HRC
Welcome to the Paranoid Circle of Delusions and the Deplorable Steam Train.
Basically, there are two kinds of Hillary haters.
On the one side, there are those for whom the fact that even decades of relentless pursuit didn’t unearth anything out of the ordinary must mean that she is a criminal mastermind: these people are long-term tenants of the Paranoid Circle of Delusions that we know so well from religious cults (“exactly because it appears so convincing, it must come from the devil”) and conspiracy mongers (“exactly because it appears so much like the truth, it must be an even deeper conspiracy than we thought”).
On the other side, there are all the alt-right fascists and Klansmen and gamergaters and gay-haters and racists and misogynists and antisemites who have boarded and taken over the Paranoid Circle of Delusions merry-go-round and retooled it into the Deplorable Steam Train that we know so well from Twitter: knowing full well that Hillary isn’t a criminal mastermind but it doesn’t matter because for them it’s perfectly sufficient that she’s a woman both with and in power.
Of course, many from the first group are also outright fascist, and many of the second group are also outright delusional, and there are certainly some who think that Hillary’s a criminal mastermind and also think, at the same time, that she can’t possibly be a criminal mastermind because, after all, women aren’t that smart and unfit for the presidency anyways; a cognitive dissonance that’s quite a remarkable feat to live with.
Both kinds of people have been with us all along, with or without Trump; he only emboldens them and makes them more visible and their hate more acceptable, very much like Stephen King’s It in its disguise as the evil clown Pennywise. And all that, in turn, has been meticulously normalized and made presentable by our outrageously inept mass media.
And make no mistake: this isn’t just Trump. It has been a long, stretched-out burning fuse that led us here, from Ken Starr to Fox News to Talk Radio to McCain knowingly setting democracy on fire with a religious extremist on his ticket to the Tea Party to Trump. And it’s up to every one of us to prevent this fuse from hitting the powder keg and destroying our democracy as we know it. It’s up to every one of us to make someone president who has evolved and demonstrated for decades that she values democracy and equal rights and opportunities for all. So, go vote, and vote early if you can.
November 8 will be a battlefield.
If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!