I’ve spent my adult life trying to understand politics, from watching The Daily Show well… daily starting while I was in highschool, to following most politicians on social media in recent years, it’s definitely a very hard topic to follow, and continues to create a huge divide in our society, one that is much deeper than anything we’ve seen in previous years.
I remember when Donald Trump was allowed on social media, before Twitter and Facebook finally decided to enforce their own Terms of Service against him, how he would spread misinformation on a daily basis, retweet things that were obviously fake, or racist, or worse… and honestly, having spent as much time arguing with people online as I have, I couldn’t imagine what it would take to help the type of people who follow accounts like his.
Now, whether or not him being banned was a “good” thing is a much deeper issue, but, what remains is that these fringe groups have continued only to degrade… people I’ve argued with will seemingly lie, or maybe are just unaware, of their own actions. It feels so much like gaslighting, but I fear it’s something much worse, much more deeply disturbed in their psyches.
I’ve honestly come to believe that they can’t accept reality, that their values and the way they operate is so adverse to reality, that they reject it as some form of defense, not simply on a conscious level with malice, but on a subconscious level, much deeper than one could easily find a cure for. I believe this because what we’re seeing is too similar to a fight or flight response, between January 6th, and more recently the Truckers for Freedom movement, what we’re seeing is how people act when they’re dealing with primal fears.