Finding their religion

One of the curious aspects of my acquaintanceship with the cartoonist Scott Adams has been my exposure to an entirely new media ecosystem. Yes, I was obviously aware that the rightwing has built an extensive network of television networks, podcasts, and online publications augmented with a vibrant - often fake - social media presence directing people to these alternative sources of information. But what’s new to me is how integrative and effective this ecosystem has become in terms of shaping and reinforcing the rightwing/MAGA worldview.

This worldview takes it for granted that “mainstream media” is lying to you. They do so at the behest of the government and various intelligence agencies, all of whom are also lying to you. These agencies also control academia, down to the kindergarten level. Further, they control the entertainment we consume, and work with individual brands to force DEI onto the bewildered masses. All of these entities are also in loose confederation with shadowy global entities and elites who wish to enslave the population and create a world government rooted in the teachings of Karl Marx.

I am not exaggerating. This is what they believe.

There are, of course, more sinister branches of this belief system, which assign the role of nefarious overlords to the Illuminati, Satan and Satanists, the Catholic Church, the Jews, etc.

Adherents to this worldview still consume mainstream media – not because they believe it, but because it allows them to cherry-pick news they like as an aberration which somehow escaped the censors, while dismissing the news they do not like as lies and government propaganda. Meanwhile, their preferred news sources are objective and – more importantly – in the know.

Orange men bad?

Because I’m a UFO freak, I’m aware of how conspiratorial thinking works. One of the key aspects of the conspiracist is the belief that somebody, somewhere has access to secret information, information they don’t want you to know. Thankfully, a few brave individuals are willing to speak truth to power. These individuals work their contacts at extreme personal risk to deliver the truth.

These truth-tellers have familiar names. Their credibility varies, but their central promise remains the same: they are not afraid of The Man. Glenn Greenwald, Alex Jones, the investor-turned-political commentator David Sachs, the investment/conspiracist site Zero Hedge, among many, many others. One of them is the conservative writer Rod Dreher, an orthodox Catholic currently residing in Orban’s Hungary. Why? Because gay people are allowed to marry in America. I’m not making this up.

I became a recent subscriber to his Substack because I found the Dreher worldview so alien to my own, but which reflects what I’ve discussed above. Consider today’s essay, which begins:

If you are a conservative like me, you are finding yourself standing here wondering how on earth Kamala Harris is doing so well against Donald Trump. Unless you were born two weeks ago, you are old enough to remember a time when Harris was widely considered to be a bad joke. She had very high unfavorable ratings, and she was known chiefly for two things: 1) her unintentionally hilarious word salads, and 2) failing at the one task Biden assigned her — fixing the border.

The opening question is a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about. How on Earth could Kamala be doing so well against Trump? How on Earth is anybody surprised that this should be the case? Trump is one of the most historically unpopular figures in American history. The question shouldn’t be how is somebody doing so well against Trump but, rather, how is Trump doing so well against anybody?

The narrative regarding Harris in conservative circles was exactly what Dreher describes: a deeply unpopular Vice President who has, suddenly, been reborn as a wildly popular candidate for the presidency. As somebody who follows politics pretty closely, I have to admit that I never thought of Kamala as ill-speaking, nor was I even aware that she was working on the border crisis to identify its causes. The idea that Harris is to blame for the border situation is curious to me when, for the entirety of the Biden administration, they have been hammering Biden - not Harris - for that problem.

And now she has pulled even with Trump, an admittedly flawed candidate (we know, we know), but one who was thought to have had the election in the bag after he survived an assassination attempt, and with his face bloodied, pumped his fist into the air, and chanted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” That’s primal stuff.

Calling Trump “an admittedly flawed candidate” is a bit like saying the Titanic had, admitetedly, some design issues. Those “flaws” of Trump’s are not a few whimsical quirks that happen to burble up now and again. He is constructed of flaws, as if “Oops, All Berries” breakfast cereal were a person. It’s a pattern of immorality and criminality that ought to horrify any devout (or secular) American, but which the devout are content to overlook because of Trump’s utility as a blunt instrument of Christian nationalism.

