America differ far less, if at all, from their urban counterparts than do non-Hispanic white residents, the researchers report.
There's gonna be a lot of discourse about Hispanic voters. In January I ran around the RGV trying to figure out how voters we're feeling about Trump and Republicans and they had a lot to say!
www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/hispanic-voters-swung-trump-south-texas-1235499072/
Anat Shenker-Osorio says that the importance attached to "swing voters" is based on "median voter theory...a very old political science idea...[that] rests on the notion of the electorate as a fixed group of people. And so someone presumably occupies the ideological center of it."
In reality, though, "the composition of the electorate changes in every election," and the people in the ideological center (however exactly we may understand that) aren't the most important group to reach, if the question is how to win the election. There are always many people "who have never voted before, whether they've just aged into the electorate, never voted before because they just became naturalized, never voted before because they didn't feel like it, or are very unreliable voters." If they can be persuaded to vote, they're "surge voters" (new voters), and there are many more of them than there are "swing voters."
I treat "both sides" and "down the middle" as a kind of mainia, a force that can take over the news mind, presenting new ways not to make sense.
For reasons obscure, Amazon is doing a live election night program with Brian Williams as host.
Here's @oliverdarcy.bsky.social on what might go wrong.
I don't normally do this, but since I am very concerned about this Science letter www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... by the NAS president on the political polarization around science that is making the rounds.
So let me say my 2c 1/
The "radical right" is responsible for two thirds of all deadly acts of
"political violence" in the United States according to the right wing's very own Cato Institute.
I think the loss of Nonpolitical monoculture touchpoints (predominantly entertainment) because of streaming, helped contribute to why Trump was able to develop a cult.
"By the early twenty-first century, if you were Christian or evangelical, you had little choice but to vote Republican. Early partisan divides on abortion were followed by increasingly polarized positions on gay rights and eventually transgender rights. Wealthy Republicans used these issues to capture the white working-class vote, and they largely succeeded, even though voting Republican was often not in workers' economic interst. Moral imperatives and cultural identities were now, more than ever, driving voting patterns. White evangelicals now represent two-thirds of the Republican Party. By contrast, non-Christians — including agnostics, Jews, and Muslims — represent half of the Democratic Party."
"During the late eighties and throughout the nineties," Susie Meister wrote in early 2016 before the election, "evangelicalism hit its stride communicating and promoting a very specific message that amounted to a chorus of sound bites about “family values,” militarism, and the pro-life movement." Meister, someone who "attended church several times a week," realized:
"I could no longer reconcile Jesus’s calls for non-judgment, loving your enemies, and taking up your cross with many of the Religious Right’s positions on social services, women’s rights, and the LGBT community. Even though I felt alone in my theological shift, I was not. A recent Pew Research Center poll puts the evangelical retention rate at 65%...It isn’t just general education that can shift beliefs; indeed a recent study by Baylor University researcher Aaron Franzen found that increased reading of the Bible correlated with greater passion for social justice — a trait typically associated with liberalism."
She noted that Trump isn't the first example of Christians overlooking the personal history of their preferred candidate: "From Ronald Reagan’s divorce to Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, evangelical Christians give passes to those whose rhetoric is most in line with their philosophy and who they believe can win the election, even if that person’s biography isn’t in line with their religious doctrine."
Around the same time, in early 2016, an article on The Weekly Challenger began by calling Trump "a political cult leader" The article says that the "white working class" isn't seeing quite as much benefit from their historic white privilege anymore, as they "are killing themselves with pills and alcohol, committing suicide with guns, and dying of despair" and also just dying of old age which means that "the Republican Party’s base of voters is rapidly shrinking." Trump leverages what psychologists call "terror management theory," as, "when scared or under threat, conservative authoritarians are more likely to become tribal, bigoted, racist and generally more hostile to those they identify as some type of Other."
Given that the demographic base is shrinking, can the Republican Party just become...less racist, sexist, homophobic, and isolationist to expand their appeal to wider demographics? No, they can't, because that will explode what is left of their core base right now. Since the 1960s, "racism has been fundamental to American conservatism, and the GOP in particular," writes Zak Cheney-Rice in 2019, "even as its purportedly defining tenets have proven to be negotiable, from small government to antagonism toward autocrats to reduced deficit spending." Republican leaders (given how the party has defined itself for a half-century) will give up all other governing principles before they will give up their racism. This is not a matter of party "infiltration by a few bad eggs. On the contrary, it’s been apparent since the Nixon administration that the Republican Party would collapse without support from racists." They know they're in a losing battle and they're circling the wagons. The actual people who currently support the Republican Party will not be injured if the party gives up its racism or its power, but the Party itself as an institution may fall apart. What they have to do is radically transform the party to be anti-racist so that it no longer resembles what it's been saying and doing for the past half-century and reorganizes what remains of its core supporters. The leaders won't go through this effort. Unfortunately, "the movement’s racism problem is not the result of a hijacking or a coup, but of popular will. There are no innocents among today’s Republicans. There’s only the ugliness they’ve unleashed, and whether they’ve the courage to risk political ruin in order to eradicate it."
"The vast majority of black Protestants (80 percent), religiously unaffiliated Americans (75 percent), Hispanic Catholics (74 percent) and non-Christian religious Americans (73 percent) surveyed said they have negative opinions about Trump. Slim majorities of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics (both 52 percent) also said they are not fans of the president.
In fact, the only religious group that had a majority of respondents voicing a favorable opinion of Trump was white evangelical Protestants, with 68 percent of them saying they have a favorable view of Trump, including 28 percent with a very favorable opinion of the president." (Carol Kuruvilla, Huffington Post)
Apart from the clear pro-Trump majority among white evangelicals, writes Diana Butler Bass, "white Christianity right now is a dumpster of discord; internecine warfare has not been this bad since the 1920s when controversy ripped American churches apart on whether human beings evolved from monkeys." As a personal example, although Bass and her brother "grew up in the same Methodist Sunday school," they stopped speaking after the Charlottesville incident "when we argued about white nationalism and racism," as she reports two years after that incident.
My brother, as an adult, traded that God for a tougher, stricter one who exercises judgment against all who refuse to bend the knee, a kind of Emperor-God, enthroned in glory. This God has often shown up in Christian history; including in American fundamentalism. But from 1980 onward, he underwent a revival in several strands of American religion including Pentecostalism, neo-Calvinism, traditionalist Roman Catholicism, and some Orthodox communities. He is a masculine Sovereign, and a winner-God for people feeling displaced in a pluralistic world. And after 9/11, this militaristic God became more real.
A Dungeons & Dragons manual, Villain Design Handbook, informally uses a simpler definition: “for the purpose of this book a cult is defined as any exclusive group that uses fear and intimidation to control its members.”
"[Mark] Lilla and others have suggested that political cults tend to fill religious vacuums; that is, they tend to arise when people lose faith in the efficacy of the religious status quo to manage their problems. In other words, in times of confusion and fear, people will vouchsafe unto symbols of the nation, the state, the race, the leader, and so on what they used to reserve for God and related religious symbols. Political religion therefore always competes in some form with preexisting religious organizations and beliefs, giving rise to a range of outcomes that include cooptation, intimidation, repression, and other possibilities as well. This precisely is what led Voegelin to insist on similarities between authoritarian and totalitarian systems and religious systems..."
