Philip Bump: An actual email I just got.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

An actual email I just got.

Link to tweet

[Karadeniz]

1. Well, today I was personally informed that Biden is a pedophile.

[AwakeAtLast]

2. I was told yesterday

That Barack Obama himself paid for those rioters to break into the Capitol. They said it with a straight face.

[Karadeniz]

3. No excuse for the existence of lie factories.

[AwakeAtLast]

5. Would it make it worse

If I told you he is a minister?

[Karadeniz]

6. Who is the minister?

[AwakeAtLast]

7. A friend of my Dad's

I had just met him, Southern Illinois. Need I say more?

[Karadeniz]

8. Oh, dear!

[PatSeg]

4. It is rather unsettling

how these people are so obsessed with pedophiles.

[Karadeniz]

9. You can tell they follow QAnon... Democrats are cannibals who abuse children, then kill them and

Drink the blood. We cannot begin to imagine what it's like to have a mind that sees that path, decides to follow it, then decides it's the right path.

[PatSeg]

10. It appears there is no conspiracy

too farfetched for them to believe it. You're right, I cannot imagine what it is like to have such a mind. It is positively medieval, going back to a time when illiterate people believed in werewolves, vampires, and demons. There is no viable excuse for people in this day and age believing absurd stories. They have a world of information at their fingertips and yet they choose to believe in the most ridiculous untruths.

[Karadeniz]

11. There are measurable differences between how the conservative mind reacts v. a liberal mind.

They are more fearful. They are less inclined to alter an opinion... So
They are probably more susceptible to confirmation bias. But what they buy into from the radical right propagandists and conspiracists just defies any normal range.

[PatSeg]

12. "They are less inclined to alter an opinion",

but then they go and believe something straight out of a 1950s horror flick. They were far more harmless when they stubbornly refused to change their minds about anything, because when they do change their mind, it is to embrace things like lizard people and vaccinations that are really micro chips. Shoot, that's not even good science fiction.

[Karadeniz]

13. Facts won't affect them, but they're open to insane ideas. I remember right after Trump started

Campaigning in 2015, the psychologists were coming out of the walls, screaming warnings about his mental illness. I particularly remember one teacher saying he was recording everything Trump said to illustrate the various aspects of psychoses, the compulsive lying, sadism, paranoia, etc.to his students. Picture those classes! We now need to better understand the psychotic minds that adore someone like Trump. Some people are talking about cults, but I think there's more to it.

[PatSeg]

14. Yes and you didn't need to be a psychologist

to see how mentally ill Trump was. You just needed your eyes and ears. As has been said over and over again, "He told us who he was from the beginning".

I agree, understanding his followers will be an enormous challenge and I also believe it goes beyond cults. We really need to understand what happened and why.