And yes, he did survive an assassination attempt, but why is Dreher so incredulous that the story fell off after a few days? Is he unfamiliar with the modern news cycle? Granted, if the shooter had turned out to be acting on the orders of Joe Biden. as many on the right still believe, instead of a registered Republican looking to gain infamy, we might be having a different conversation. Frankly, I’m surprised at Dreher’s surprise.

But that didn’t happen. The various parts of the Machine — the Democratic Party, the media, the tech masters, and others — have come together brilliantly to show how easy it is to manufacture reality, and therefore consent. Kamala Harris is no different today than she ever was. It’s just that the Machine has reframed her. That, and there is a deeply felt need among liberals and Trump haters of all kinds to have someone capable of preventing Big Orange’s return. It is now easy to foresee that Harris could run the veep equivalent of a Rose Garden campaign, like Biden did in 2020 during Covid, and win this thing. Normally you would expect the media to call her out for not having press conferences and giving interviews, but we all know that’s not going to happen, not this year, and not any year for an opponent of Donald Trump. 

And there’s the conspiracy: do you see how “The Machine” collaborated to anoint Harris? They “came together brilliantly” to “manufacture reality.” Which reality do you think they’ve manufactured? Before Biden dropped out, a large percentage of the Democratic electorate wished he were not running. The enthusiasm gap was considerable and palpable. So why is Dreher surprised that when Biden drops out, Democrats rally around an alternate candidate? The candidate who was already next in line to the presidency, who had the campaign at her fingertips, and who fit the bill of being a younger, more energetic champion of Democratic priorities?

His complaints about the media not “calling her out” for not having press conferences and giving lengthy interviews fall a little flat because any press conferences of interviews she does end up giving will be dismissed as biased. It’s a game no Democratic candidate can win.

Then there’s this paragraph:

This is an election that the Republicans cannot afford to lose. Kamala Harris really is the most left-wing Democratic nominee ever. It’s not even close. She has advocated for positions on the farthest left of her party. She’s for the entire panoply of the LGBT agenda, and has stated in an interview that she believes the government should pay for sex changes for transgendered inmates. If you saw the travesty in Paris this week, when an intersexed “female” boxer, with testosterone surging through his/her veins, pummeled an Italian female boxer into surrender, then you had better understand that this is exactly the kind of thing Kamala supports. I’m serious. 

Harris is the most left-wing Democratic nominee ever? Have these people suddenly forgotten their obsession with the the Muslim Communist Barack Obama? Harris is more liberal than Jimmy Carter? FDR??? Dreher’s primary evidence for her wild-eyed liberalism, the evidence with which he leads his argument, regards her support for transpeople. To somebody who lives in this ecosystem, Dreher’s evidence is damning indeed because it speaks to the immoral globalist agenda which seeks to destroy all that is good and holy about Western civilization. To the rest of us, it’s a head scratcher. This is his primary concern with Harris? The fact that one boxer defeated another at an Olympics held in France? I mean, what?

It’s disgusting.

The piece goes on, but you’ve gotten the gist. And, keep in mind, Dreher is (I think) considered to be a leading intellectual in this movement. It’s a movement which takes for granted that Trump is the only barrier between conservative civility and the barbarism of the left. It’s a movement that takes it as an article of faith that all those who do not live in the same information ecosystem as them are “brainwashed,” or “black pilled” or “NPCs” (non-playing characters unable to think for themselves, which I wrote about here).

When liberals say it’s “a cult,” this is what they mean.

But it’s not a cult. A cult is defined by its relative smallness. This isn’t small. This is millions upon millions of people practicing a faith in which a godhead speaks in tongues, his message then interpreted for the faithful by a legion of acolytes who spread their gospel through various television networks, YouTube channels, podcasts, and publications. They collect dollars by the bushel. They self-insulate; they are both of the world and apart from it. They preach his words on flags, T-shirts, and gold sneakers. They believe their leader is anointed by God to lead them to the promised land - that is what it means to make America great again. It has its own customs and idioms and symbology. Their movement is massive and it’s not going anywhere. So, no, it’s not a cult. It’s a religion.