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What Do We Do with Trump’s Fans once the Problem Child is Gone?

I have been scratching my head over how anyone could believe anything the orange hitler says ever since the first time I saw him on TV - the guy has zero credibility to anyone who has a functioning brain. How the hell he has so many fans has been discussed ad nauseum for that length of time, and no-one has come up with even a good answer. We have come up with a lot of bad answers, but none of them explains how so many people that otherwise function in society can buy that pure bullshit. I guess this could be considered another attempt at that explanation, but I am looking beyond that at what we do with the toddler-in-chief’s cult members once the fake president has left the Whitehouse and entered the legal system from the other end.

Part of the problem is the commonality between the orange liar’s cult members and the members of the various religious cults. Both of these groups believe in things that (to be nice about it) have no basis in reality, and in many (most?) cases the individuals I am talking about are members of both cult groups. While society is slowly moving away from the religious variety of cult, we have not rid ourselves of that collection of mental poisons, and that pretty much explains how the orangutan in the Whitehouse got there as well.

Human society overall does not penalize people that live in religious fantasies. While some of the authoritarian governments have and continue to try to eliminate religion, they only do so because they want to replace it with reverence for their brand of authoritarian governance, trying to swap one set of falsehoods for another, and history has shown that inevitably fails - an imaginary god is always easier to stomach than brutally repressive humans. Other authoritarian governments throw their lot in with their local religious authoritarians, hoping to take advantage of one brand of brainwash to augment their brand, with the same level of success overall - imaginary tales are always easier to take there, too.

This history explains why the more enlightened governments keep their paws off of “religion” - left to its own devices, religion fades away to nothing except for a very small minority of hardcore believers, but those hardcores always screw it up for everyone else, keeping the tension between real governance and the religious authoritarians alive and causing pain. The same thing is true of many other cultural untruths - racism/racial supremacy, anti-immigrant sentiment, etc. While they have no resemblance to reality, they promote the fears and agenda of some individuals and small groups, who use them to promote themselves to the detriment of society as a whole.

All of this leaves us with a “problem of the ages” - what do we do with people who cannot deal with reality? As the problems we have created by our abuse of the planet - global warming, plastic poisoning, etc. - get more and more urgent, the trouble created by people who fail to deal with that reality becomes a problem of its own in that they keep the rest of us from dealing with the real issues. While some of them have their own greed-based reasons for attempting to prevent the needed change - the Koch Industries clan comes to mind - society has dealt with that kind of issues in the past, and we have institutions like the EPA and OSHA as reminders of past partial successes. The fascists are doing their best to wreck those (like everything else in our democracy) but that is a short-term problem, and reparable. I am trying to look past that to the real rebuilding that has to happen, and that means figuring out what to do with the people that buy all of the lies, and that enable the greed.

An example of the obvious problem is the reaction to Al Gore, who has single-handedly crusaded to educate the American populace about what causes global warming, and teach what we know about the damage it is causing. The people who “don’t believe” him are not by-and-large organically stupid enough to be incapable of comprehending what he has said. They make the choice to believe the clearly false - it isn’t that they can’t comprehend, they just don’t want to. The same people choose to believe the clearly false garbage emanating from the fake president - there is no way they could believe it except that they choose to ignore the facts. Not organic stupidity, stupidity by choice.

This is where that “going easy on religion” becomes a problem. While I am sure that almost everyone out there has a fantasy or two that we cling to hopefully, the great majority of humanity doesn’t live those fantasies to the exclusion of reality. Like the cult that believes that global warming is a lie, religious cults only become a problem when they try to extend their fantasies to control others. You are free to have doubts about global warming, and you are free to bitch about the monster storms and flooding that wreck your farm. Just don’t try to do both, or I will laugh in your face - denying reality on one side and complaining about it on the other is just a bit too much. Likewise, complaining about how our society has departed from the morals of its forefathers while supporting the orange hitler that obviously shares none of those morals is just over the top - you can’t have it both ways.

So how do we deal with the fools that want the benefits of a civilized society while denying those benefits to others in the same breath, and refusing to take responsibility for the issues caused by that society in the next? This is the problem that the cult of the orangutan’s members present us with. Once the orangutan is no longer a problem, we are still stuck with his (voluntarily) stupid followers, and they will far outlive the pain-in-the-Whitehouse.