of course. the right has operated for years in the knowledge that exposure to repeated inflammatory assertions which conform with people's existing prejudices will produce a population of passionate believers, regardless of the truth behind the assertions.
as soon as a person feels a sense of outrage which someone else is promoting, that's when they should stand back and check the evidence. and that's exactly what they rarely do.
arguments require the existence of facts. republican hypotheses are usually founded on some invention or another, supported by the herd instinct.
eg the market is always right.
or, hillary clinton is corrupt.
or, democrats hate america.
or, us elections are corrupted by illegal voting.
or, government and regulations are always bad (except when they support republican ideas).
or, the constitution supports republican ideas and the supreme court must reflect this truth.
everything is built on the rotten wood of these sorts of premises/prejudices. but you can't get republicans to challenge their ideas. the sorts of people who did left the party long ago.
what actually happens is they proclaim their ideals and then disclaim their results. this was particularly obvious under bush, where, for instance, government hatred produced the response to hurricane katrina and the love of unfettered markets produced the 2008 catastrophe. after which, people who originally supported what he did said bush was the problem because he wasn't republican enough!!!!
lest we forget, a majority of americans were willing to be taken to war in iraq on the basis of obvious lies about links to al qaeda and nuclear weapons programs, followed by the more nebulous weapons of mass destruction which no one could find ahead of the war. how did submitting to those lies turn out?
some folks have started early under trump! suspension of disbelief.
| 