It will be interesting to see MAGA’s take on it. Is finding a new partner ok to them in this scenario, or should she be the subservient all-accepting wife?
I don’t often want to know MAGA’s opinion on anything, but to watch them come to an impassable intersection of their values will be fascinating.
Yes. It’s a feature, not a bug, and the propaganda is made to do this by design: if you can keep someone in cognitive dissonance, you can feed them whatever cognitive slop you want, and then they have to find a way to explain it to themselves and keep believing, or face the consequences of realizing the whole thing is a lie, which are usually too high to bear. And it just piles on.
This is part of why the Trump Republicans hate James Talarico so much: he is showing the MAGA crowd you can (and should) be able to keep your Christianity and still ditch Trump, the two are not connected in any actual way except by propaganda. I think urban folks don’t realize just how hard this conflation of MAGA and Christianity has been pumped in rural regions: to leave Trump is to face hellfire. To many of us that sounds ridiculous, and it is, but I’m not joking: they’ve made it so that to be Christian is to be MAGA, and to ditch Trump is to desert Christianity itself.
Strangely enough, the cognitive dissonance is also the weakest point in the whole scheme, and is why the trip out of cognitive manipulation often starts with the tiniest, often unnoticeable piece that doesn’t fit: it sticks in their head and refuses to be argued away, and then something else happens, and something else. Cult deprogramming is all about this, allowing people physical space and time to find their own way out of the mental hole without ever actually forcing them to do so.
It’s why getting rid of the news as infotainment is so critically important if we can ever get out of this mess: that’s the source of the propaganda that keeps it going for the hardcore MAGA believers no matter what their orange god does.
It will be interesting to see MAGA’s take on it. Is finding a new partner ok to them in this scenario, or should she be the subservient all-accepting wife?
I don’t often want to know MAGA’s opinion on anything, but to watch them come to an impassable intersection of their values will be fascinating.
Cons and magats live with cognitive dissonance every day. This is nothing new
Yes. It’s a feature, not a bug, and the propaganda is made to do this by design: if you can keep someone in cognitive dissonance, you can feed them whatever cognitive slop you want, and then they have to find a way to explain it to themselves and keep believing, or face the consequences of realizing the whole thing is a lie, which are usually too high to bear. And it just piles on.
This is part of why the Trump Republicans hate James Talarico so much: he is showing the MAGA crowd you can (and should) be able to keep your Christianity and still ditch Trump, the two are not connected in any actual way except by propaganda. I think urban folks don’t realize just how hard this conflation of MAGA and Christianity has been pumped in rural regions: to leave Trump is to face hellfire. To many of us that sounds ridiculous, and it is, but I’m not joking: they’ve made it so that to be Christian is to be MAGA, and to ditch Trump is to desert Christianity itself.
Strangely enough, the cognitive dissonance is also the weakest point in the whole scheme, and is why the trip out of cognitive manipulation often starts with the tiniest, often unnoticeable piece that doesn’t fit: it sticks in their head and refuses to be argued away, and then something else happens, and something else. Cult deprogramming is all about this, allowing people physical space and time to find their own way out of the mental hole without ever actually forcing them to do so.
It’s why getting rid of the news as infotainment is so critically important if we can ever get out of this mess: that’s the source of the propaganda that keeps it going for the hardcore MAGA believers no matter what their orange god does.