11 January 2021

Walking with the insurrectionists

Excerpts from an essay in The Atlantic:
I told the woman in the cat costume that I would walk with her group. “Only if you take off your mask,” she said. The media is the only real virus, she explained, knowing that I was a part of the media. I told her I would keep my mask on. Trumpists had asked me periodically to remove it. Some were polite about it, a few others not. It seemed to me that only 5 percent or so of the thousands of people gathered for the insurrection wore masks. At one point, when I was caught in the thickest part of the crowd, near the Ellipse, a man told me, “Your glasses are fogging up.”

“Yep, masks,” I said.

“You don’t have to wear it. It’s not a mandate.”

“No, I do.”

“Why?”

“There’s a pandemic.”

“Yeah, right.”

We will find out shortly if today’s insurrection was also a super-spreader event. What I do know, after spending hours sponging up Trumpist paranoia, conspiracism, and cultishness, is that this gathering was not merely an attempted coup but also a mass-delusion event, not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics. Its chaos was rooted in psychological and theological phenomena, intensified by eschatological anxiety. One man I interviewed this morning, a resident of Texas who said his name was Don Johnson (I did not trust this to be his name), told me that the country was coming apart, and that this dissolution presaged the End Times. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible. Get yourself ready.”
More at the link (no paywall).

8 comments:

  1. If this pandemic isn't real, then why are so many sick and dying from it? Covidiots!

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  2. If Trump is in the Bible, I'll stop reading it. (At least if he's referenced in a positive light.)

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    1. https://twitter.com/TravisAllen02/status/1219422769059958784

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    2. I think it's the part about the Antichrist..

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  3. This kind of crap just sends me over the edge. It's delusional and illogical and has me reaching for the Xanax. When Biden or anyone else says "This is not who we are", I have to disagree. It might not be who we *think* we are, or who we pretend to be, but 70-some million people bought into this, perpetuated it, and acted on these beliefs. It IS who a lot of us (them) are. When I saw what was happening last Wednesday, it brought me to tears - how is this even possible?

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    1. Understood. But I would caution you that not all 70 million Trump voters share the apocalyptic visions of the resurrectionists. There are in fact "good people" on both sides of the aisle. There may be millions who are delusional, but how many is hard to say.

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    2. Any and everyone who did vote for trump is delusional at best. There is no excuse for him or anyone supporting him, period.

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  4. Point taken and I try to avoid sweeping generalizations. I think my underlying reasoning behind 'maybe this IS who we are' is the fact that 70+ million supporters *remained* supporters after hearing things like "grab 'em by...": "I could stand on Broadway (5th Ave.?) and shoot someone and get away with it", "shit hole countries" etc etc etc and didn't denounce the party or him. How did we get to a point where any leader in this country could say those kinds of things and it was somehow OK? I was born in '62 and can't imagine any President in my lifetime saying those kind of statements out loud (I have no doubt they said them behind closed doors)

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