*Updated
After I shut my laptop and iPhone off last night I had an additional thought to the article below which, under the circumstances, I hand-wrote on a clean sheet of paper:
"I believe also, to a standard of reasonable suspicion, that Trump supporters and these right-wing nuts are deliberately not getting vaccinated to do what they can to make President Biden fail in his handling of COVID--The president and CDC are certainly being useful fools to them! but I do have reasonable suspicion that this is another prong of their efforts at sabotage, to sicken and kill Americans in order to 'own the Libs.'"
They are a Fifth Column, an internal enemy. The Chinese had a name for them, those who "wave the red flag to fight the red flag." The Christian Jihadists ostentatiously wave, wear, display, and mate with the stars and stripes to fight the stars and stripes. They are not ultra American nationalists, they are an anti-American Fifth Column who see their own shining path washed with American blood, American body parts, corpses, and the sickened are their sign posts that they are on the right road. They are for anything that damages Democrats in power, everything else is acceptable collateral damage. "You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs." They are against anything that helps Democrats succeed, even if American life is saved and protected.
What is the likelier explanation, that they need "more information", that it's a matter of persuasion, of cutting through the false information they are getting? I don't believe that. They want Biden to fail, that's in fact their plan!, the reason they praise with faint damnation the Taliban. They got together during Obama's inaugural BALLS and vowed to oppose anything he proposed. Mitch McConnell said early in Obama's presidency Republicans' first and only job was ensure that Obama was a one-term president.
I offer Goldberg's article and my postscript because the vaccination education and persuasion campaigns are not going to work. Trump and a congressman he was with got booed in Alabama for urging rally attendees to get vaxed! Not even Trump got it: "If we get vaxed it makes Biden look good." That is their thinking. It's not lack of info, it's calculation to bring closer to realization their desideratum of a Christian nationalist state to replace the liberal democratic, pluralistic United States of America of our Founding Fathers. The alternative to education and persuasion? Force. Mandates, as the president has done belatedly in the military. Banning travel to and from the slave states. Vaccine passports. They are going to have to be forced.
8/28, 9:37 p.m.:
This is an extremely important column by Michelle Goldberg:
The influential young white supremacist Nick Fuentes — an ally of the Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar and the anti-immigrant pundit Michelle Malkin — wrote on the encrypted app Telegram: “The Taliban is a conservative, religious force, the U.S. is godless and liberal. The defeat of the U.S. government in Afghanistan is unequivocally a positive development.” An account linked to the Proud Boys expressed respect for the way the Taliban “took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters.”
“The far right, the alt-right, are all sort of galvanized by the Taliban essentially running roughshod through Afghanistan, and us leaving underneath a Democratic president,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank devoted to countering violent extremism. They’re looking at Afghanistan, he said, “from a standpoint of us getting ‘owned,’ in the parlance of the internet.”...
...Florida Republican Matt Gaetz may be a clown, but he’s also a congressman who was close to the previous president. On Twitter earlier this month, Gaetz described the Taliban, like Trump, as “more legitimate than the last government in Afghanistan or the current government here.”
...
...before the devastating terrorist attacks on Thursday, there was a subtler form of satisfaction with the Taliban’s takeover among more respectable nationalist conservatives. They don’t sympathize with barbarism, but were pleased to see liberal internationalism lose. “The humiliation of Afghanistan will have been worth it if it pries the old paradigm loose and lets new thoughts in,” Yoram Hazony, an influential nationalist intellectual whose conferences feature figures like Josh Hawley and Peter Thiel, tweeted earlier this month.
...a few days later he tweeted, “What went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan was, first and foremost, the ideas in the heads of the people running the show. Say its name: Liberalism.”
Fox’s Tucker Carlson, the most important nationalist voice in America, seemed to sympathize with the gender politics of Taliban-supporting Afghans. “They don’t hate their own masculinity,” he said shortly after the fall of Kabul. “They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the patriarchy. Some of their women like it too. So now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.”
...In his new book “Reign of Terror,” the national security journalist Spencer Ackerman draws a direct line between our stalemated post-9/11 wars and the rise of Donald Trump. “Trump was able to safely voice the reality of the war by articulating what about it most offended right-wing exceptionalists: humiliation,” he wrote.
Humiliation: That was what Adolph Hitler dialed into.
Humiliation is a volatile emotion....Perhaps it’s not surprising that parts of the right would respond to humiliation by identifying with images of brutal masculinity.
Just below the surface in these comments is what I have always thought about the Right and of Trump. Politics is sex by other means. It is humiliating to be impotent, sexually or in political influence. Hitler, Trump, McConnell, Bannon, Giuliani--they are (or were) all limpy dicks. They can't get it up because they're old and morbidly obese. No woman is attracted to them because they are disgusting looking. They take out their sexual humiliation through their politics, rageful language, rape, prostitutes.
As for the rest of the pro-Taliban right, the Proud Boys and incels and MAGA splinter factions, some of them are probably just trolling.
My goodness, Ms. Goldberg, you're naive. The "incels", involuntary celibates, are the template for this thought and behavior. You think the guy in Britain was just "trolling." Bullshit!
