re: #209 Targetpractice

The problem with using vanishingly slim possibility that Trump will somehow win in the courts and get the results overturned being used to keep the plebes in a state of constant froth is that you can’t maintain such for long periods of time. Eventually there has to be a payoff or else they begin to question if they’re just being jerked around.

I think everyone is underestimating the total control that mass media has over the cult, and by extension over America in general.

This isn’t the way it works. QAnon has never had a single payoff at all, yet the cult only spreads and grows stronger. Other apocalyptic cults can promise the end of the world next week forever, and despite the fact that it never happens, their followers still believe. Republicans killed hundreds of thousands of people and created actual concentration camps, yet their support only went up, and literally the only reason their support went up is more exposure to the disease vector of right wing media.

Cults create reality for their followers. You can confront them with a different reality all you like and they will never believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears. For years, Donald Trump has been a bronzed Adonis superhero who loves each of them personally, and no amount of evidence will ever change that fact for them. In the age of mass media, that level of delusion starts to bleed over into the real world, because it’s one thing to ignore a cult of 300 people in a compound, but it’s another thing when that cult is 70 million people who live around you.

There is no bottom. There is no need for inconveniences such as reality. If Democrats do successfully take office, they are going to have to deal not only with the monstrous challenges ahead, but the fact that 70+million Americans simply no longer believe in the democratic process, the concept of America, or indeed objective reality itself.