Using an 11-point list of cultic structure and belief, Garfinkle finds that Trumpism is cultic only to a "middling extent," and moreover its cultiness has been decreasing since the election was won. He warns that, nevertheless, "[t]o the extent it is more cult-like than its recent predecessors, the 'excitement' may be just ahead of us as the movement circles the wagons."
It's not true — Shannon Ashley wrote in 2018, identifying herself as someone who once emerged from a cult — that cults are "always religious," that only a few people are at risk for joining cults, that cults "prey on the weak and are easy to identify," and that most people who join are lost causes and can never emerge. A real cult, she says, uses "thought reform to challenge reality."
Reza Aslan, author of God: A Human History, points out in an interview on Nov. 20, 2017 that "to this day, still, three-quarters of white evangelicals strongly support him," and "support for him is highest among those who go to church at least once a week." He asks why churchgoing makes one more likely to support a
"lying, lecherous, greedy, sexist, racist, narcissistic sociopath whose entire worldview makes a mockery of Christianity, makes a mockery of basic Christian tenets like humility, and empathy, and care for the poor. And scholars like myself have been just wracking our brains trying to figure this out, 'cause it makes no sense."
He observes that this is limited to white evangelicals (as two-thirds of evangelicals of color supported Hillary Clinton). He also observes that white evangelicals (who called themselves "Values Voters") used to say that public morality was important for politicians, but today, atheists are more likely to say that. Aslan concludes that Trump has "transformed a large swath of white evangelicals into his own personal cult." Aslan is using "cult" in a "pejorative sense...it's a 'value judgment' word." He believes Trumpism is a cult insofar it is "an insulated group of individuals in thrall to a charismatic leader to whom they have given divine status, prophetic status, and that is definitively what has happened among a large swath of white evangelicals when it comes to Trump."
On June 19, 2019, TV pastor (and "End Times prepper") Jim Bakker said on his show that Trump was elected "because God's people voted and the world knows it, the enemies of the gospel know it." He warned that "if we keep losing, you’re going to see the leaders of the church and the leaders of the gospel and the political conservative leaders that are powerful, you are going to see them suddenly die, suddenly killed—suddenly as they were driving, suddenly as they were in a boat, suddenly in an airplane—you’re going to see it one after another.” He knows this because "God spoke this to me years ago what would happen near the end and I believe we’re in that time." In August 2018, Bakker warned that "the evil in this country is so bad, if I was a Republican — which I have been my whole life — I couldn’t wear a hat with my candidate on it without concern about being murdered in the street." However, Bakker is aware that Trump does not fit the image of a typical Christian leader. In January 2020, Right Wing Watch shared a video of Bakker apparently joking that, because Trump is so difficult to love or even to forgive, only true Christians are prepared to love and accept Trump.
Evangelicals aside, most Americans are displeased with the president, and therefore his approach to campaigning and governing may not survive in American politics. Ezra Klein's Nov. 7 article in Vox:
"Trumpism without Trump was possible before Trump was president. It might be possible after he’s president. It’s not possible while he’s president.
In 2016, Trump had the advantage of being a true outsider: He had no record to answer for, no unemployment rate to explain, no votes to justify. For all his oddities and eccentricities, he was a blank slate — a businessman to those who wanted a businessman, a culture warrior to those who wanted a culture warrior, a pragmatist to those who wanted a pragmatist, a conservative to those who wanted a conservative, and so on. He was theory severed from practice; “ism” without the reality check of is.
But now we have Trumpism with Trump, and the American people don’t much like it. Trump is no longer an abstraction, Trumpism no longer an idea. Instead, we are watching the real thing: a White House in chaos, a legislative agenda in shambles, a world in which nuclear war is likelier and America’s global leadership is diminished. Trump isn’t merely unpopular; he is less popular than any president at this point in their term since the advent of modern polling, and he is that unpopular even though the economy is growing and Americans are not dying in large numbers overseas."
At least a couple scandals centered around Liberty University.
First, in 2015, Liberty's chief information officer John Gauger accepted an offer of $50,000 from the Trump campaign to manipulate the polls on two news websites. Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen gave him a Walmart bag containing roughly $12,000 in cash and a collectible MMA boxing glove; he never delivered the rest of the money.
Secondly, the following year, there was a politicized Christian battle. Going into the 2016 Republican caucuses, Sen. Ted Cruz (whose father is an evangelical pastor) had expected the support of Liberty's president Jerry Falwell Jr., but shortly before the causes, Falwell (a businessman, not a pastor like his father) suddenly announced his support for Trump.
When the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016 before the election, Newsweek reports, "student journalists accused [Liberty's president Jerry] Falwell Jr. of censorship for axing an opinion piece in the student newspaper that blasted the then-Republican nominee." Liberty, the largest employer in Lynchburg, Va., had hosted Trump as a commencement speaker in 2017. In March 2018, Falwell appeared on CNN, defending Trump's character in the wake of sex scandals. Some Liberty students criticized Falwell for this:
To be clear, most Liberty students are not moral relativists like Falwell. Most don’t even know he was on TV tonight. That veneer of logos behind him makes it look like we all stand behind his words. Some do, but many do not. https://t.co/WGnXYIhLWW
A new organization called Red Letter Christians planned a revival event in Lynchburg for April 2018, intended to be somewhat of a political protest against Falwell. Professional evangelicals were afraid of damaging their ties to Liberty, so Red Letter Christians had a difficult time recruiting speakers for the event. Shortly before the event, Falwell banned the Red Letter Christians from campus and said the student newspaper couldn't cover the event. Red Letter exec director Don Golden said he wasn't inclined to ask permission to do what he does, since "we weren’t asked permission for evangelical leaders to say that Donald Trump is the president for evangelicals." In the end, the hall they rented for the revival was filled to less than one-fifth capacity, though many people watched online.
When asked at the end of 2018, "Is there anything President Trump could do that would endanger that support from you or other evangelical leaders?" Falwell answered, "No." A long investigative article published in the New York Times in June 2019, based on information gathered "from a lawsuit filed against the Falwells in Florida; the investigation into Mr. [Michael] Cohen by federal prosecutors in New York; and the gonzo-style tactics of the comedian and actor Tom Arnold," found that Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer, had been willing to help the Falwells with 2015 lawsuit over ownership of the gay-friendly Miami Hostel. As a favor to Jerry and Becki Falwell, who were being threatened with the revelation of compromising photographs of them, Cohen was thinking of buying and burying the photographs. The photos may have conveniently disappeared on their own without Cohen's involvement, however, and, since then, "no photos have surfaced."
A New York Times editorial on June 7, 2018 suggested that "the cult of Trump" really is just about the man:
"Mr. Trump’s favorability rating among Republicans is at 87 percent — the second-highest rating within a president’s party at an administration’s 500-day mark since World War II. (George W. Bush was slightly higher following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.) The absence of Republican criticism of Mr. Trump, in turn, serves to reinforce his popularity, creating a cycle cravenness that has now made it risky for even the staunchest of conservatives to question Mr. Trump. * * * Former House speaker John Boehner addressed the crowd at a policy conference in May 2018: 'There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.'"
Scot Lehigh satirized in the Boston Globe on June 21: "The Great Trumpkin had hoped to rally the entire cult to his side. Just follow Corey’s lead and offer a sneering 'womp womp' to stories of traumatized kids. Why, the Thugwomps, with its nice 19th century ring, could even become the new nickname of the Grand Old Cult!"
