Deadly Dishonesty

Here's a recipe for disaster in two easy steps: 1) give everyone a gun, 2) tell everyone that everyone else is out to get them. Or their children. This tried and tested recipe works every time, if the goal is to maximize the body-count, as shown in modern day America.

Yes, you've guessed it; this is another post about the radical supporters of the GOP, the MAGA Republicans who are responsible for the lion's share of domestic terrorism in the United States of America. The GOP is an ideological empty shell, relying exclusively on antagonism and disgust in their public messaging. They have no positive program, no proposals for policies that can actually help make things better for everyone, so they resort to fomenting hate against their ideological opponents. This relentless stream of hate- and fear-mongering in a society where everyone can get firearms leads to stochastic terrorism, which is defined as the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted.

That right there is much of the reason why domestic terrorism in America is predominantly coming from the political right. Two recent tragic events were the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband in their house, and the mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub, Club Q, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. They were both the result from stochastic terrorism. Only hours before the attack on Paul Pelosi, Fox News's Tucker Carlson interviewed right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who claimed drag queens participating in book readings were trying to "sexualize children." That's just a tiny snippet of the total body of rhetoric aimed at equivocating LGBTQ+ people with "child grooming"; they're all pedophiles chasing after your child's booty! In that same interview Carlson and Rufo explain that queers and transgenders want to create "a sexual connection between adult and child, which has of course long been the kind of final taboo of the sexual revolution."

Christopher Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative American think tank focused on domestic policy and urban affairs, and a regular guest on Fox News, still the largest cable news network in America. He's the network's chief fear-monger who also started the campaign against Critical Race Theory that resulted in mass-book-banning in many schools last year.

In the battle over the false idea that Critical Race Theory is “infiltrating” our K-12 schools—and the belief that it must be stopped—the new frontier is children's literature.
_{source: ADL}

The above linked article is titled "Schools Are Using Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws to Ban Children's Literature"; the same is now happening with literature that's deemed, by the reactionary right, to "sexualize" children. Pay close attention to their rhetoric and you'll immediately notice how these far-right public figures stubbornly refuse to make any distinction between "gender" and "sex", leading them to equate discussion about the former with trying to abuse the latter. This strategy of fomenting disgust is an old one that's been used to dehumanize Jewish people as vermin; Black people as subhuman apes; Indigenous people as "savages"; immigrants as "animals" importing crime, disease and filth; and members of the LGBTQ community as sexual deviants and "predators" who prey upon children. The political extremists on the right feverishly reach out and grab any opportunity they get to create contempt, hatred and disgust. Even during the pandemic, when energy was better directed at solving its many problems, the MAGA crowd's hatred was succesfully aimed at Asian Americans, resulting in a spike in hate-crimes against that demographic.

So, when last weekend the mass shooting happened in Colorado Springs, it was shocking, but not surprising. All these LGBTQ+ people are filthy pedophile predators who don't deserve to breathe the same air as "normal" people. Right? Just watch the Tucker Carlson segment, in which he again interviews Christopher Rufo, linked below; in it he literally says his viewers should arm themselves against the LGBTQ+ threat. I share Sam Seder's outrage at these men; they know exactly what they're doing. Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson and the likes, they know that they won't be prosecuted, and they know their rhetoric increases chances of yet another "lone-wolf" losing their shit to go on another killing-spree. They know that sexual child abuse is much more widespread among the spiritual leaders of their churches. They know that the Miss Teen USA beauty pageant (for girls aged 14-19) does far more damage sexualizing minors than any transgender book-reading could ever do. They know the difference between "gender" and "sex". They know they're lying, and they don't care. They know that their particular brand of dishonesty is deadly, and they don't care.

Maybe there's a silver lining to this dark cloud in the conviction of Alex Jones. He got convicted and must pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the families of the victims who were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. Maybe that could be the first of many being held responsible for the violence incited by their constant lies and purposeful disinformation. There's a limit to how much we can tolerate the intolerant and the intolerable. Read the article titled "How Stochastic Terrorism Uses Disgust to Incite Violence" by Scientific American for more information on this ugly phenomenon, and watch the below linked video as a case-study on how this works.

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