Tuesday, January 22, 2019

The New Radical Left is to Blame...Or something. But how to pay the bills?

Morning Review of the News
Day 31 of the Trump Government Shutdown

Fox News is telling its viewers that a new "radical" element of the Democrat party is taking over _their_ country, that Covington students were smeared by the left, oh, and that Adam Schiff is the real problem, not that Trump is a grifter and could be involved in treason. Breitbart is really in a lather over whether even giving three years to work out DACA is "amnesty": the wingnuts want nothing but deportation now and anything less drives them only further into snow blind whiteness. So Trump has a small problem with his base and discontent among them is always a good thing though it hardly seems to matter because liberals are worse than dictators or death. Still everyone has to pay their bills, so what's next?

That a lot of Trump voters are about to miss another paycheck is nowhere on Fox or Breitbart this morning. Just so you know. This is where ideology and identity becomes real and what's at stake is more than a Fox fantasy or a MAGA rally. What will these folks with bills to pay do?

*Will they continue to do what they are told, principally by their handlers, Fox, Coulter, Hannity, and Trump? At least for a while longer because faith is never that helpful and they have lots of it, they would be turning on their leaders, and admitting tacitly their mistakes.
---Take away: So they will be told to blame Democrats. Will they? Of course. Will it matter? Do they stick it out?

*They have been taught since Reagan to hate government and that government is always the problem---even when the work for government or depend on it for, you know, living in a modern world. Unlike Democrats who do not share this ideological manipulation that serves only the rich and manufactures only chaos...
---Take away: Republicans get to prove their theory that government doesn't work when the government is put out of work. That too will be Democrats' fault but there's something strangely satisfying to Republicans here even as they suffer.

*Destroying the world to save it is built into their politics and, importantly, their religion. Republicans are tied to messianism and apocalypse deep, deep in their structure bones, in their memories without even having to call it up. (Structural realities don't demand awareness or application to be influential.) They view Trump their savior and if he brings the end of the world, well then, Jesus. In the meantime there is a fast track to global environmental catastrophe, endless war, authoritarianism, malice towards anyone who is "against them", meaning, not them, and not the slightest care for the values of the past or the shape of the real future---because armageddon is coming and Jesus will usher in the new Jerusalem. I don't need to make this up, just listen to them. Really. You can find this out the same way you learn about Greenland's glaciers, with the facts at hand.
---Take away: Never underestimate how much their deep religious belief aka stupidity informs their world because little else does.

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