The ultimate cause of this situation, however, is Trump himself. His followers are not asked to follow the contours of an ideology. They are asked to embrace his impulses and instincts. Those instincts move in a clear direction: toward feeding racial and ethnic divisions, salting national wounds, undermining rival institutions and violating restrictive precedents. But the unifying principle is Trump himself.
G.K. Chesterton argued that the egotist is the exact opposite of the dogmatist. The dogmatist believes there is an objective truth that he wants everyone to see. The egotist believes that all his views are interesting because they are related to him.
When it comes to President Trump, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between a political strategy and a nervous breakdown. His tweeted trash talk, his meandering stream of consciousness media availabilities and his shameless embrace of sleaziness are not the signs of a healthy mind. Trump’s followers might eventually look up to find they were actors in someone else’s delusion.
* * *
Trump is effectively setting a new standard of political morality and requiring his supporters to defend it. He is asking elected Republicans, in particular, to agree with his claim that a practice uniformly viewed as corruption in the past is actually an example of fighting corruption now. That is the little thing, the small thing, which Trump demands of his followers: To call hot cold. To call black white. To call wrong right.
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s idea of “incommensurability” strikes me as relevant here. If all moral claims are merely “emotive” — statements about ourselves rather than the nature of reality — then there is no way to argue between them.
* * *
Trump is the emotivist par excellence. He holds no objective, abstract beliefs about the meaning of justice or duty. He approves of things that help him and disapproves of things that hurt him. There is no other moral grounding.
Rather than shaping President Trump’s agenda in Christian ways, they [white evangelical Protestants] have been reshaped into the image of Trump himself. Or, more accurately, they have become involved in a political throuple with Trump and Fox News, in which each feeds the grievances and conspiracy thinking of the others.
The result has properly been called cultlike. For many followers, Trump has defined an alternative, insular universe of facts and values that only marginally resembles our own.
* * *
Thirty-one percent say there is almost nothing that Trump could do to forfeit their approval. This is preemptive permission for any violation of the moral law or the constitutional order. It is not support; it is obeisance.
In January 2022, Democratic strategist Paul Begala pointed out that Republicans no longer have a political ideology apart from Trump. In 2006, "16 G.O.P. senators...voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act," yet now in 2022, those same senators are blocking that same legislation, because now they see that, if USAmericans vote, then Trump cannot win. They no longer have political beliefs (if they ever did); more obviously, they have Trumpism.
But what are the aims?
If Trumpism is a cult, what is its ideology and what are its goals?
Perhaps none. In June 2018, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker said: "It's becoming a cultish thing, isn't it?" He elaborated that this is "an administration that wakes up every day on an ad hoc basis just making stuff up as they go along with no coherency to it".
"You just can’t," Charles M. Blow wrote in the New York Times on June 20, 2018, "construct prisons for babies. You can’t rip children from mothers and fathers. You can’t use the power of the American government to institute and oversee a program of state-sponsored child abuse. You can’t have a system where the process and possibility of reunification is murky and maybe futile." Complaining that "although two-thirds of Americans overall opposed the policy, a majority of Republicans supported it," he offered this diagnosis: "That to me goes beyond standard political tribalism. That ventures into the territory that the Tennessee Republican senator Bob Corker described last week: This is cultlike." Indeed: "Not even the sight of devastated families could move the party that once called itself the party of family values. Not even the idea of 'tender age' internment camps for babies could move the party built on the protection of 'unborn babies.'"
Tribalism is now not just one force in American politics, it’s the overwhelming one, and tribalism abhors reality if it impugns the tribe. But you can’t have both tribalism and public health...What we are seeing is whether this tribalism can be sustained even when it costs tens of thousands of lives, even when it means exposing yourself to a deadly virus, even when it is literally more important than your own life. We are entering the Jonestown phase of the Trump cult this summer.
What is a cult?
"The concept of cult was implicit in the work of Howard Becker on spiritualism, who described cult in terms of an ‘amorphous, loose-textured, uncondensed type of social structure ... is that of purely personal ecstatic experience, salvation, comfort and mental or physical healing’ (Von Wiese & Becker cited in Nelson, 1968). Becker’s interpretation formed the basis of the definition provided by J. Milton Yinger (1957, cited in Nelson, 1968), who maintained that a cult is normally a small, short-lived group, developed around the personality of a charismatic leader."
— Lisa Sugiura, The Incel Rebellion: The Rise of the Manosphere and the Virtual War Against Women (2021), open access.
Aside: According to a 2023 CNN story, "an unincorporated area of Volusia County, [Florida,] Cassadaga is home to the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp, a community founded around the religious movement Spiritualism that is 'based upon the principle of continuous life demonstrated through Mediumship,' according to the camp’s official press kit."
Mary Midgley wrote in the early 1980s that Nazism lacked any consistent ideology except for hatred of Jews.
"In general, then, there are strong objections to viewing all wrongdoers as mad, as well as strong temptations to do it, and for many cases people do not find this explanation plausible. In these cases, however, another strategy often comes into play to make the offence look intelligible. This is to credit the offenders with having a complete morality of their own, which, for them, justifies their actions. This idea leads people to suppose that (for instance) the Nazis must have been original reasoners, with an independent, consistent and well-thought-out ethical theory — a view which their careers and writings do not support at all. As Hannah Arendt points out, at the Nuremburg trials the lack of this much-advertised commodity became painfully obvious. 'The defendants accused and betrayed each other and assured the world that they 'had always been against it'....Although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology.' This was not just from a failure of nerve, though that in itself would be significant in a movement apparently devoted to the military virtues. It was also because there was not really much coherent ideology that could be defended. The only part of it which carried real passionate conviction was emotional and destructive; it was the hatred of the Jews. This always remained constant, but almost every other element varied according to the audience addressed and the political possibilities of the moment. The enemy might be Communism or capitalism, the elite or the rabble, France or Russia or the Weimar government, just as interest dictated at the time. It was therefore hard to say much that was positive and constructive about the aims of the regime. Germany was to expand, but why it would be a good thing that it should do so remained obscure." (Mary Midgley. Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay. (First published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.) Kindle edition: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.)
The inevitable observation is that Nazism did not need a complex ideology to be very dangerous, not only to Jews, but to other identity groups and vulnerable people and to foreign and domestic government institutions.
Political cults may be prone to fail ultimately since, as Cheeseman and Klaas write, "the electorate is often deeply cynical about politicians. For all the capacity of presidents to build personality cults, citizens are generally skeptical about the motivations of political leaders and their ability and determination to deliver on their promises." (Nicholas Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. How to Rig an Election. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2018.)
Jeremy W. Peters interviewed several Trump supporters for the New York Times in a June 23, 2018 article. One woman said that “overblown” criticism from the left “makes me angry at them, which causes me to want to defend him [Trump] to them more." A man said: "He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff. But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old. Give the guy a little.” Another woman said: "It bothers me that he doesn’t tell the truth, but I guess I kind of expect that, and I expect that from the media, too — not to always tell the truth or to slant it one way." And another man described hearing criticism more as a visceral rather than intellectual experience: "It’s kind of like when you experience a sensation over and over and over again. A sensation is no longer a sensation. It’s just, 'Oh, here we are again.'" Other people emphasized the responsibility of immigrants for their own fate — "I think it’s terrible about the kids getting split up from their parents. But the parents shouldn’t have been here" — or of the left for their comments and activism — “It’s just incredible what the nation is trying to do to disrupt this president and his agenda." A high school student said: "I have a fair bit of skepticism toward him [Trump]. But I feel like he is trying his best."
