Believe In Magic

Some debates are unwinnable and the Republican Party is a party of magicians. Think that's a bold claim? It's actually not, and I'll try to explain why.

The post-truth society has run amok. The ability of millions of people to think critically has clearly taken a dent, with them believing things without having, or needing, any kind of tangible proof. Misdirection is a technique used in many professions, some legit and some criminal, and sometimes the distinction between the two becomes vague. We admire magicians for their ability to use misdirection in an entertaining way. When they perform a seemingly impossible feat of altering the reality we see with our very eyes, we're left wondering how the hell they pulled it off. We know we've been tricked. We know the performer focused our minds on something else, so we don't notice the mechanism or slight of hand used to make the bunny appear out of the empty hat. It's an unwritten and unspoken deal between the magician and their audience, where both agree that one will cheat the others.

Well, that's the same kind of deal MAGA Republicans have with their base. Although, not exactly the same. You see, the understanding between magician and audience is legit, agreed to by both parties, but there's a point where a line is crossed and the magician becomes a con-artist, a scammer. We all know the Three-card Monte scam. It's when the scammer shuffles three face-down playing cards on a table and the mark is tricked into betting a sum of money on the assumption that they can find the "money card". There are many variations, like using three shells with a little ball and having victims guess under which shell the ball hides.

Often the scammer, who's performing a magic trick using slight of hand and misdirection, has a crew of accomplices; a few placing bets, some losing and typically one or two winning big, a bouncer-type watching over the whole charade, and one talking up the game trying to lure potential gamblers. Only, they're not gamblers; the scam is based on the fact that we think ourselves smarter than the accomplices who keep on losing. It's a confidence game, first gaining the victim's trust and then exploiting their credulity, naiveté, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility and, mos importantly, greed; they bet on our urge to make some quick and easy cash.

The Three-card Monte scammer and his crew perhaps provide a better approximation of the state of the MAGA Republicans. Or perhaps they're somewhere in between the magician and the scammer. One trait they share with both the scammer and his victims is the sole focus on winning. Thr Republican Party cares for nothing else; they want to win and they want to own the libs, they want to see them bleed. And when the bloodbath didn't materialize in the midterm elections, they booed their chief magician, the MAGA Grand Wizard of Make Believe Toxicity, off the stage, they blamed Trump for their perceived loss. It's not just the MAGA's though; we live in a time when magical thinking has gone viral.

I'd like you to watch the above linked video called "10 Levels of Deception: The Neuroscience of Magic". In it a magician who has a degree in neurobiology explains how he uses a mix of misdirection, slight of hand and our innate blindness to perform magic tricks; he even shows how we can be fooled into misunderstanding how our own bodies work. He also has a great video about 10 Levels of Sleight of Hand: 3 CARD MONTE, showing just how easily we can be tricked out of our hard-earned money. And if you want a proper explanation of the variant using three shells, watch The Shell Game (Magic Trick Explained).

Now, people who've fallen for the magical thinking promoted by scammers and the MAGA Republicans, who are lured into believing wild claims without evidence and have been debunked a thousand times over, lack the kind of critical thinking that's necessary to win any debate. Republicans use misdirection by focusing their base on baseless accusations of child grooming and imaginary litter-boxes put into the world by woke communists on the far left. They do this because they have no arguments, no case to make for providing their base or the American people with proposals or policies that would actually make their lifes better. All their traditional principles have been abandoned; they're not pro military, because they voted against the PACT act, they're not the party of fiscal responsibility as Trump's tax cuts for the rich inflated the national debt, and the lie about "trickle-down economics" has long been debunked.

I've said this before, and I'll repeat it here; maybe it's because the Republican base consists of all the fundamentalist Christians in the country. Christians, or any theists really, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or any other belief in a supernatural power, have been raised to engage in magical thinking. That's why all debates between theists and atheists are won by the atheists. They always win by asking one simple question: where's the proof? Election deniers are defeated with the same question, as are Republicans who are asked how tax cuts for the rich help the 90 percent. Some debates are unwinnable, and the only way to get the audience on your side is to use misdirection, trickery and slight of hand.

I'll leave you with this video, made by a theist, explaining why atheists always win the debates. I love the fact that he's a theist who's willing to admit that believing in God is the same as believing in magic, and I also love the slogan he uses: "reason and reality thrusting the sword into the heart of ignorance"...

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