re: #376 The Ghost of Quesos Past

Fanatics—people who really believe something and rigidly operate within that framework—definitely exist, but many people who act out strong belief are in fact utterly full of shit. What you have to look at is the interaction, over time, between what they say they believe, what they do, and what they do when they’re caught between the former and the latter.

In the case of Gorka et al, I’d say the signs point to the second thing; they have no Higher Truth at all. They want power, and appropriate the thin exterior of belief—the buzzwords, the tropes, the rituals—to obtain power. Some are self-aware, and thus acting as cynics, some conflate narcissism and genuine belief…but many lack self-reflection and thus exist in a state of constant self-bullshitting..

On one hand you have the True Believers and on the other you have cynical manipulators. In between you have trolls and cynics and contrarians who just have fun getting people riled up and gaining attention.

And those people managed to gain enough mass in our body politic to take control of the Executive branch