The next morning, Tom Nichols threaded his tweets: "The NYT piece on Trump supporters digging in is why I said, well over a year ago, that there was no way to reason with them. There is no level of moral collapse or political incompetence they will not defend.
The question is why. ... They double-down because they know that even if they win, they lose. They're desperately trying to recapture a world that doesn't exist, and never did. That old lady crying for Trump?" — here, Nichols referred to a June 21 MSNBC interview — "She knows it's over. The world she once loved - or thought she did - isn't coming back. ... This explains a lot of the fury, I think, and why Trumpers are the angriest winners in American political history. They won, but they know it doesn't mean anything, and they double down out of shame and fear. What choice is there? ... when people are ashamed of themselves, they double down. The people in the NYT story *know*. They *know*. But once you defend the indefensible, there's no climb-down. That's why there's no point in trying to reason with them." (tweets 1, 3, 5, 7) In response to a comment, Nichols added: "We are no longer a virtuous country. The rest is just the endgame." Cesar Falson commented: "It’s like being lost when you’re driving and never wanting to admit being lost so you double down and make things worse. But then again, the easy answer is this is just cultish behavior." Another commenter said: "They tend to be authoritarians. They believe they are right because they are in a position of authority, i.e., white, esp. white male. Being right can be largely unrelated to facts to them. It's the evangelical way which is why his infidelities don't bother them, authority wins."
ok cmon guys all i did was click the link you gave me
I don't think it can be mentioned enough that Jeremy Peters is friendly enough with white supremacist transphobe Ann Coulter to attend her book party and casually touch her on her bare arm. Would you expect fair minded fact based reporting on trans issues from such a man?
The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan is a book about "the persuasiveness, not cultishness, of Trump, written by a cult expert," according to an interview with the author. Hassan said:
My definition of a destructive cult is an authoritarian pyramid-structured group, with a section in recruitment and mind control on the people it recruits and indoctrinates to be dependent and obedient. So, for me, the designation of “cult” includes Trump being a malignant narcissist, which is the stereotypical profile of cult leaders. I parallel his behaviors with people like Jim Jones, L. Ron Hubbard, and other cult leaders.
The overall formula of a cult is that the members are indoctrinated into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil version of reality, where they are not thinking for themselves, they’re not thinking with their consciences, they’re cut off from other forms of information that question their indoctrination. In fact, they’re explicitly punished if they listen to the other side.
He added: "A lot of people are going to wake up one day from what they were supporting with Trump and realize how they have been taken. At that point, there’s going to be a lot of upset, angry, ashamed, and embarrassed people."
In April 2020, Chauncey Devega interviewed Hassan for "The Truth Report." Hassan explained that "Trump was trained to be a magical thinker as a child" because of his association with the church of Norman Vincent Peale. "It’s been described as a type of solipsistic reality where Trump defines his own world and what is real or not...In this way of thinking, if Trump says the coronavirus pandemic is just going to somehow get better then it is going to happen. And when that does not happen, then Trump can deny ever saying such a thing, blame the Chinese, the Democrats or anyone else, instead of just saying he was wrong." Although "right now it is premature to say that Donald Trump leads a death cult," Hassan said, as in that type of cult the president would be "telling the followers to kill themselves" or saying "it does not matter if those people who are not in the death cult die," his cult would be a death cult when "the coronavirus pandemic overwhelms the health care system." But even confronting the death of family members and friends may not prompt people to leave the death cult, as "the cult part of their psyche is going to say it was their time [to die]. If Trump’s followers are religious, they will simply rationalize it as the dead are going to a better place in heaven."
In June 2022, Hassan was interviewed by Chauncey DeVega. He said: "My thesis was completely confirmed after Jan. 6 [2021] and all the efforts by the GOP to avoid being held accountable for their role in Trump's coup attempt." He reflected:
"As I began to do the research for my book, it became very clear to me that he would not have been elected president if not for the thousands of new apostolic reformation ministers supporting him and then telling their millions of followers to believe in Trump as someone doing the work of God. They represent a right-wing Christian religious movement that does not believe in equality under the law, or in civil rights for women and those not of their faith. These right-wing Christian leaders want to destroy any type of organized effort to advance liberty and freedom and knowledge. Trump as a cult leader and authoritarian is a perfect fit for their beliefs."
Regarding Trump's power over Christians, Hassan said:
"The biggest single bloc of true believers are the members of right-wing Christian fundamentalist churches and other groups. These are authoritarian religions where the members believe that their pastor is an apostle who is directly connected to God and getting direct revelations.
If the pastor says, "God wants Trump," you're going to believe in Trump. If the pastor says, "God gave me a revelation where we are now following Ron DeSantis. God's taken the blessing away from Donald Trump," then those people are going to blindly follow DeSantis. Why? Because they're already in a mind-control cult."
Hey, here's a 2024 update on the Gov. Ron DeSantis administration in Florida:
Wow: The Florida official who sent letters threatening TV stations for airing pro-choice ads has filed a declaration in federal court stating that (1) DeSantis' office directed him to send them, and (2) he resigned rather than sending more. s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25...
Ashley Smith is the cofounder of the "Reopen NC" movement. Her husband, Adam Smith, posted Facebook Live videos on May 22, 2020 that threatened: "But are we willing to kill people? Are we willing to lay down our lives? We have to say, ‘Yes.’ We have to say, ‘Yes.’ Is that violence? Is that terrorism? No, it’s not terrorism. I’m not trying to strike fear in people by saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ I’m gonna say, ‘If you bring guns, I’m gonna bring guns. If you’re armed with this, we’re going to be armed with this.’" He added, as Raw Story put it, "that he feels called by God and by his understanding of the Constitution to prepare for a violent showdown." He calls himself a "constitutionalist" and said that the lockdown situation "is a test. This is seeing if we are ready to accept the mark of the beast, if we are ready to accept this New World Order system they want to implement over humanity."
Selected tweets from a 5 June 2019 thread:
But they don't confront you on the street and tell you about Xenu and thetans and how they'll charge you half a million dollars you don't have to give you superpowers, but it's okay, you can also pay for the superpowers through slavery.
The tiers of Scientology are designed to turn off people who would definitely sound the alarm at the really ridiculous stuff, while conditioning the people who remain to accept it without question, on the basis of what they've already accepted.
Trump does not care about the people who won't go along with his lies, except to the extent that we are a threat, individually or singly. He is not trying to convince us. He is not trying to reach us. He sees us as irrelevant and wants to render us completely so.
The thing about a loyalty test is it's not just a query, not just checking to see if loyalty is there. It's a way of reinforcing it. Passing the test means you're invested in your own continued loyalty, whether because of a good feeling you got for praise, or the price you paid.
The people who surrendered their senses to Trump on day 1, who accepted and defended or repeated his lies about his inauguration, took a step into an alternate reality of his construction, just as people who rise through a tier of Scientology do.
Yes, thank you! That actually tripped a lot of these thoughts, when it happened, but I didn't have the time or clarity of thought to sit down and put them in order.
We're at the point he can put out a video contradicting him and say it proves him right.https://t.co/eI4hEOOcn5
So he's trimmed this thing down to the absolute bare minimum. No finesse. No dazzle, just razzle. He'll say "Here's a video showing not skub." and slap up a video of skub, and count on his believers to sort themselves out from the herd.
