You're assuming that Charlie Kirk—and the pro-Trump evangelicals—actually believe any of the shit that comes out of their mouths, when clearly they do not.
GOP slouches into the crazy to be born as MAGA ~ GENERAL
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superrific
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Well, only for argument's sake. If they are going to say it, then they should get mocked.
There's nothing about what most Evangelicals have believed all their lives to keep them from believing this as well. It's not even terribly farfetched by their standards.
WaynetheDrain
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If I actually believed in God, I could get behind the notion that He gave Trump to us. But not as a gift because he loves us, but as a curse because He hates what we’ve become as a country.
p5mmr9
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I hope the Democratic Party is ready for these types of ridiculous "negotiations."
4thgenheel
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evergreen: nancy mace is a horrific, ghoulish, lying sack of shit "human being."
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All true -- Mace is a self-promoting loser. But I wouldn't appreciate the tone or the infantilizing language of being called "child" in that setting, either. I wouldn't demand a duel or anything, though. I get it, people do it (especially currently with "girl"), so I wouldn't blow my top or anything, but I wouldn't consider it professional or appropriate in a work setting.
4thgenheel
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absolutely. crockett's speech left quite a bit to be desired but her intentions are enormously better and more productive than nancy mace's dishonest BS christofacist agenda.
ZenMode
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Much of what is in the article is already known, but it's still a good article.
www.theatlantic.com
MAGA’s Demon-Haunted World
Peter Thiel is the latest pro-Trump luminary to take a conspiracist turn.
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Thanks for the link. It is interesting.Much of what is in the article is already known, but it's still a good article.
MAGA’s Demon-Haunted World
Peter Thiel is the latest pro-Trump luminary to take a conspiracist turn.
“… After Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Thiel implies, we might finally know the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and whether the coronavirus was a bioweapon. Thiel notes that the internet also has questions about the death of the well-connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis”—that is, a revealing—“of the ancien regime’s secrets,” he adds. (Two pretentious expressions in one sentence? Monsieur, watch out for hubris.) Thiel wants large-scale declassifications and a truth-and-reconciliation commission, in the model of South Africa’s reckoning with apartheid. “The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619,” Thiel writes, referring to the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, “but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today.”
Thiel portrays Trump’s resurgence as a defeat for the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex,” or DISC—his friend and employee Eric Weinstein’s term for legacy media outlets and nongovernmental organizations that supposedly prevent politically inconvenient truths from reaching the public. Thanks to the internet, information can no longer be suppressed.
… Thiel’s quest for closure about the pandemic is noteworthy. Something happened during that period to drive influential, apparently rational people toward beliefs that were once associated with crackpots. Others suddenly lost trust in institutions and expertise.
The podcaster Bryan Johnson—a successful tech entrepreneur who is now pursuing literal immortality—went from boasting about receiving the Moderna vaccine in 2021, because he had invested in one of the companies involved in its development, to complaining that “vaccines are a holy war” and that he regretted getting a COVID shot because not enough data supported its use. This is a man who pops enough pills that if you shook him, he’d rattle.
… Until recently, I had assumed that the anti-establishment sentiments promoted by Thiel and others were merely opportunistic, a way for elites to stoke a form of anti-elitism that somehow excluded themselves as targets of popular rage. … But reading his Financial Times column, I thought: My God, he actually believes this stuff. The entire tone is reminiscent of a stranger sitting down next to you on public transit and whispering that the FBI is following him. …”
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A related link, by Anne Applebaum:
GIFT LINK —> The New Rasputins
“… The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.
… When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality.
But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well.
Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult.
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body. …”
GIFT LINK —> The New Rasputins
THE NEW RASPUTINS
Anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe.“… The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.
… When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality.
But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well.
Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult.
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body. …”
lawtig02
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Thiel and MAGA are right about this point -- "Thanks to the internet, information can no longer be suppressed."
The problem is they've lost track of whether information is accurate. Or reliable. Or useful. Throughout modern human history, societies have grappled with how to elevate fact over myth, truth over convenient, but misguided, belief. That's literally the story of the Enlightenment writ large. Only now are Thiel and MAGA pushing back on that history. They prefer a world in which witches can be blamed for natural disasters and burned at the stake. In which kings have unassailable divine rights as a function of their birth and their decree. In which the church controls the means of production, and keeps the serfs in their rightful place through fear and trembling.
There are so many historical analogies to MAGA that help us understand what's happening now. 1930s Germany is a useful analogy, no matter how loudly MAGAs may scream about it. Late czarist Russia has some analogical truths to share with us today. But the more I think about it, the more it seems the real historical analogy is pre-Englightenment v. post-Enlightenment. MAGA's response to what it sees as the "curse" of postmodernism is, in a nutshell, to send us back to premodernism.
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“… In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too. …”
SnoopRob
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superrific
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It couldn't really be suppressed in Medieval Europe either. Not at the local level. Peasants and serfs had all kinds of ideas, and had formed opinions based on all sorts of tales "they had heard."
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Kleptocracy + Oligarchy is a bad combo.