Can We Get The Right's Brains Out Of Their Cultified MAGA Asses? No, Real Question.

Serious post.

Unsurprising to just about anyone, Vance Boelter, arrested Sunday night after he allegedly assassinated Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and shot state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, is an anti-choice extremist and Christian evangelist with his own ministry and Roman-themed security company.

Boelter been registered as a Republican since the early 2000s, and he said on his social media that he was a Trump supporter, and his roommate confirmed that, and that Boelter was intense about his anti-choice views. “He was a Christian. He thought it was murder.” The people Boelter allegedly shot were Democrats, and his notebook found in his car had a target list of nearly 70 people, ALL Democrats, mostly “prominent pro-choice individuals in Minnesota, including many Democratic lawmakers,” and also family-planning clinics.

But the right-wing disinformation machine immediately kicked into gear, pushing the ridiculously obvious lie that Boelter was a Democrat. Posted Elon Musk on his hellsite, “The far left is murderously violent,” and Rob Schneider chimed in “would say that the word ‘far’ is not necessary in this statement…” and similar troll-comments proliferated all over social media.

Sen. Mike Lee, with a photo of the shooting suspect in a latex mask, “this is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way.”

Boelter could not fit the violent-Right profile more exactly, though. He founded his own evangelical ministry to minister to groups such as “militant Islamists in order to share the gospel and tell them that violence wasn't the answer.” He was rabidly homophobic and anti-abortion.

Here he is evangelizing.

Hoo boy!

Not a drag queen, not a Democrat, but definitely a loser in life. He was the manager of a 7-Eleven, but quit that to start businesses, Praetorian Guard Security Services and Red Lion Group, which according to his LinkedIn was:

involved with security situations in Eastern Europe, Africa, North America and the Middle East, including the West Bank, Southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. [Boelter] brings a great security aspect forged by both many on the ground experiences combined with training by both private security firms and by people in the U.S. Military. He has worked for the largest U.S. oil refining company, the world's largest food company based in Switzerland and the world's largest convenience retailer based in Japan.

A conspiracy theorist’s treasure trove. But, even though he bought cop-like SUVs, he had no experience in law enforcement or with the military, and none of Boelter’s companies apparently ever had any clients. He aspired to do “private business projects” like providing armed security and oil refining, logging, and glass production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but never had any takers, and as his businesses were failing he was also looking for work in the food industry and working part-time delivering bodies to the morgue. Somehow, though, the former governor, Mark Dayton, appointed him to a bipartisan business panel, the Governor's Workforce Development Board, along with one of his victims, Sen. John Hoffman, and later Gov. Tim Walz re-appointed him. It was a large, bipartisan and powerless recommendations board, though, and evidently not very discerning.

Boelter has a wife, Jenny, listed as CEO of Red Lion Group, and five kids, but his marriage was maybe not going well, because he was living at least part time with two roommates, whom he texted before the shootings, “David and Ron, I love you guys. I’ve made some choices and you guys don’t know anything about this, but I’m going to be gone for a while. I may be dead shortly.”

Still, Boelter‘s wife was reportedly stopped after the shooting with cash, passports, weapons and ammunition in her car. Was she trying to help him escape, or was she up to her own shady things? Unknown, and she is reportedly cooperating.

How do people get so extreme? Why is the MAGA brain so eager to seize obvious lies like that this guy was some kind of Democrat? It is hard to cultivate the empathy necessary to understand; the MAGA thought process seems less knowable than a terrier’s.

MAGA is not just uninformed, many of them are downright enthusiastic about repeating obvious lies. Trump’s mouthpieces are gleeful participants in the regime’s deceptions. Because lying in everyone’s face proves his domination, and therefore their own, and reinforces it. It’s not that they don’t see the lies, they like them. They savor them. Lying to people’s faces reinforces their feelings of power and sense of superiority.

Psychology has been tackling this question of Why Are They Like That and How Can We Fix Them since World War II, and for a well-cited deep dive on MAGA psychological topics, check out The Rational League Substack.