And this is because Comey had made him president, which meant Comey had the power to swing a presidency, which meant Comey *terrified* him. He needed to know: did you do this out of loyalty? Are you mine? Can I control you? Do I own you?
Trump is gambling that when push comes to shove, he will have enough people he can rely on, enough power that is 100% his, to defeat whatever obstacles come his way. Whether this means winning at the ballot box, skewing the ballot box disregarding the ballot box, he'll try.
So, for those waking up, Donald Trump is embracing the idea that he’s considered a messiah. It’s a phenomenon inside apocalyptic Christianity that began within the evangelical community and the New World Order fad of the 1990’s. pic.twitter.com/iUeLQ7aH5P
As someone who grew up in apocalyptic evangelicalism, it’s a familiar concept and sadly the logical conclusion of a narrative that’s been fermenting since the 1970’s.
A lot of this begins with Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live? which claimed liberalism was destroying society and Hal Lindsay’s The Late, Great Planet Earth which profited off pushing Book of Revelations hysteria.
The Christian Right embraced these ideas as a means to profit and get involved in the political sphere. It worked better than blatant segregation, this hinting at minorities as being agents of Satan, a lesson Jerry Falwell learned.
There’s a bunch of stuff too with Ronald Reagan being an occultist who believed himself to be an instrument of a benevolent god who was using him to fight Satan and bring a new kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
In the 1990’s Republicans pushed New World Order narratives embedded in apocalyptic evangelicalism to hurt Bill Clinton’s standing, thus creating a new narrative that liberals were working with evil forces to destroy America from within.
This narrative not only hurt Democrat’s, but inflamed white supremacist extremists who now believed they weren’t racists, they were fighting a war to save America, they were Christian patriots, a new army of God’s.
With Obama, the narrative changed. It grew into the idea that Obama was a foreign Manchurian candidate, possibly the very antichrist himself. The rumors were everywhere and evangelicals became convinced by Fox News and Glenn Beck the final battle was nigh.
So. If Obama is the antichrist, the head of the New World Order, the easy jump is to Trump, his opposite, being the messiah. It’s a giant, incomprehensible mess of narrative and myth and generational manipulation. And it’s as dangerous as it gets.
By the way, this is the key to understanding the QAnon nonsense. It’s written like a combination of Nostradamus and Revelation. It’s the incomprehensible narrative necessary to explain Trump as infallible and an otherworldly champion.
By the way, this is the key to understanding the QAnon nonsense. It’s written like a combination of Nostradamus and Revelation. It’s the incomprehensible narrative necessary to explain Trump as infallible and an otherworldly champion.
This death cult mentality has driven US politics for years. They don’t want peace in the Middle East. They don’t want a drawdown of the military as they think it’s necessary for the literal Battle of Armageddon. Why invest in infrastructure and programs if we’re going to die?
If you want to learn more about QAnon, try this episode from Patrick Farnsworth's "Last Born in the Wilderness." It's the August 12, 2020 episode: "Jared Yates Sexton: QAnon — A License to Fascistic Impulses." If you only have one minute, listen especially to 10:30 – 11:30. "QAnon is an interactive supernatural New World Order," Jared Yates Sexton says, which "gives people who are powerless the sensation of having power, which is part of a cult."
The antisemitism of the QAnon conspiracy theory — always latent in its fantasies of elite blood-drinking cabals — has also become much more open. As the A.D.L. has reported, one of the most popular QAnon influencer, GhostEzra, “is an open Nazi who praises Hitler, admires the Third Reich, and decries the supposedly treacherous nature of Jews.”
Andrew Napolitano, a former judge who is now a judicial analyst at Fox News, argued in an opinion piece published by Fox on Sept. 5, 2019 that Trump simply has too much power.
"This question of presidential power is not an academic one. Nor is it a question unique to the Trump presidency, as it has risen numerous times before Trump entered office. But the audacious manner of Trump's employment of presidential powers has brought it to public scrutiny.
* * *
After years of faithless Congresses legally but unconstitutionally ceding power to the presidency, we have arrived where we are today — a president who spends unappropriated funds, raises taxes, defies courts and changes immigration laws on his own. I have written before that the Republicans who rejoice in this will weep over it when a Democrat is in the White House. No president should have unconstitutional powers."
This is what seems to be driving away a small but meaningful number of Republicans: not just that Trump is doing things like ripping children from their parents’ arms at the border, but that so much of the Republican electorate loves him precisely because of it. You can be disgusted at the venom coursing off the podium at one of Trump’s rallies, but the real horror is in the crowd, lustily cheering every insult, every lie, every call to hate.
If you’re one of these Republican defectors, you probably realize that Trump didn’t create the ugliness that has driven you away; he merely revealed it. A healthier party would have spat him out like a piece of rancid meat. Instead, it swallowed heartily and proclaimed this the best thing it had ever tasted.
Anthony Scaramucci, who famously lasted only days as Trump's WH Communications Director, referred to Trumpism as a "cult" in November 2019:
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” - Chinese Proverb
I, along with many of my fellow Americans, made a mistake in not abandoning @realDonaldTrump sooner. But today is the next best day to leave the cult. Let’s fix this together.
Jeff Sessions, who was elected Senator in 1996 and held that seat until he made the mistake of accepting the role of Attorney General in Trump's White House in 2017 (which Trump allowed him to hold for less than two years), now wants his Senate seat back. Avi Selk notes that Sessions' 1996 campaign ad had mentioned "fundamental values" and "a God in heaven who orders the universe." In Sessions' 2019 campaign ad, by contrast, "the only higher power mentioned...is the president."
At an August 2019 press conference about his trade war with China, Trump yelled, "I am the chosen one!" He subsequently tweeted that he had been joking and that he would have "No more trust!" for the media who had suggested otherwise. He also claimed that he had been smiling, although the video shows that he was not smiling. In November 2019, however, Rick Perry appeared on the "Fox & Friends" TV show saying that he recently provided Trump with "a one-pager" with information about Old Testament kings with the comment that, "You know, you said you were 'the chosen one.' And I said, 'You were.'" Co-host Pete Hegseth said that supporters "feel precisely the way Rick Perry does," saying that they "dismiss" reporters' information about Trump's personal failings, since "God has used imperfect people forever, because we're all imperfect, but what he [Trump] has withstood is unlikely really what any other mortal could understand." Co-host Rachel Campos Duffy appeared to try to dial this back, attributing a more orthodox theological statement to Trump supporters (or so it seems, from context): "They also say, 'I don't need a savior, I already got one.'"
This kind of thing is what you see in authoritarian states with cults of personality and state media, not democracies. pic.twitter.com/lVgY1okRgy
Of Perry's "chosen one" comment, Jay Parini wrote: "This notion has been going around the administration like a strange virus, infecting Sarah Sanders and Mike Pompeo as well. I don't have any easy answers, and it worries me to see evangelicals who do." Anthea Butler said, "Perhaps what the Trump era has laid bare is how nakedly church leaders' support of him is about political power."
Former Minnesota Congressperson Michele Bachmann said in April 2019 that "we will, in all likelihood, never see a more godly, biblical president again in our lifetime." She said in October 2019 that Trump "understands the difference between good and evil. We have not seen a president with greater moral clarity than this president," and that his likely impeachment has "almost biblical implications."
