And it’s still working
Honestly, I don’t know what to say about this. It’s hard not to be insulting. But I’m afraid these people are in the grips of cultlike behavior and it isn’t pretty:
Former President Donald Trump has made the “stolen” 2020 election the centerpiece of his post-White House political life. Virtually every statement he sends out invokes the false theme.
The polling shows it has been effective, not just with the crowd that stormed the Capitol on his behalf on Jan. 6, 2021, but with members of the Republican Party almost a year and a half later.
The multiple recounts and audits that confirmed Joe Biden’s win have changed little. With remarkable consistency, a scant one-quarter of Republican voters tell pollsters that Biden won legitimately. That was the view they shared in the spring of 2021, and the fraction remains about the same today.
Roughly 70% of Republicans don’t see Biden as the legitimate winner. Surveys by different pollsters show virtually the same results, with the exception of a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll that dropped it to 61%.
The people around Trump may have known he was lying, as we learned yesterday, but they didn’t speak out at the time and now the GOP is completely brainwashed.
Focus groups have shown that Trump supporters weren’t swayed by specific pieces of evidence that rebutted his claims.
Sarah Longwell, executive director of Republicans for the Rule of Law, has conducted regular focus groups with fans of Trump.”For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought,” Longwell wrote April 18 for The Atlantic. “They know something nefarious occurred, but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.”
Trump, Longwell wrote, primed his backers to disbelieve the official results. Months before the vote, he linked mail-in ballots to fraud. On Election Night in many states, mail-in results come later than in-person tabulations. Longwell said that timing raised suspicions.”A woman from Georgia told me, ‘When I went to bed, Trump was so in the lead and then (I got) up and he’s not in the lead. I mean, that’s crazy,’” Longwell said.
Personal experience also reinforced belief. Political scientist Lilliana Mason at Johns Hopkins University told us that maps of the election results show that many Republican voters live in communities that are almost entirely red.“It seems ludicrous to them that Biden could have won, because they’ve never heard of a single person who voted for him,” Mason said.
Political scientist Alexander Theodoridis, associate director of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst poll, said partisan polarization makes agreement on the election results even harder to achieve.”Partisans view the other side as morally bankrupt and capable of anything,” Theodoridis said. “This makes it nearly impossible to correct even the most egregious pieces of misinformation.”
Not only does accurate information fail to persuade, Longwell said the effort can backfire.”A woman from Arizona told me, ‘I think what convinced me more that the election was fixed was how vehemently they have said it wasn’t,’” Longwell said.
I’m sorry, that is just daft.
But maybe there are just some people who are subject to cult-like thinking and when a demagogue like Trump comes along they can’t resist? Check out this story about Ginni Thomas’s history with cults:
In the 1980s, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas had a moment of clarity: She realized she had fallen in with a group she considered “a cult” and sought to be “deprogrammed” from it, she said in decades-old remarks obtained by NBC News.
Thomas’ involvement with Lifespring, an organization advertising training seminars purporting to help participants unlock almost superhuman potential, left her wondering what it was about herself that allowed her to be drawn in. Her successful deprogramming — considered a controversial tactic — led her to become a vigorous anti-cult crusader. For years, she was deeply involved with the nation’s largest anti-cult organization, assisting in setting up workshops for congressional staffers to combat groups like Lifespring.
“When you come away from a cult, you’ve got to find a balance in your life as far as getting involved with fighting the cult or exposing it,” Thomas told attendees at a 1986 Cult Awareness Network panel in Kansas City, Missouri. “And kind of the other angle is getting a sense of yourself and what was it that made you get into that group. And what open questions are there that still need to be answered.”
It appears she didn’t answer any of these open questions. She is clearly in the grip of the Trump cult.
Two debunked conspiracies Thomas referenced in the aftermath of the 2020 election were first embraced and promoted by QAnon adherents. One theory involves claims that Democrats and other election officials were being arrested and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba as the votes were still being counted. Another is the idea that then-President Donald Trump had watermarked mail-in ballots so he could track voter fraud — a claim both false and implausible. Still, QAnon followers spread both claims online following the November 3 vote, and references appear in QAnon-connected videos, social media posts and message boards.
“I don’t know how anybody would go for that — again,” said Peter Georgiades, a Pittsburgh- based lawyer who for more than a decade specialized in suing cults, of the conspiracies Thomas referred to in her text messages.
“Here is Ginni Thomas sort of getting sucked into the basically equivalent of a cult again,” said one person involved with a 1988 anti-cult briefing for congressional staffers Thomas helped organize, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution
Maybe the openness to cults never really goes away. Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics has been disputed by recent scholars but there is an element of truth in it. While cult’s of personality are not confined to the right, this combination of cult worship and paranoia does seem to be a specific characteristic of the wingnuts. What’s still shocking is how many of them there are.