The Tea Party Of Liberals

Remember the Tea Party of 2010?
Their defining feature in my mind was their crazy conspiracy theories.
Recall that Obama was a Kenyan, Communist Muslim (among other crazy stuff).
But their paranoid delusions went far, far beyond that.

The tea Party believed some seriously crazy shit.

Are sex-ed classes just a secret plot to turn kids gay? Yes, according to Wisconsin state senator and soon-to-be U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman, who once warned that some school classes are the result of an “agenda which is left unsaid is that some of those who throw it out as an option would like it if more kids became homosexuals.”
Grothman instead proposed that schools enact their own “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policies, lest growing support for gay rights in the U.S. lead to divine punishment.
Hice, as it happens, shares Grothman concerns about gay recruitment, once citing a satirical 1987 essay to claim that gay people want to “sodomize your sons” and “seduce them in your schools.”

No, really crazy shit.

At least one Republican candidate knows the true identity of the Antichrist, and it’s Hillary Clinton.
Ryan Zinke, the successful Montana GOP U.S. House candidate who helped launch the Super PAC Special Operations for America, told a Republican group that Clinton is Satan’s bride, and he knows this to be so because he speaks the truth:

And then there is Shariah Law, Gun Grabbing, FEMA, Secret Muslim Training Camps, and the North American Union, just to name a few.
In the end, it was always about the president, as this Vanity Fair article points out.

How many of you think Barack Obama is the Antichrist? You know, the fella (or fellas, depending on which part of the Bible you’re reading) confronted by Jesus in the Second Coming? Twenty-six percent of Americans either believe that the president is preparing for war with the Messiah or aren’t sure that he isn’t. (Of course, since Obama has been in office for five years, these yahoos should really start to wonder what’s taking Jesus so long to get back to Earth to confront the demon president.)
Hopefully, these are the same 26 percent of wackos who believe that the government puts fluoride into drinking water notfor dental health but for “other, more sinister reasons,” as the P.P.P. question read. It was all a communist plot, you see, to do . . . something.

Only 'wackos' and 'yahoos' believe crazy konspiracy theories, as Vanity Fair pointed out.
Which makes it all the more ironic when Vanity Fair decided to embrace konspiracy theories.

The chattering classes have officially lost it.... They’re falling fast. They’re speeding away from the world of logic into a cesspit of conspiracy and fear. It’s tragic. Or hilarious. One or the other.
Exhibit A: this week’s New Yorker. It’s mad. It captures wonderfully how the liberal-left has come to be polluted by the paranoid style of McCarthyist thinking since Trump’s victory. It’s a New Yorker for a future, dystopian America that’s been captured by the Evil Empire. The mag’s masthead is in Cyrillic and its famous dandy mascot — Eustace Tilley — has morphed into Putin. It’s now ‘Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley’. Inside the mag it’s even more feverish. A 13,000-word report, ‘Trump, Putin and the New Cold War’, is accompanied by a drawing of a deep-red, UFO-style Kremlin hovering over the White House and firing lasers into it. It’s CGI Hollywood meets House Un-American Activities in an orgy of liberal dread over Ruskies ruining the nation.

It used to be right-wingers who fretted over Russians and Reds and pinkos colonising Westerners’ lives and minds. Now it’s lefties. Trump is regularly called ‘Putin’s puppet’. He’s an ‘unwitting agent’ of Moscow, we’re told. The New York Times even called him ‘The Siberian Candidate’, echoing the title of the 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate, in which an American is brainwashed by Korean Communists to become an assassin. That’s how some seriously view Trump: a Putin-moulded footsoldier of Russian interests who’ll assassinate the American way of life, if not American citizens. I mean, Vanity Fair actually asks: ‘Is Trump a Manchurian Candidate?’ These people need a lie down. You have to get deep into the New Yorker’s prolix report to discover that US officials still haven’t provided evidence for their claim that Putin ordered the hacking of Democrat emails in order to hurry Trump to power: ‘The declassified report [on Putin’s meddling] provides more assertion than evidence.’