In November 2019, not long after Attorney General William Barr referred to the "organized destruction" of secularism that has allegedly "marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values," Thomas B. Edsall made this observation:
The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life.
Presidential historians ranked Lincoln as the nation’s greatest president, and Trump as one of the worst in a 2017 survey...But ordinary Republicans, in a 53-percent-to-47-percent majority, favor Trump over the Civil War hero, according to a survey conducted by the Economist magazine and polling site YouGov.com.
Most white evangelicals say that Jesus will return within their lifetimes. (That is: In a 2010 poll, nearly 60 percent of white evangelicals said Jesus would return by the year 2050.) A Mother Jones article by Stephanie Mencimer explained: "The most blatant appeal to this constituency came when Trump made the controversial decision to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a long-desired goal of evangelicals who see it as fulfilling a biblical prophecy necessary in securing the Second Coming. What may be less obvious is how Trump’s disdain for international governing bodies like NATO also dovetails almost perfectly with End Times theology, whether he realizes it or not."
Also according to Mencimer: While "Trump’s self-created crisis in Iran seems to have no relationship to any sort of coherent foreign policy or geopolitical plan for the future," it resonates for evangelicals. "The administration has struggled to provide evidence of any imminent threats from Soleimani, but the timing for the assassination was certainly fortuitous for someone looking to mobilize evangelicals." Indeed, "Trump announced the killing of Soleimani just hours before appearing at the launch of his campaign’s Evangelicals for Trump coalition in Miami." And thus: "A few days after the killing of Soleimani, [megachurch pastor Greg] Laurie made a YouTube video with Don Stewart, author of 25 Signs We Are Near the End, to discuss Iran and the End Times. 'The scenario that the Bible predicted, seemingly so impossible,' Stewart promised, 'is now falling into place.'"
In 2024, the U.S. Secret Service became aware of an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump in revenge for Soleimani's killing. Trump posted to his social media platform that he endorsed collective punishment for the entire country: "If they do 'assassinate President Trump,' which is always a possibility, I hope that America obliterates Iran, wipes it off the face of the Earth..."
On July 22, 2024, an anonymous account began sending Trump campaign documents to Politico. On August 9, Microsoft reported that Iranian hackers had "sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign," and the next day, the Trump campaign acknowledged that it had been hacked.
"NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich had asked the president to respond to Iran’s personal death threats against him as he calls for regime change amid ongoing, and increasingly deadly, protests against Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“Well, they shouldn’t be doing it but I’ve left notification, anything ever happens, we’re going to blow ... the whole country is going to get blown up,” vowed Trump, who has been the reported target of Iran before following his 2020 order to assassinate top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani."
HUGE scandal if true. Laura Loomer got Marco Rubio to throw two Iranian women with green cards in ICE jail to be stripped of status and deported, claiming they were related to Qasem Soleimani.
Official documents provided to @dropsitenews.com appear to show they are NOT related; they're innocent.
Jonathan Chait, regarding "the cruelty is the point":
For many of Trump’s policy actions, the cruelty is the point. But for some of his more trivial episodes, the stupidity is the point. The gleeful rejection of objective truth, throwing oneself fully into Trumpism, is a marker of tribal loyalty.
Trump obviously has no reason to credit Kansas rather than Missouri with hosting the Super Bowl champions. The point of defending it is to demonstrate that the Trump cult can create its own reality and needn’t make any concession to external truth.
I know we’re used to it, but there is no rational or coherent explanation for any of this. There is no strategy, or political genius. There is just a delusional pathology in which he says whatever comes into his head at any moment, determined entirely by his mood, which is usually bad. * * * The key thing, however, is that none of this seems to matter to the supporters of the president. For them, the pathology seems to be the point.
"Kakistocracy" is a word for rulership by the worst people.
News -- President Trump told network anchors during a private lunch today that he will award Rush Limbaugh with the Medal of Freedom, one day after the prominent political radio host announced he has advanced lung cancer.https://t.co/Entc5UTXKm
Sarah Posner explained in Unholy (2020): "The evangelical publisher Stephen Strang, who owns the widely read Charisma magazine, which promotes the careers of televangelists like White and a widening circle of self-styled prophets and revivalists, wrote in his hagiography, God and Donald Trump, that Christian leaders believe Trump is a 'chosen vessel used by God despite his flaws.'"
Companies like these oil and energy giants are the architects of the current societal crisis. In this economy, they have worked together to undermine the healthcare system, scuttle reform, and ensure lower wages among American workers. Partnered with the Republican Party, they have created an anti-future death cult dedicated to immediate profit and gain at the expense and sacrifice of the future. This partnership has resulted in unbelievable consequences, including a dilapidated national infrastructure, fractured social connections, and the twisting of reality.
The Republican Party has aimed to reduce access to education and the impact of the curriculum:
Since desegregation, white supremacists have attempted to wipe out public education in favor of private schools where African Americans can still be barred from the halls. The wealthy and corporate interests prefer a defanged curriculum that hides their past crimes and manipulations in favor of making students more susceptible to their marketing and propaganda while ensuring they’re incapable of understanding government or civic duties.
"These companies and political bodies," Sexton writes, do "trust experts," but "undermine them as to keep their intentions clandestine in nature. As early as the 1980's energy companies like Exxon were warning of 'potentially catastrophic' climate change, a concept they still deny now, four decades later. The companies were well aware that they were peddling poison and ushering in destruction on a truly global scale."
This brought us to where we are now in the 2020 pandemic:
They manifested an America ripe for manipulation and control, but doomed them to a society teeming with a virus they can’t believe exists and facing an extinction they can’t believe will come. The people they’ve affected, the people they’ve trained not to trust experts or educators, are in the streets demanding the right to die so they can return to work that is designed to exploit and lessen the quality of their lives.
Jeff Sharlet, author of "The Family,"wrote for Vanity Fair on June 18, 2020 that people at a Louisiana rally thrilled in a relatively new "white power" hand gesture, a "kind of coded message, a sense of possessing knowledge shared only by a select few. It’s Möbius strip politics, Trumpism’s defining oxymoron: a populist elite, a mass movement of 'free thinkers' all thinking the same thing. They love Trump because he makes them feel like insiders even as they imagine him their outsider champion." Many of them believe the president "is on a mission from God to expose (and destroy) the hidden demons of the deep state." Jesse Lee Peterson, a pastor, "calls Trump the Great White Hope because, he says, 'Number one, he is white. Number two, he is of God.'" Another rally attendee put it: "God is using him...He’s the chosen one to run America."
A rally attendee that Sharlet spoke to described Democratic politicians as "demons. Not even human"; this man once spent 33 days in jail for threatening to replicate the Pizzagate assault on another pizzeria in the neighborhood. He pled guilty to threatening: "I’m coming to finish what the other guy didn’t. I’m coming there to save the kids, and then I’m going to shoot you and everyone in the place." He claimed that his preacher told him, "You did a good thing." He came to the rally wearing a homemade "GOT TRUMP?" shirt and a plastic mask with Trump's face on it.
Sharlet writes:
The gospel of Thomas — the doubting one — does not, of course, reside with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in your King James. But then, Trump doesn’t read the Bible. He doesn’t need to. Rule books are for losers. Reading is for losers. The gospel of Trump, like that of Thomas — noncanonical, antiestablishment — is gnostic, a form of secret knowledge reserved for the faithful, a 'truth' you must have the eyes to see in order to believe.
