#derangement

There’s a number of issues that seem to function as a foot in the door for this kind of derangement. A person has one set of beliefs, a certain way of viewing the world, but then something sets them off, and before you know it, they’ve gone crazy and they’re voting Trump now. It’s like that issue is the first crack in the glass. It breaks them. Their whole world starts falling apart.

Not all topics are likely to cause this type of effect. I don’t think anybody’s world is falling over taxes or gun legislation or healthcare. It depends on the issue. Some prime examples of topics that seem to break people are:

medical misinformation/anti-vaccine content/distrust of pharmaceutical industry

wokeness, or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives

political correctness/perception of social media censorship

the existence of trans people/fear about lefties trying to make their kids trans

immigration/demographic anxiety/fears related to the decline of the white population as a percentage of the country

religion/fear about society becoming less religious

A person can go from being sort of normal, to being persuaded about just one of these topics, and then fully come around into being a frothing MAGA cult-member, sacrificing everything else they believed as required of them. These are all what I should term “first crack” issues. And interestingly, all these roads lead to Trump, because Donald Trump and his people have made appeals to all of these different crowds.

Not because they truly care about any of it. Trump himself didn’t seem to have any inherent skepticism about vaccines or pharmaceuticals in general. He also didn’t care that much about trans people until recently. Instead, the Trump lobby noticed certain people in the country losing their minds over a certain topic, and they would try to incorporate all of those people into their movement.

This is why the Trump following is so generally dysfunctional. It’s a big tent only insofar as it caters to people of all different sorts of derangement. They all went crazy for all different reasons, but somehow found unity by all putting on the same red hat and voting for the same orange turd.

There isn’t nearly as much of this behaviour on the left. Perhaps on the far left, like the communists, whose uniting quality, instead of “supporting Trump” is hating America or hating the West, but those people are on the fringes and don’t represent much of society; whereas the Trump following has taken over the mainstream right, the Republican Party, and a huge portion of the political media landscape.

The most prominent left-wing “first crack” that some people become fixated on is Israel. They look at Israel, they think Israel is doing bad things (as it often is), but for some reason this shatters their reality, they reörient their entire world view around this conflict, and soon it comes to define what they feel about seemingly everything else. They often come out the other side hating the Democratic Party, and believing that Israel and AIPAC are controlling all of their politicians, if not being outright antisemitic.

The Israel fixation creates an opening to also become crazy about a few other topics. A telltale sign is they start being overly concerned about the “military industrial complex,” which isn’t a serious or legitimate problem. It’s the left-wing version of how people talk about “the deep state” on the right. It’s designed to be an ambiguous bogeyman that makes people feel as though their democracy is illegitimate because everybody we elect is secretly being controlled by a powerful but unseen force.