I'm one of the new subscribers who found you from your article. I'd been searching for awhile to find a site, or someone who was tracking the chatter on RW MAGA boards particularly to keep an eye on the potential of violence. Thank you so much for doing this and your courage to attend those rallies and make these reports.
I expected the potential to increase dramatically after the debate. That event was the real life enactment of their greatest fears demonstrated before their eyes. A loss of power—which they believe they deserve—a radical change in the hierarchy where white men deserved and got respect from their inferiors. Here, we not only had a woman talking back to their chosen leader, but a black woman. Not only disrespecting him, but attacking him and making him look like a fool.
My concern is how will the base, who have looked to him to be their savior and give them their rightful power back, react in the face of his being treated like this, and his reaction to it of anger and confusion?
Will they begin to lose faith and belief in him, to finally see him as the weak, small minded, inept, lying fool he is?
Or will they, reverse projecting you might call it, take it as an attack on themselves and their way of life? Will they see it as clear evidence that what they have believed they'd been facing, fearing and fighting against all these decades—as constantly reinforced by RW propaganda*—was real and existential?
And in turn, feeling defeated, or near to it, turn now to violence, as a last stand, like cornered animals?
And when will the violence break out? Before, during, and after the election? or all three?
Be safe out there, and thank you again.
(*The irony of the lead comments in the last 3 blocks above is amazing and surreal; clearly describing the propaganda process that has captured and fed their rage and anger and redirected it for decades, and so wrongly attributing it to 'the Left'....I could write a long comment on just that, but this is already too long.)
You nailed it exactly in this comment. They are losing power that they think they deserve - not just in this election but overall. That feeds so much of their anger.
I'm one of the new subscribers who found you from your article. I'd been searching for awhile to find a site, or someone who was tracking the chatter on RW MAGA boards particularly to keep an eye on the potential of violence. Thank you so much for doing this and your courage to attend those rallies and make these reports.
I expected the potential to increase dramatically after the debate. That event was the real life enactment of their greatest fears demonstrated before their eyes. A loss of power—which they believe they deserve—a radical change in the hierarchy where white men deserved and got respect from their inferiors. Here, we not only had a woman talking back to their chosen leader, but a black woman. Not only disrespecting him, but attacking him and making him look like a fool.
My concern is how will the base, who have looked to him to be their savior and give them their rightful power back, react in the face of his being treated like this, and his reaction to it of anger and confusion?
Will they begin to lose faith and belief in him, to finally see him as the weak, small minded, inept, lying fool he is?
Or will they, reverse projecting you might call it, take it as an attack on themselves and their way of life? Will they see it as clear evidence that what they have believed they'd been facing, fearing and fighting against all these decades—as constantly reinforced by RW propaganda*—was real and existential?
And in turn, feeling defeated, or near to it, turn now to violence, as a last stand, like cornered animals?
And when will the violence break out? Before, during, and after the election? or all three?
Be safe out there, and thank you again.
(*The irony of the lead comments in the last 3 blocks above is amazing and surreal; clearly describing the propaganda process that has captured and fed their rage and anger and redirected it for decades, and so wrongly attributing it to 'the Left'....I could write a long comment on just that, but this is already too long.)
You nailed it exactly in this comment. They are losing power that they think they deserve - not just in this election but overall. That feeds so much of their anger.