We read a whole lot of that-all, and the only metaphor we can think of is, when Tetris came out, did you ever play so much Tetris that you started to dream about Tetris? It seems kind of like that. Facts keep on coming, and MAGA’s job is to fit all people, places, events, and things into a binary of Good for MAGA, or Bad, Evil, and Threat to MAGA. The MAGA echo chamber is a fear management system, and a retribution-distribution system, and also a high-control, high-demand group, which is a politically correct way to say “cult.”

To liberals, scientists, etc., facts are neutral data points. But in the MAGAsphere, there are no neutral facts, not even the weather. Even a storm is a JOE BIDEN Democrat weather machine. And no actions are moral or immoral, not even shooting an unarmed woman in her home while she is protecting her child from bullets.

In the MAGAsphere, no actions are lawful or unlawful. Only individuals or types of people themselves can be moral or lawful. There are no neutral actions for any person outside of MAGAstan, and the very existence of people outside of the MAGA cult is a threat. There is only inside the cult and outside the cult.

Meanwhile, inside the group, literal alleged kid-diddlers are excused and defended.

In MAGA, there are no bad actions from MAGA. All that flows from the vertical Trump-topped hierarchy is a moral and perfect GOOD. MAGA is never the instigator of aggression in its own mind. In 2020 Trump re-Tweeted a video from Cowboys For Trump founder Couy Griffin saying, “I've come to a place where I've come to the conclusion that the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” Just in the political sense, of course.

That’s morally acceptable because any and all actions are a justified reaction to prior victimization, acts of re-setting perceived moral wrongs to their proper state. In Boelter’s mind, he was restoring God’s perfect order. Shooting people in their beds can be justified as self-defense that way.

It’s no coincidence that evidence shows one of the most effective treatments for certain kinds of personality and behavioral disorders is dialectical behavioral therapy: learning to mindfully avoid black-and-white thinking, because believing that anything or anyone is all good or all bad is a one-way path to madness and extremism. Reality is not binary. And the constant mental sorting into threat and not a threat means everything is evaluated for its potential as an existential threat. The constant sorting becomes all-consuming, and becomes a habit of mind, which is exactly what all the fear propaganda is going for.

Trump himself doesn’t have to make up justifications, lies or insinuations to explain bad news any more. Cult members immediately and reflexively do it for every piece of information that they get about anything.

None of this is a coincidence.

Remember how Paul Manafort, Charlie Black, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone were running an entire dictator school, advising and cleaning up the images of the likes of Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, and teaching them how to strong-arm their way into total control? The Right has been learning and teaching the art of the right-wing putsch around the world.

Remember how Flynn used his experience as a general and the Defense Department’s own research into what radicalized the Al-Qaedas to turn psychological warfare techniques onto Americans? And endorsed QAnon? Just like Al-Qaeda, the propaganda goal is reaching vulnerable populations with a narrative of fear and victimhood at the hands of a foreign invader, and leading them to extremist content. Reality is complicated, but the propaganda is always black and white and simple, there is only good and evil. And if there is evil, isn’t it one’s job to stop it by any means?

The playbook works whether it’s angry young men in Kabul or a yeehaw with a GED.

Will these cultists ever get out? Sometimes they do. There’s a web site and community, Leaving MAGA, full of people who got disillusioned and realized they’d been sold a sack of crap. They all have their own moments, that usually start with a little thing that makes them say huh, and gets them to wonder, can I trust this guy? and the thread starts to unravel.

Millions of people will never leave the cult. But millions more people hate Trump than love him, and are screaming in the streets about it. His approval rating is now underwater and sinking, as everything he touches fails: his California invasion, The Groceries, peace in Ukraine, you name it, his agenda is not winning. He is backing away from his own policies, and his Big Beautiful Bill is backed up in the bowels of Congress.

Is it too late to de-program MAGA before the personality cult and cultural revolution becomes a permanent condition, as in Russia or China?

That remains to be seen, it’s the trillion-dollar question.

[Milwaukee Journal / The Rational League / Leaving MAGA]

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