I admit it: I have been occasionally engaging with these lunatics off my own Facebook page, when I don’t know the miscreant and there is little chance of insulting or upsetting someone I care about even a little bit. Pointless and futile, of course, except that it gets some pent up disgust and frustration out of my system.
I didn’t bother responding to the jerk who posted that thing above. Clearly, she is beyond hope. Ethics Alarms is still seeking evidence that anyone west of the great ideological divide has posted something similar. I haven’t seen any, not one example. In contrast, many of my show-biz and academic friends have posted virtually the same message: “If you voted for President Trump or supporthim, get out of my life. I hate you.”
In my continuing quest for symptoms of Trump Derangement to shake in the faces of those, including some commenters, who say the diagnosis is just an ad hominem attack and not based on substance, I find these social media posts especially persuasive that some kind of mental break is responsible. To use one of the Trump Deranged’s favorite refrains in a correct context for once, this “isn’t normal.”
There was much discussion during the respective administrations about “Clinton Derangement,” “Bush Derangement” and “Obama Derangement,” yet I never heard or read anyone suffering from those alleged emotional handicaps announce, “If you support this President or voted for him, you are evil and I want no contact with you, forever.” Literally and historically, no President in our history justified that attitude. Someone who would write, say, or even think that is, to use the kind of metaphor that once got me sued here for defamation, a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Proportion? Respect? Empathy? Fairness? Restraint? The Golden Rule?
Bueller? Hello? McFly?
My next job will be to identify what causes this unique brain dysfunction. CNN and MSNBC? Falling IQs? Social media itself? Advocacy journalism? Educational indoctrination? Wet markets? “Gain of function” research? The C.I.A.? Fluoride?
Whatever it is, I believe it is important to identify the cause and fix the problem, as I hope that the cure won’t require deprogramming. Meanwhile, I find myself less and less inclined to regard “Nah, there’s no such thing as Trump Derangement!” as a legitimate or supportable position.
Ethics Alarms 
Too many of my Facebook friends are posting anti-ICE and anti-Trump screeds like this. I know of no other name for it. I’ve stopped engaging for my own mental health and may be taking a long Facebook break because of it. I have never seen a time when so many normally sane, intelligent and friendly people have lost all sense of proportion.
I blame:
I think it’s the fact the left thought there would never be another Republican president or Republican control of Congress or any conservatives on the Supreme Court after Obama was elected. Hillary Clinton was supposed to carry on single party rule forever and ever, amen. Trump, a rank amateur and not even a politician, won the biggest electoral prize. George Bush II was unpalatable and demonized, but Trump was simply beyond the pale. He didn’t even act like a Republican, i.e. a Democrat. He wasn’t playing the game of go along to get along. He wanted to change the direction the country was going in. Per the left, this is not how things are supposed to work. As a result, the left, half the country, is throwing a non-stop hissy fit. They want single party rule, and they want it now. And they thought it was coming after Obama. History should have ended by now. And boy, are they pissed.
And remember, Hillary Clinton ginned up the term/imperative, “Resist.” Leftists think they are in Vichy France and everything they do is to weaken the NAZIs running the country. They are literally resistance fighters. Every aspect of their lives has been weaponized. Even a simple, goofy act like “unfriending” someone on Facebook is an act of “resistance,” a noble act of guerilla warfare.
This was certainly the thinking, but how did normal everyday people get to this point? It has been a decades-long process of boiling the water so the frog doesn’t realize he’s being slowly killed.
My theory, and I’m willing to listen to others who are more deeply involved in politics who will correct me, is that the derangement is the offspring of deliberate incendiary tactics by leftist radicals and foreign adversaries that see Donald Trump, a political outsider, as an existential threat to the massive grift and fraud that funds their lifestyles and projects. These radicals and foreigners have managed to work their way into influencing education, media, the justice system, and so on. They have a backbone in the numerous, poorly-monitored executive agencies that take billions of federal dollars and quietly shuffle it out to political supporters. With Trump actually working to do what he campaigned on, instead of betraying his promises once in office, it became clear that the usual “the Republican is the worst” was insufficient, and so the rhetoric had to be ratcheted up.
I’ve been looking more recently into Alinsky’s rules for radicals. From the Wikipedia article on them, we have:
Specifically, from rule #1, this small group has been very loud, and because it has influence with the media, the effect is amplified. It has been convincing many people that Trump is far worse than he really is (see rule #9). This has been augmented by rule #8, so that as soon as one attack on Trump starts losing steam, there’s another attack, and another, endlessly. Anything can be hung on Trump as a negative, whether actual, distorted, or imaginary, is trumpeted to the heavens, and if it is later revealed that the attack had no merit, just move on to the next attack. For rule #2, never actually engage in the merits of an argument (often because there are are none), just keep spouting off whatever you can. Enough smoke will convince people there must be a fire. For rules #2 and #3, keep the opposition on the defensive, make them defend things they don’t like (such as Trump’s marital infidelity, his “grab them by the pussy” locker talk), and keep them unbalanced with “No one is above the law” rhetoric that was used to justify all the blatantly corrupt lawfare against Trump.
