ANS -- I Was a Liberal Who Worked at Fox News. Here's What That Taught Me About Arguing Politics

Here's a fairly short article about how to talk to those who disagree with us politically.  It has some good advice.  We say we don't like how divided the nation is right now -- here's your chance to be part of healing the divide.  

find it here:  I Was a Liberal Who Worked at Fox News. Here's What That Taught Me About Arguing Politics    

I Was a Liberal Who Worked at Fox News. Here's What That Taught Me About... I was getting to know and like many conservatives and at the same time receiving more and more hate mail from co...

--Kim

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• I WAS A LIBERAL WHO WORKED AT FOX NEWS. HERE'S WHAT THAT TAUGHT ME ABOUT ARGUING POLITICS 

I Was a Liberal Who Worked at Fox News. Here's What That Taught Me About Arguing Politics

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IDEAS

BY SALLY KOHN 

 

APRIL 10, 2018 10:38 AM EDT

Sally Kohn is a CNN political commentator, activist, host of the podcast State of Resistance and author of The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity.

It may seem surprising for a liberal commentator like myself, but from 2010 to 2013, I worked in the most prominent den of American conservatism: Fox News. During my time at the network I came to realize how condescending I'd been in my views about not only the people who worked at Fox News but the people watching at home. And condescension is just a snooty form of prejudice; we are only condescending to those we feel are inherently beneath us. The more I got out of my own liberal bubble, the more I met other conservatives who were neither stupid nor hateful — or at least no more deliberately hateful than I was. Those experiences really challenged my biases and assumptions. I'm not saying that Sean Hannity is the nicest person on the planet; his political views are certainly not anywhere near what I would reasonably call nice. What I am saying is that I realized that the person I'd thought of as entirely cruel, as the caricature of a horrific right-wing monster, is actually caring and kind, and a good dad and a supportive friend. Including a supportive friend to me.

Either way, the experience of getting to know and like many conservatives and at the same time receiving more and more hate mail from conservatives presented me with a choice. From here on out, was I going to believe that most conservatives were like the ones I'd worked with at Fox News, or was I going to assume that most conservatives were like the ones sending me hateful messages online? Which was the exception, and which was the rule? Honestly, I probably could have made a case either way. This was a decision that tested my core principles. I could either choose to hate most conservatives or not. I found my answer in my aunt Lucy.

Aunt Lucy has a deep love for her friends and family, a great sense of humor, and a laugh that feels like a tickle. Aunt Lucy (not her real name, by the way) lives in the middle of the country and is a conservative Republican. She also loves me and my partner and our daughter and welcomes us with open arms at every family occasion we manage to attend. The few times we've cautiously talked politics, Aunt Lucy has been curious and kind. Aunt Lucy watches Fox News, and eventually it dawned on me that most Fox viewers are probably just like her — decent, curious about the news, intending to learn and do something good with the information. I started to picture my aunt Lucy when I would go on Fox, and then when I would go on CNN, and even when I would respond to people on Twitter. It made it easier for me to think and talk and act from a place of kindness, not hate — to not stereotype the invisible people on the other side of those screens but instead to imagine my aunt Lucy, someone I love and respect.

For me, it's infinitely more encouraging, not to mention more effective, to treat conservatives as a bunch of Aunt Lucys instead of a cache of trolls or a "basket of deplorables." Nobody is going to engage in a constructive dialogue with me if they think I believe they're a bridge-dwelling gnome or a totable pile of rot.

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People often ask me how they can talk to their conservative relatives at family gatherings like Thanksgiving. I actually have a handy tool, taught to me by Matt Kohut and John Neffinger, authors of the book Compelling People, as well as their colleague Seth Pendleton, with whom I've worked leading media trainings and public-speaking workshops.

Algonquin Books

Imagine my aunt Lucy says something about how she doesn't mean to be anti-immigrant or anything, but the economy is just really bad right now and we don't have enough jobs for the people who are already here. Now, my natural instinct is to argue: "No, you're wrong, and let me explain the three reasons why!" But what we know from neuroscience is that while we all need to use our frontal lobes to engage in a reasoned discussion — and to be open to persuasion — when we perceive an argument coming, our frontal lobes shut down and the fight-or-flight part of our brain turns on (the part of the brain, as we'll see later, that also holds our biases and stereotypes). If we want to keep the possibility of persuasion open, we have to stay conversational. Also, in her statement, my aunt Lucy isn't expressing cold hard facts so much as she's expressing a feeling about the facts as she understands them. And as every good couples counselor I've ever been to has told me, you can't argue with feelings. If my partner says I hurt her feelings, I can't say, "No, I didn't!" They're her feelings — and they're inherently valid by virtue of her feeling them.

