A scapegoat is a person or group who gets unfairly blamed for the wrongdoings, misdeeds, or crimes of others. Scapegoating is the act of doing this to someone. The term comes originally from the Bible, in a story from Leviticus where a Jewish chief priest symbolically laid the sins of the people on a goat […]
In a special 6th session of the January 6 Commission Hearings that was not anticipated, former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson revealed bombshell testimony under oath about what the witnessed and heard in the White House leading up to and on the violent January 6 coup event. From her forthright and gripping account, today we […]
Freedom is freedom from the fear of death. Freedom is freedom from fearing you’ll be gunned down at school. Freedom is freedom from fear your kids won’t come home from school. Freedom is freedom from fear of going to the grocery store. Freedom is freedom from senseless violence. Freedom is freedom from murderous rampages replayed […]
The demagogue is the creature the Founders of America most feared: the authoritarian-style leader who would stir the passions of the mob and use them to overthrow the more moderate democratic norms and checks and balances of the republic in order to stay in power. Yet the United States has had a flirtation with demagogues […]
Freedom from Dogma The world had been ruled by dogma for thousands of years until The Enlightenment burst onto the scene — and it holds sway still, in many parts and pockets of the world. Freedom from dogma was one of the greatest gifts of the intense period of scientific and empirical discovery of the […]
I’ve been reading Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and it’s synthesizing a few things together for me in new ways — prime among them the realization that collective narcissism is the shared root ideology of both Christian nationalism and Nazism. First off, I’d recommend it: Next, I’d like to thank it for reminding me about […]
Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory originally promoted by ultraconservative American political operatives William S. Lind and Paul Weyrich, claiming the existence of an organized conspiracy against the “traditional Christian values of America.” It’s a modern derivative of the Nazi propaganda term “Cultural Bolshevism,” which was used as a derogative slur against anything progressive, modernist, […]
Groupthink is a social psychological phenomenon that happens when a group’s desire for conformity or cohesiveness overrides critical thinking, leading to irrational or dysfunctional outcomes. The deep longing for harmony we sometimes feel in our social groups, workplaces, political parties and so on can lend itself to an unspoken philosophy of agreeing at all costs. […]
The radical right is a fervent anti-government strain of Libertarian ultraconservative, emerging out of the anti-New Deal ideology of the 1930s. From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society, from fiscal conservatives to Christian nationalists, the radical right contains some of the most extreme ideologies in the right wing. Conservative ideology has gotten more and more […]
The phenomenon of QAnon may have come seemingly out of nowhere to some, but will be familiar to many as a much older series of conspiracy theories that have been used repeatedly throughout history to stoke fear and hysteria, thus controlling populations more easily. At its core, QAnon is a recycling of the Protocols of the Elders of […]
The caricatures of the TV show — at least some of them — ring true, especially politically these days. The MAGA folks who remain loyal are truly stuck in time. They’re back at an event that’s over — some to spend the rest of their lives relitigating the election and holding onto its Lost Cause-style […]
Paranoia manifests as extreme anxiety or fear, to the point of irrationality and delusions. Paranoid delusions are usually persecutory in nature — someone or someones is “out to get them.” There is little actual evidence this is the case, but the paranoid person is quite convinced it’s true and cannot be shaken from this belief […]
The Founders knew acutely the pains of centuries of religious warfare in modern Europe and resoundingly did not want that for their new nation. Many of them moreover knew religious persecution intimately — some whose families fled the Church of England for fear of being imprisoned, burned at the stake, or worse. Is America a […]
The hierarchy vs. fairness framework is an attempt to classify the world into two major spectra: a hierarchical, authoritarian worldview (R1) and a cooperative, collaborative, egalitarian one (R2). The former tends to be the value system associated with the right wing on the political spectrum (conservatives, Libertarians, the alt-Right, and so on), while the latter […]
Cultism as a kind of collective personality disorder The enemy at the gates is us