Gnosticism, which dates at least to the second century A.D., is the path Christianity did not take, its texts destroyed as heretical, its ideas mostly forgotten until the 1945 discovery in Egypt of 13 ancient books in a sealed clay jar. Or maybe not so much forgotten as woven over the centuries into countless conspiracy theories, the deep-seated belief that there exist truths they — there is always a they in gnosticism, from the bishops and bureaucrats of the early church, coastal elites of the ancient world, to the modern media peddling fake news — do not want us, the people, to perceive.
People wearing shirts saying "TRUMP'S TWEETS MATTER" believe: "Every tweet, every misspelling, every typo, every strange capitalization — especially the capitalizations, says Dave — has meaning. 'The truth is right there in what the media think are his mistakes. He doesn’t make mistakes.' The message of the shirt to Dave is: Study the layers. 'Trump is known as a five-dimension chess player,' Dave says later. And he’s sending us clues."
And yet another rallygoer insists that the Democrats are "raping and pillaging Haiti!":
It’s too terrible to speak of. She turns away, to the happiness of a small circle of new friends she’s made at the rally, a whole family decked out in Trump wear. But she keeps coming back. “The truth and the lies,” she says. I don’t know what she means. She turns away again, returns again, her eyes watery. “I’m going to say it,” she decides. But she can’t. She walks away. Her friends seem worried. She comes back, leans in. “They eat the children.” She shakes with tears. Her friends nod.
This same person believes that the random incorrect capitalization in Trump's tweets are a form of Gematria. She explains: "Anything capitalized, we add up as a number." She says Trump's messages are all about "spiritual warfare" and something Q calls "The Great Awakening."
In 2018, Kaitlin Bennett gained 15 minutes of fame by open-carrying an AR-10 rifle at Kent State University. In September 2020, she tweeted: "Donald Trump isn't just my President. He's my KING!" She was hawking "Trump is my KING" T-shirts.
It seems that, at Liberty University, "in the face of allegations of Falwell Jr.'s inappropriate comments and behavior, the school's board of trustees opted to take no official notice for at least a decade," Ashlie Stevens wrote. She finds the proper metaphor to be — rather than Cyrus — the golden calf.
In November 2020, after the election, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told Wolf Blitzer on CNN: "This is not a political party. This is a cult." He pointed out that the Republican Party had no platform in 2020. "They're all afraid of the cult leader," he said.
In 2024, former RNC chair Michael Steele said that the chair of the RNC is supposed to "organize and coordinate every state party and the territories of the United States who are in the Republican family, and you are to provide them the platform from which you will launch a platform to talk about what the party believes in." But since "we don’t have a platform," Steele continued, that gives some context to revent events. Donald Trump suggested that his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, could be chair of the RNC, and Lara Trump said that if she gets the job, "every single penny will go to the number one and the only job of the RNC, that is electing Donald J. Trump as president..."
(The theme of fear can be seen in the book A Very Stable Genius.
“Donald Trump’s party,” Jamie Raskin writes in Unthinkable (2022), from the present-tense perspective of January 6, 2021, “operates like a religious cult and couldn’t give a damn about the Constitution or democracy.”
On May 6, 2021, Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Fox News: “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no. I’ve always liked Liz Cheney, but she’s made the determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”
Late last month, one of the accused Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists told a D.C. judge that she didn’t recognize his authority and was making a “divine special appearance.” Another one of the accused streams a solo religious service each week that he calls “Good Morning Sunday Morning.” A third runs a 65,000-subscriber YouTube channel where she shares Bible verses and calls herself a “healer of deep inner wounds.” ... leaders of major denominations and megachurches, and even President Donald Trump’s faith advisers, were absent that day [January 6, 2021]. For such people, their faith is individualistic, largely free of structures, rules or the approval of clergy.
* * *
Americans who have Christian-nationalist beliefs who do not attend church are more likely to have voted for and support Trump, compared with those who attend more regularly, said Paul Froese, a sociologist at Baylor University who published a paper on the topic in January.
For such people, Froese’s paper says, affirming a kind of “mythical or even sacred” Christian nationalism can become a key part of their religious observance, one that comes from sources outside traditional church.
Judge Reggie Walton said that having Trump and his allies testify would not necessarily help Dustin Thompson's defense, which plans to argue that Trump and others goaded his supporters to storm the Capitol. * * * Many of the defendants facing criminal charges for their role in the January 6 insurrection have tried to share blame with Trump or shift blame to him. While some federal judges have lambasted the former President, often not by name, and suggested he bears some responsibility for what happened that day, they also have said the defendants should be held responsible for their own actions. * * * "Just because the Pope says it," doesn't mean a Catholic can commit a crime, he [Judge Walton] said in court. "I'm not convinced."
Former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) quit the Republican party because of the Trumpism cult, as he explained in 2022.
Evangelicals don’t think life is supposed to be good. They think life on earth is supposed to be a crucible that tests if you’re fit for heaven. If evangelicals take over society the quality of life for everyone is going to STEEPLY decline. Count on it.
Like if you think our society is obsessed with punishment NOW… these people literally think that death for a believer is a merciful release from a world of earthly sin. They think DEATH should be LOOKED FORWARD TO. They don’t want to improve society. They want apocalypse.
"There are no heroes on the Republican side at all. The Democrats do not understand how the Republican Party and MAGA works. It is a cult.
Members of a cult line up, they do their duty, they say what needs to be said, and they fight. They don't ask questions. Cult members follow orders. Cults are orderly. Cults can get a lot of things done. That is part of why the Republicans are so effective. The Democrats don't have that same cult gene and programming.
* * *
There would be a major uptick in violence from the right around this country if Donald Trump was indicted. He is their cult leader. They would see it as "the Deep State" going after their leader. There would be major violence.
"The Republican fascists and the MAGA people and the larger right wing understand power in a way that the Democrats and today's so-called liberals and progressives and the left in America do not. They want to win at any cost. They don't care about truth, justice, "the American way" or even reality because they are part of a political religion. They've convinced themselves that God is on their side. They literally believe such a fantastical thing."
Walsh responded:
"The Republicans and Trumpists — as though there is a difference now — will lie, cheat and steal, which is why all of these so-called "good Christian men and women" embrace Trump. He is the personification of doing bad things to get what he wants. These "good Christians" see Donald Trump as a bad f**king man who's going to deliver them to the promised land."
An article by Sean Donovan on Medium explains how the fascist cult conception of "truth" is whatever others in the group believe. Stating ever-changing, contradictory things is the price of admission to the group. It's a continual loyalty test. They pledge allegiance to whiteness and to their pro-whiteness leader. Whiteness, in turn, is the very performance of this ongoing lie.
[Herschel] Walker’s story of religious redemption is “very much targeted to his base,” says Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta.
“The base includes white evangelicals,” she says, “And he’s rendering it in a pretty evangelical way, and talking about how those mistakes were part of his path.”
88% of evangelical Christians voted for Herschel Walker, not Warnock, the candidate who has devoted his adult life to Jesus Christ. Let that sink in.
