With former President Donald Trump convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records this week, his furious supporters are trying to expose the identities of the people who did it.According to NBC News, "Advance Democracy, a non-profit that conducts public interest research, said there ha...
For the longest time I thought this was solely a matter of education; but these days, I’m beginning to think such right-wing extremism is also a matter of mental illness.
Things like poor parenting, brain injuries from football, lead exposure from guns and motorsports, substance abuse, shitty diets, etc. – all culminate in a banner of people who are… Not of sound mind.
Saying this as a former rural Appalachian Republican from decades ago.
Edit: added “solely” for some clarification.
Its just people miserable with their lot in life and that hate themselves, and wanting to blame someone else for it.
I agree that a lot is mental illness but I think it’s more education. They fall for the lies and get in line and do what they’re told to do by sources like fox “news”. It’s scary how it’s changed, I had Republican friends that we could all hang out and even discuss politics with no problems. Now, we don’t talk at all, there is no discussion. I am the enemy and I don’t even care about politics, just be a good human. I don’t think you can be a good human and support the Republicans at this time, it’s gone off the rails.
You’re likely right that education is still the prevailing issue, but I think we need to get more specific on what kind of education people receive in terms of safeguarding against false rhetoric. Drilling in the logical fallacies, teaching ethics, and even teaching common propaganda techniques so you can identify them. We need to step back and ask ourselves how we managed to escape the rabbit hole when others could not.
The echo-chambers have become so ironclad that it’s so difficult to pierce through and drag someone out.
That’s a good point. I would say having empathy and being a critical thinker would be a good start to escaping the rabbit hole.
This is a great indicator that free will isn’t what we think. I’ve been chatting to maga family about free will through that “how we managed to escape the rabbit hole” lens. There’s often a lot of reasons we have different opinions and tracing the distributed causality is pretty fun because you can avoid the propoganda talking points but still make progress. I think it helps them question information or to be more guarded instead of immediately parroting fox news lines.
Right-Wing Authoritarianism is a well-studied, if controversial, and ostensibly hereditary psychosocial predisposition that strongly predicts a number of psychiatric comorbidities often associated with acute cerebral trauma.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism