Welcome to the nuthouse

Despite having his Precious Bodily Fluids depleted and polluted by the feminist succubus and the Bill Gates microchip vaccine, Travis Kelce turned in a Hall of Fame-worthy performance to lead the KC Chiefs to the Superb Owl. So, right on cue, MAGAland is in hysteria because the game was obviously rigged, presumably by an Italian satellite, Dominion Voting Systems, and Hugo Chavez.

“Taylor Swift is an op,” Benny Johnson, a right-wing media personality who boasts millions of followers across different social media platforms, wrote on X. “It’s all fake. You’re being played.”

“The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open,” added Laura Loomer, a self-described Islamophobe who has been embraced and promoted by Trump. “It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.”

“The NFL is totally RIGGED for the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce),” agreed Mike Crispi, a Salem Media host. “All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA. Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.”“It’s all been an op since day one,” Crispi concluded.

 

Where exactly the Chiefs and Ravens found the time or space to secretly rehearse the game is as yet unknown, but they sure made it look real. Great job guys! The question is how people can actually believe something so manifestly insane. Well, it's not limited to rigged football games, as Krugthulu notes (gift link):

 

Falsely believing that Europe is a continent on the brink of ruin is one thing (although millions of Americans visit Europe, and so get the chance to see for themselves, each year). It’s much harder to excuse the belief that New York — one of the safest big cities in America — is some kind of urban wasteland. After all, estimates say that more than 50 million Americans visited the Big Apple last year, and a lot of people who haven’t visited New York know someone who has visited or who, like yours truly, actually lives here. Yet only 22 percent of Republicans say that the city is safe to visit or live in.

The trashing of New York raises the question of the extent to which MAGA supporters are willing to disregard the evidence of their own eyes. People buy gas all the time; when Trump says “gasoline prices are now $5, $6, $7 and even $8 a gallon,” around twice the price plainly displayed on big signs all around the country, do his followers believe him?

 

All of this obviously poses the question, why do people believe things that obviously are not true? Jill Filipovic proposes one answer: 

DeSantis seems like an unpleasant person. His cruelty is of the smarmy sort, calibrated to his goal of personal gain, which means winning approval – from Trump or from a voter base he has pegged as malicious and spiteful.  

But even people who support cruel acts don’t typically want to think of themselves, as DeSantis seems to, as callous or vengeful. They want to think that they are pursuing justice and doing what is required to assert a deserved dominance. This means that the cruelty should feel good, and may even be fun. Trump grasps this, which is why he so often makes cruelty a mass spectator sport: in a crowd (or a mob), it’s easy and invigorating to get caught up in the collective pleasure of a shared experience and sense of purpose, and of a common enemy.  . . .

In his essay “The Cruelty is the Point”, Adam Serwer recounted a trip to the Museum of African-American History in Washington DC, where he looked at photos of lynchings, and particularly at the faces of the white men in the crowd, smiling at their grotesque crimes. “Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy,” Serwer wrote. “And it made them feel closer to one another.” This is perhaps Trump’s highest skill: he draws sharp lines around “us” and an abhorrent, dangerous and vermin-like other, and then brings the in-group into his cruelty with him. It’s not Trump targeting vulnerable groups; it’s Trump pulling us together to defend the collective us, protect the tribe. Anyone who has spent time on a middle-school campus knows that there are bully leaders who attract a group of bully followers, and then there are the mean jerks no one likes. Trump is the former, and DeSantis more the latter.  . . .

This desire for collective cruelty, and a sense that being in a group makes cruelty more entertaining and less the responsibility of any one individual, has roots in the darkest parts of humanity. Public executions persisted in England until the second half of the 19th century; in the US, public executions, lynchings, and mob violence aimed at racial minorities were long popular activities; today in some conservative, autocratic, often theocratic nations, public executions remain favoured spectator sports. As other societies have evolved, democratised, secularised and sought to impose human rights-affirming systems of justice, they have moved away from killing-as-spectacle. But the core desire – to make vengeance a communal pastime – has not died out, especially among those who embrace autocracy, conservative religiosity and traditionalism.  

Trump embodies that desire for retribution as sport. Ron DeSantis hit all the right notes on the punitive vengeance part of the equation. But he failed to make it feel like a party.

 

 This.