That’s pretty much the definition of a cult. They are groomed to cut off the outside world, and then to see the outside world as a threat. They are taught to act in manners that will make the outside world less accepting of them, which reinforces the in-group mentality.
I’ve always felt bad for people who have been caught up in cults, but I’ve always kinda disliked the people in hate groups. Never occured to me till just now that hate groups are cults in and of themselves. Does this mean that the members are victims here, or at least some of them?
Not that it should really change how we react to hate groups. Cult members are pretty hard to reach, so it doesn’t really give any insight into how to reach members of hate groups.
Yeah, the mechanics are very much the same, Gangs, too. And yes, in many cases the members are victims as well as guilty as well as doing it to themselves. It’s really complicated, and it doesn’t help that in many cases the people in them were unlikable before they fell down the rabbit hole.
As for how to reach them - I have no clue, and they won’t help you do it. In fact they’ll do everything in their power to keep out of reach, consciously and unconsciously. Maybe magical negros can help.
But anyway, how about them Trumps ?
There are requirements that a school has to meet in order to enroll students who are on financial aid. Those have been historically about academic standards and job placement opportunities, but if we are creating standards for “free speech” on other college campuses, then they can be applied to colleges to make money off of tuitions paid for by the federal govt.
That is very recent, then. Because they didn’t used to accept any money from federal student loans/grants. They made it a selling point, in fact. Guess the money was just to good for them to resist anymore.
Agree with this, and Kobal2’s points as well. It does explain the resistance Trumpers have to any facts disagreeing with the MAGA nonsense. I was watching Trump do his little “repeat twice” statements, I dont know if it gives a pause and time to think, before his next line, or if its some subtle “salespitch” he learned. “Its gonna be great. Its gonna be great”.
My dislike radar on him has been going off since, probably the 70’s? What a fraud I thought back then.
I would be hesitant in calling Trump supporters members of a full fledged cult. Psychologist Steve Hassan has developed a BITE model for determining cults in general.Behavior control Information control Thought control Emotional controlWhile there are certainly elements of a cult among them, it’s not a lot of the criteria Hassan has set out and they are all voluntarily adhered to (there are no Trumpist compounds* for example).
More like one of those cults that forms around a really bad movie. The hats are like cosplay. And in the future, they will gather at convention centers for ShitGibbonCons, this week’s one being in Lamar CO.
FTR, I wouldn’t say that Trump supporters in general are a cult. Plenty are just idiots, or xenophobes, or scared of whatever, or rich fucks who are deluded enough to think he’s controllable or on their side. That’s juste Weimar stuff.
But Proud Boys, and that guy who shot up New Zealand, and the QAnon crowd, and the guy who mailed pipe bombs to Trump’s “enemies” ('member that ?) and so on… You know, the self-describeb alt-right ? yeah, they’re trapped (and trapped themselves) in the lunatic fringe. All the people who wear those stupid fucking hats, not “innocently” (like the guy discussed in the video), but to troll people. To “own the libs”.
At that point, yeah, you’re already so far out to pasture that you might as well be Amish, for all intents and purposes.
Until this morning, Individual 1 had not tweeted since the release of the Mueller report. And this morning, all he tweeted was “Good Morning, Have A Great Day!” and “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Has he had a stroke?
The reason to seperate the racists from the morons is that we could use deceptive tactics too, and we may be able to trick the morons into voting for their own best interest.
Trump believes that optimism and saying what you want to be true will make it true.
Regrettably, he also seems to be the world’s luckiest man, so I can’t completely knock the strategy, though I find it annoying when he says things like, “I’m polling higher than Reagan!”
Dunno. You remember that scene in E.T.* where Elliott gets a boo-boo, and E.T. heals it by touching it with his glowy finger? What if the only reason E.T.'s species is able to do that is because they went to the trouble of analyzing every physical aspect of that type of injury? Maybe if WE tried doing that, we’d be able to treat such superficial injuries to obtain similar results.
*Okay, E.T. The Extraterrestrial. Happy?
Something I’ve been wondering: Trump has pissed off a lot of people ostensibly on his side, usually by actually showing them what he’s like. At what point does it start to interfere in any way with his ability to get things that he wants done done? Obviously, there will always be people who will want to work for him, and the party in general will prop him up for fear of going down with him, but is there a point where he’s alienated enough people, either directly or secondhand, that he has problems, at the least, with agenda items that the party in general isn’t already enthusiastic about?
More to the point, that scenario depends on that the GOP’s ideological culture hasn’t already moved so far from conservatism to Trumpism that those who say “this is too much” may be dismissed without consequence.