See also: Trump's "Unholy" Week: Theology and politics take center stage, Diana Butler Bass, Substack, March 30, 2023. She writes: "I recently spoke with a journalist about Trump’s increasing use of theological and apocalyptic language to describe himself. This was especially obvious in his Waco speech when he referenced his current campaign as the run-up to the “final battle,” a clear allusion to the Battle of Armageddon in the Book of Revelation." And: "A large number of white evangelicals — one poll says 50% — believe that Trump is 'anointed' by God to be president — in the same way that David was anointed to be King or Jesus was anointed to be Savior." And: "Some observers have said that it is a cult. I’ve come to wonder if it is mass religious delusion."
"'Prolonged exposure to Trump is injurious to intelligence and fatal to principles,' said Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican consultant in Florida. 'It is like a disease. You are exposed to it, become infected and succumb to it. The people I know who I once thought well of who have now lost their minds are legion. It's depressing.'"
— Trump Is Lying About Another Election Being ‘Stolen’ From Him — The One Still A Year Away Trump’s last effort to undermine an election led to 140 injured police officers and five police deaths on the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by his followers. S.V. Date, HuffPost, Oct 7, 2023
"MAGA isn’t interested in winning elections or connecting with Americans outside of their base. Trump and the coalition that supports him are anti-democratic. As I’ve written previously, they’ve essentially given up on winning free and fair elections. Trump’s rhetoric is particularly explicit, telling his followers in speeches that they don’t have to worry about voting and should focus on watching Biden voters and sharing memes that call for the arrest of poll workers. Trump and the GOP have also stopped talking to voters outside of the MAGA Cinematic Universe, and that conversation has become so extreme and so insular it’s difficult for anyone else to follow, even if they’re interested in what MAGA has to say." — "Opportunity knocks once in a lifetime: Election Day is one year out. Here are five opportunities we can take advantage of." Melissa Ryan. Ctrl Alt Right Delete. November 5, 2023.
Because Trump, for all his flaws, is charismatic—a kind of Borscht-Belt-meets-televangelist style of speaking that mixes florid, Florida, and his native Queens. Yes, there may be long, rambling asides about his fixations, like hairspray, shower pressure, and sharks, but he knows how to take hold of a crowd when he needs to, how to lift them up in an orgy of hatred. There’s a ritualism present in his rallies that is not unlike an altar call at a megachurch; he’s about one step from the faith healing Jim Jones practiced in his early days, smuggling in animal innards to willing dupes who’d say they’d passed cancerous growths due to his touch.
His message is repulsive; it’s one of hate, of the stripping-away of human rights. It would reduce women to animals in this country, would induce a wave of mass deportations that would cause unimaginable torment. It would be the end of democracy as we know it here in America—the end of choice.
To some people, though, the end of choice is a relief from suffering.
— Talia Lavin, "On Cults, Part 2: Follow the Leader," The Sword and the Sandwich, June 11, 2024
Source
D. Andrew Ferguson, Brian Jelke, Don Morgan, Mark Plemmons, and Jarrett Sylvestre. Villain Design Handbook: Kingdoms of Kalamar. Mundelein, Ill.: Kenzer and Company, 2002. p. 42.
I’m sorry for bringing over a screenshot but this is the bubble they’re living in right now
this is their closing message
the pulse of right wing America, everyone
Where It's All Heading: The Fascist Right Post-Trump: Watching parts of the Right grow weary of Trump might be hopeful, but without needed change the situation will only worsen. Jared Yates Sexton, Dispatches from a Collapsing State, Oct 10, 2025
Friends, it’s a cult. MAGA is a cult. Please—for God’s sake, after a decade—accept this.
Accept it, internalize it, and then decide what you think America should do.
And as you think about that, think about all the other cults you’re aware of, what they did, and how they ended.
"After referring to the Texas Democrat as “a wolf,” a “demon,” a “snake” and an “enemy,” the two talked about what they hope becomes of Talarico.
“I pray that God kills him,” Haymes said. “Ultimately, that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ.”
Potteiger concurred. “Right, right,” he said. “We want him crucified with Christ.”
Haymes repeated that he wants “death and new life” for Talarico. “And if it would not be within God’s will to do so, stop him by any means necessary,” he said.
At one point, the podcast host said Talarico “is the kind of guy you pray imprecatory psalms against. And I mean that actually.” An imprecatory psalm is a biblical song or prayer that invokes God’s judgment, curses or destruction upon enemies.
“Yep,” Potteiger said in response.
* * *
Talarico, a 36-year-old rising star in the Democratic Party, has clashed with President Donald Trump over his vision of progressive politics rooted in his Christian faith. He has argued that the religious right has distorted Christianity, and emphasized Jesus’ teachings about helping the vulnerable and welcoming strangers versus drilling down on divisive issues like abortion." (HuffPost, March 24, 2026)
Moodie says the Epstein class, the people who believed they were "losers" if they didn't hang out with Epstein, were "devoid of morals, integrity, vision." "And let's call it what it is," Sexton replies. "It's a cult." It went from self-help to sex trafficking. How did it happen? Look at Donald Trump as an example: He hates himself, that's why he gold-plates everything. "You play a character that tries to be what you aren't because you don't want to be you because you don't like you. But here's the problem: You always have to pay a higher toll. You have to hurt people. You have to hurt yourself. You have to hurt the world." You might numb out for a while, but ultimately you can't escape. "You look in the mirror and what's looking back? It's fucking you. And you know who you are. You know what you're not. You know that this performance and this consumption — It's not only hollow...It's disgusting. It's embarrassing." (Jared Yates Sexton, talking to Danielle Moodie, We're Reaching the Moment of Truth: The Check-In with Jared Yates Sexton and Danielle Moodie, April 15, 2026, see 40:30 — 43:00)
They voted for MAGA. Now they want out: For some Trump voters, leaving MAGA is a psychological ordeal. A new support group is trying to help.
Chauncey DeVega, Salon, April 28, 2026
"...my background is in cult trauma and recovery. While I'm not opposed to organized religion or expressions of faith, I'm pointedly interested in the co-opting nature of coercion; how language and emotions are manipulated by bad actors to blur the lines of consent." (Bethany Leger)
"The “Great American State Fair” currently “operating” in Washington, D.C., is a perfect metaphor. Shabby. Low-rent. Slapped together and literally crumbling by the minute as unenthusiastic performers dodge pieces of the stage falling from the ceiling. AI art that was whipped together so haphazardly that it’s obvious the person producing it didn’t try past the first attempt to fine tune the images. In one of the tents sits a fitting reminder of the convergence of the myth and the reality, a baptizing pool for attendees to dedicate themselves to a God we have to assume is a MAGA fan and supporter in the Christian Nationalist vein. Trump devotees have traveled there by the dozens, found no air conditioning or support, and have been left, like the woman in the video below, on the verge of sickness before taking a quick dip in the pool and being given medical attention.
Holding onto the illusion of the myth even as it flickers and dies is an act of pure desperation. I would hope that this woman and others like her would reconsider their devotion to a man who would subject them to this kind of thing, but I also spent years attending one MAGA rally after another where people adorned in his cheap merchandise were left to cook in the heat or to walk miles and miles in uneven and uncaring terrain because Trump and his crooked allies so obviously hold disdain for anyone who would buy their grift.
Because that’s all that’s left. Finally accepting the reality means not only giving up the illusion of MAGA but also discarding the lie that has been sold to Americans now for 250 years, to one ancestor after another, to our parents, our friends, our neighbors, our communities, every single one of us. It is the type of psychic pain that we would do almost anything to avoid. Including performing belief when no belief remains."