So instead of arguing, here's a tip, which uses the shorthand ABC. The A stands for "affirm." First, you find a feeling that you can genuinely affirm. In this hypothetical conversation with my aunt Lucy, I might say, "I'm also really worried about the economy right now." Or, "I completely agree it's important that everyone has access to a good job." It's important that I'm not making it up. It's not some act or gesture. I mean it. I can really, authentically agree with that part of what Aunt Lucy is saying. So I start with that.

Next is B, for "bridge." It does not stand for "but." It also doesn't stand for "however," which is the Harvard of "buts." It's a bridge, a way of saying "and." You can actually just say "and" — or "that's why" or "actually" or "the thing is" or even "the good news is." Anything but "but." "But" basically invalidates whatever came before it. Like when I say to my partner, "I'm sorry, but . . ." According to those same couples counselors, that means I'm not at all sorry. Apparently, that's what my partner thinks it means, too.

Then comes C — "convince." This is where I put whatever I was inclined to spit out in the first place, about how comprehensive immigration reform actually raises wages and working standards for immigrant and citizen workers, or whatever point I wanted to make.

In my experience, ABCing is hard to do in the moment but incredibly effective when done right. It's a powerful tool for what I call "connection-speech," which not only lets you make your point but helps you make it in a friendly, respectful way that can be heard.

But beyond the ABC tool, when people ask how to talk to their own Aunt Lucys about politics, I often ask how they talk with their family members about topics other than politics. Do they yell and scream at their aunt if she loves some movie they think is stupid? Of course not. Maybe they get heated and say things like, "Seriously? You don't think Dirty Dancing is the greatest love story of all time?" But the conversation stays civil, and any outrage is secondary to the overwhelming spirit of love. I'm not going to disown Aunt Lucy for not liking Dirty Dancing.

Obviously, political issues are far more important. But still, I love Aunt Lucy infinitely more than I dislike Donald Trump. Remembering that helps. And frankly, I have plenty of good friends I don't see 100 percent eye to eye with but generally think are "on my side." What if I only agree with them on 90 percent of issues? Or 60 percent? Or 40 percent? Where do I draw the line between accepting we just "agree to disagree" and defining them as monstrous enemies? The thing is, I give "my people" on "my side" the benefit of the doubt. Why don't I do that for Aunt Lucy?

Connection-speech offers a ray of hope in the dark storm cloud that is internet vitriol, and vitriol in general. Because the fact is, we all say we don't like this crap. For instance, most Americans say they don't like mudslinging political ads and negative campaigns. And yet we keep voting for the mudslingers. Do we really want what we say we want? If so, we have to start actually supporting it and modeling civility ourselves. Both offline and on, if we stop fanning hate and instead practice connection-speech, that little ray of hope for a better way of interacting and even disagreeing with one another could spread.

Excerpted from The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity by Sally Kohn © 2018 by Sally Kohn. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

ANS -- Heather Cox Richardson on last night's speech:

Here's another bit from FaceBook.  It's a comment on Trump's speech at the last night of the Republican "convention".  Plus the comments thus far.  

--Kim

 

Sara Robinson posted this 8/28/20

Heather Cox Richardson on last night's speech:

"I looked at the hundreds of people at Trump's rally tonight, unmasked and older, and almost all so very white, and saw a group of people so afraid of the future they are willing to say yes, willing to throw in their lot with a malignant narcissist because he tells them they can recover a world in which they felt more relevant, a world they control.

We have been here before. In the 1850s, when the nation had to grapple with the idea of westward expansion across a continent, many reactionary Americans thought the solution to keeping an expanding nation stable was to spread human enslavement along with the American flag so that a small group of wealthy slaveowners maintained control over the government.

But Americans who believed that society worked best if every man had a right to his own labor organized under Abraham Lincoln and, rejecting their neighbors' hierarchical view of society, restored the idea of human equality and pushed America into the future.