But that hasn’t stopped the left McCarthyists, these Reds on the Web fearmongers, from buying into all kinds of claptrap about Putin putting Trump in the White House. In December, a YouGov survey of Democratic voters found that 50 percent of them think ‘Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Trump’. That is, White House-eyeing Putinites actually meddled with voting machines or ballot counts. There’s no evidence whatever for this. In YouGov’s words, it’s an ‘election day conspiracy theory’. A kind of delirium is spreading.

What's truly scary is that we aren't even two months into the Trump presidency and liberals are already sounding like crazy Tea Partiers.
What will liberals sound like in a couple years, once a lot of these konspiracy theories have a chance to develop and mature? Who will be the liberal's Glenn Beck?
Does it really make a difference that Trump is Hitler and not the anti-Christ?

I'm fully in support of the public getting politically engaged, and I totally oppose most Trump's policies.
But this sort of ignorant reaction, based on little more than emotion will not produce the sorts of changes that their country badly needs. Emotion investment is good, but their needs to be something of value behind it, and that requires drastic reforms of the Democratic Party.

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@earthling1 @earthling1

Hey, they have to consider bids and counterbids!

Edit: see if the Rooshians outbid Hill's billionaires to snag the Super Delegates for their less toxic candidate, I mean, of course.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

k9disc's picture

So how is hacking them hacking an election?

And they most likely weren't hacked, they were leaked. If they were hacked, it did not have to be a sophisticated operation given that the passwords of the dupe were p@ssw0rd and runner4567, iirc.

And then to take the absurdity of "election hacking by a foreign power" even further, it was a simple phishing exploit, meaning there was malfunctioning wetware (human at the keyboard) to blame.

The whole thing is just asinine.

Sure, let me trust the CIA and Intelligence "community".

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@k9disc ROTFLMAO. I love you for that question!

They're private when they wanna be, public when they wanna be.

'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

k9disc's picture

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

Dhyerwolf's picture

anti-christ is still massive, since only of the two things are actually real. The election hacking is idiotic, but at least that means that they have to accept that our elections are farcical (And yet, if 50% of believe this, why isn't there more outcry to go back to completely non-electronic voting? Maybe because Democratic adherents only tend to think what they've been told to think to a large degree).

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RantingRooster's picture

and remember very well "duck and cover" training in grade school. I was "all in" on the whole "evil Soviet Empire", untill I joined the service on my 18th birthday, and realized, we are the evil empire. While studying my military history for my nomination for solider of the month, I came across Smedly Bulters book and the light bulbs starting going off. Needless to say, I didn't make soldier of the month. I was chaptered out of the service on my 19th birthday. Then all the Iran Contra shit broke out, Ollie fucking North, CIA drug running, Gary Webb reporting etc...
I think Putin is the only adult in the room. I would love to visit Russia and spend a year just traveling all over that country. But most places over there are just too dern cold for this city boy from Texas.

If the constitution actually mattered, every president since at least FDR would be facing a firing squad for the shit they have pulled, in subservience to the .001%. Fire bombing Drezden, a-bombs on Japan, fire bombing Tokyo, over throwing at least 30 governments since WWII.

See Bill Moyers' Secret Government https://youtu.be/0eDTcGkOJj4

RR Drinks

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C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote

@RantingRooster I rebelled against the duck and cover drills, saying I wanted the nuke to land on my head, rather than try to live in the aftermath. Teachers despised me for expressing that.
What part of Texxasss are you from? I am San Jacinto County.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

RantingRooster's picture

@on the cusp of where our local rulers are fleecing our local firemen and police unions pensions, Dallas.

Drinks

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C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote

kharma's picture

that the Moon landing was a faked and all you people who think you saw it happen were taken.

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There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties.. This...is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.--John Adams

Have you ever noticed the similarity of Monsanto/Bivings-style right-wing comment trolling in both American and Israeli comment sections and elsewhere? I have personally long been attributing this to the influence of/PR agencies employed by the same/similar billionaires and other interests - including Clinton's hero, dear Bibi, of nuclear Roadrunner enactment fame.

That type of crazy - and these self-interests - had previously been associated with the Republicans, but now that the Clintons have won over what were previously Republican Really Big Donors and are sworn besties with Bibi (who was to help form policy under the Mad Bomber, had she won, this beginning virtually immediately upon her attaining the Presidency) and AIPAC, we are now seeing similar looney-tunes behaviours.

If you lie down with nutters, you may get up with a cracked shell...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

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