I’m fairly well convinced that the Trump Derangement is less actually mental illness and far more deliberate tactics to wear down people who support Trump or at least don’t believe he is literally the worst thing ever. The Facebook statement above is geared to make people either grovel that they are not Trump supporters, or place them in the uncomfortable position of losing out on friendship, which then makes them at least question whether supporting Trump is worthwhile. This declaration of unfriending someone is a loud, tantrum tactic that seeks no argument, no conversation, just capitulation. And if there isn’t capitulation, the next step will be to escalate the tantrum. This post is just a few steps behind the librarian from a few posts back that was hoping Trump supports would be shot in the face. And the funny thing, if you actually unfriend the poster, the poster gets to then immediately turn around claim martyrdom because they are so persecuted for calling out how horrible Trump is. It is all deliberate tactics.
The real question is how to handle this. Sitting down and talking just ends in reinforcing the tactics of the radicals. Trying to negotiate leads to giving them at least a portion of what they want, after which they will just ratchet up the rhetoric and the pressure once again, because you were foolish enough to give them an inch in the first place. It is like a toddler throwing a tantrum, who knows that he can wear you down with the tantrum and get what he wants, and who knows he just needs to tantrum harder if there’s any resistance to his tantrums. At this point, responses need to be forceful and refuse to give in to the emotional blackmail these people are using.
Maybe a response would be, “This despicable display of emotional blackmail is a naked attempt to claim martyrdom when those of us who had been your dedicated friends walk out on you. To be clear: at any point of time you wish to resume our friendship, reach out, and I’ll be waiting, because that is what friends actually do. But I will accept your challenge, unfriend you, and leave with the knowledge that you have brought this contemptuous situation upon yourself.” But then, I’m not very good at dealing with conflict, so maybe that’s too weak.
Ryan, I think you’re onto something. Remember, Hillary Clinton did her senior college thesis on Saul Alinsky and his “Rules for Radicals.” How crazy is that? Is that telling, or what. I think the American Communist Party has been active since the teens or twenties. I had two experiences as a kid that keep coming back to me.
First, in the fall of 1969, I’d just matriculated at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, populated mostly by kids from Long Island. I’d just departed from my home in Miami, Florida where I’d grown up from around sixth grade with kids who’d literally fled the Communist regime in Cuba. While visiting in one of the dorms at the girl’s college across the street, I was enthusiastically confronted by an older student, or maybe he wasn’t even a student, who asked me if I wanted to go to Cuba to cut sugar cane. He moved on after I was dumbstruck. (As a sub note, the partner I worked for in my big firm days recalled being similarly pitched while an undergrad at Miami of Ohio. He, a successful big firm partner, said he wanted to go but it didn’t work out!)
Later that same year, I was riding a bus up the Thruway, back to the college from the Port Authority while returning from Christmas break. The guy sitting next to me, asked me, “Are you with the movement?” Again, I was dumbstruck.
My point is simply, these revolutionaries are out there, and they’re organized and they have an agenda to remake the country. And it’s been going on for at least a hundred years. The collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s conversion to fascism has not dissuaded these Communist revolutionaries from their task of overthrowing the government by cultural and electoral control or violence.
Steve Bannon well before “the escalator” anticipated a figure to come forth who would initiate a movement to turn back and against a destructive tide in America and in the West, described Trump when he did appear as “an armor piercing shell” but a weapon with many imperfections.
Trump represents — emblazons — a deep defect in the American psyche. His “imperfections” are far too visible and dominate him far too much. I suggest that he represents a “flawed man” of the present. Those that desire “genuine restoration” of a soundness to the body politic (political, conceptual, intellectual, spiritual) trip over their own psychic failings or perhaps the disease of their own multitudinous complicities in corruption. They desire that “the time” bring forth — almost literally — a savior-figure and one capable of ‘national restoration’ but what has come forth cannot embody that ideal. (The ideal is not actually and truthfully defined, a big part of the problem).
The Left-Progressive factions (evermore radical, evermore rebellious) invite themselves to “hate” with burning emotion and contempt this ridiculous, loud-mouthed, arrogant and reckless Figure (which in one aspect he surely and unfortunately is) and to band together in opposition to what he represents both tangibly and in their overheated projections. He may well represent that Old America being crushed by a radical and different wave.
Where is this tending? is the question I ask. You have to see and accept something that can be described as “social psychosis” which is breaking out but which is also bound to erupt in something more grave.