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alis's avatar

Gun control or just simply control?

Either or both, there is no excuse for grown ass-people posing with their armed children. They look pathetic. They want the left to fear them, but seriously, I pity the kids and I find them disgusting. No fear involved. Thankfully this is a subset of their party.

But then there are the rest of the Republicans not posing as tough guys and gals, the ones that want to use the Supreme Court to bully the rest of us. They too don't make me fearful, they just make me furious, because my nature is to protect the most vulnerable.

Your through line is accurate, Thom. Republicans have reached a point where they have failed to disavow or keep in check their bad actors. Instead they endorsed a psychopath after his mental state was on full display. The Klan, Germany, and authoritarianism is exactly where the line leads.

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Michael J Monett's avatar

How did the Dennis-like people, those with authoritarian brains, get self segregated to the extent they now are?

That question intrigues me.

America now has many more of them than five European countries and Canada, and Germany now has many fewer:

https://theauthoritarians.org/lessons-of-the-2020-american-election-january-6th-and-beyond/

https://theauthoritarians.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/RWAs-International.jpg

And now, this 35-40 percent of Americans are all armed with weapons of war, and live in their own media bubble.

They are highly segregated within the US in rural places. 40 years ago, when I lived in the rural part of Ohio that now votes about 70-90 percent Republican, were the authoritarians already self-segregated then, before right wing propaganda began radicalizing them?

I think they always were self-segregated to rural places, but there used to be non-authoritarians who also lived there. These have all moved to the cities and their suburbs now, leaving behind those who want nothing to do with the cities and suburbs because brown and black people live there. Columbus, my home town, is unique among big US cities, in that it's robust growth in recent decades has almost all been due to migration from rural parts of the rest of the state where population has dropped, rather than from other states.

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