In recent months, Vance has been the key figure in making Springfield a national target for the far right. “I blame JD Vance for it. Our city leaders reached out to JD Vance, our senator, asking for help,” Carl Ruby, the senior pastor at Central Christian in Springfield, said about a request for federal assistance Vance drew attention to this summer. “Instead, he brought it up at a Senate hearing and referenced it as a crisis and began amplifying these lies.” In doing so, Vance has put his own constituents at risk. Bomb threats have now led to multiple Springfield schools being evacuated.
Stochastic Terrorism is becoming quite frequent with the Republicans. Thing is they KNOW what they are doing and the consquences it leads to.
I forgot who said it here, but it was something along the lines of “they can never condemn the root causes of school shootings because they fundamentally agree with them”.
I swear, if we ever need to use dogwhistles on the left. All we have to do is call ourselves “anti-Malthusians” and it will not be a lie.
EDIT: And to follow up on your point, some of the most famous mass shooters were practically set out to do the GOP’s dirty work. The Ecole Polytechnique massacre in 1989 comes immediately to mind. I worry if it happened today we’d see tons of memes of it owning the libs
Once again, this redsails article is being dropped. It seriously should be considered Theory.
The same inquisitive nature that first led them to unravel war propaganda narratives begins to feed an even larger psycho-historical narrative, and nihilism takes hold. The tragic cycle begins to appear eternal: innocent, well-meaning, hard-working folks are, time and again, viciously tricked by the scapegoating of a new rogue in the gallery — Indigenous, Black, Spanish, Jewish, Soviet, Vietnamese, Cuban, Serbian, Muslim, Libyan, Syrian, Korean, Venezuelan, Russian, Chinese. Due to the sheer power of propaganda and mass-media, the masses helplessly fall for hatred and volunteer for war, even though it comes at a very high cost to ourselves, our loved ones, and our ideals (religion, environmentalism, etc.). Sadly, the innate human propensity to “hate the Other” seals our fate as a society… or something along those lines. I am going to argue that this narrative is nonsense. It tries to pass off as universal and eternal something that in reality is particular and ephemeral. In short: Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits.
I believe that, on the contrary, the process of Western propaganda is better understood in terms of “licensing”: the issuing of moral license for the bourgeois proletariat to profitably go along with bourgeois designs without the feeling of shame overwhelming. In this alternative account people aren’t “brainwashed” insofar as they don’t actually believe the lies, not in the way that we generally understand belief. It’s more correct to say that they go along with them
Not trying to hate on the article but did the author never look up the origins of “brainwashing” as a concept. It’s obviously bs.
The thing that makes Vance kinda scary is that he is ambitious and clearly has no morals. That’s a dangerous combination. Luckily he has the charisma of a mildewed dishrag. But he’s clearly okay with sowing chaos and hate for his own gain.