In the 1890s, when the nation had to grapple with the idea of industrialization, many reactionary Americans thought the solution to the growing divide between labor and capital was to create a world in which a few wealthy industrialists directed the labor of the masses.

But Americans who believed in the founding principle of human equality before the law organized under Theodore Roosevelt and rejected the idea that workers belonged to a permanent underclass. They pushed America into the future.

In the 1930s, when the nation had to grapple with a worldwide depression, reactionary Americans thought the solution was fascism, in which a few strong men organized and directed the labor of their countrymen.

But most Americans rejected the idea that some men were better than others, and they organized under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to restore the idea of equality before the law and return the government to the hands of ordinary Americans. They pushed America into the future.

Tonight's event at the White House demonstrated that we are in another great crisis in American history. A reactionary group of older white men look at a global future in which questions of clean energy, climate change, economic fairness, and human equality are uppermost, and their reaction is to cling to a world they control.

But that world is passing, whether they like it or not. Even if Trump wins in 2020, he cannot stop the future from coming. And while the United States will not meet that future with the power we had even four years ago, we will have to meet it nonetheless. It will be no less exciting and offer no fewer opportunities than the dramatic changes of the 1850s, 1890s, and 1930s, and at some point, Americans will want to meet those challenges.

If history is any guide, when that happens, we will restore the principle of equality before the law, and push America into the future."

 

 

Comments

Suzanne Turner

Thanks for this.

Phil Verostko

It is helpful to read Heather every day.

Barbara O'Brien

This is excellent.

ElJean Dodge Wilson

Thanks for sharing, 

Sara Robinson

. Very well said.

Robert R. Mackey

Had this discussion last year. To me, it is the "Big Daddy will protect us from the Bad Future people." Caudillo territory here, folks.

Sara Robinson

Charlie Pierce routinely refers to Trump as "El Caudillo de Mar-A-Lago."

Brian Angliss

I desperately want to be hopeful like this, but my understanding of the history of fascism does not let me.

Christian Crews

A lot of us futurists are recovered historians so loved this retrospective. Just quibble with "Even if Trump wins in 2020..." Unlike previous examples, if Trump wins in 2020 it will be a threat to our democracy and nation itself, with no other threat as serious in our history except the Civil War. The principles of equality before the law may not be able to prevail against pure unrestrained power, or until it does the consequences of a fascist regime will make it impossible to unbreak the egg. Whether through a legitimate vote or stealing the election with voter suppression, refusal to concede, declaration of emergency powers, lawsuits and a willing Supreme Court, Trump will be emboldened to continue to erode democratic principles and checks on his power. Liberal states will secede, future elections will be suspended or rigged, and the end of the US as a single democratic country will begin. Trump must lose in a landslide to prevent the end of the republic - it sounds dramatic but following the impacts it's all there.

We need to be clear - we are already living in a fascist regime that is dismantling the people's representative freedoms and whose only ideology is the gaining and maintaining of complete power, one that has already killed 180,000 people in service of staying in office. This election will test our ability to vote ourselves out of that regime or show that our democracy is not strong enough to withstand it. It is literally (not figuratively) the most important vote since 1860.

Sara Robinson

Richardson, who is a professor of Civil War history, would no doubt agree with you. If you haven't seen it, her new book, "How The South Won The Civil War," is an excellent guide to these times -- and lays out exactly why this is the most important vote since 1860.

Which, it's good to remember, is the election that triggered the Civil War. This one may, too.

James Brinton

BTW, HCR is now a regular on Bill Moyers site. She's got a couple of top-notch podcasts up there, too.

Stephen Benson

Stephen Benson Stephen Benson đang ở trên Facebook. Tham gia Facebook để kết nối với Stephen Benson và những người khác mà có t...

just like nature abhors a vacuum, economies detest imbalance. galbraith

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ANS -- Twenty things I learned from watching the Republican convention:

This is meant to be somewhat humorous.  From FaceBook.  Written by Joy Morgenstern.  

Joy Morgenstern

Twenty things I learned from watching the Republican convention:

1. The pandemic is over and now we're going to re-open our economy.

2. Our cities are crumbling and burning down and if Biden is elected our cities will crumble and burn down and only Trump can prevent cities from crumbling and burning down like they are now while he is president.

3. Black people are all born into poverty but the good ones persevere and become successful without any help from the government except for the help they get from programs that Donald and Ivanka created.

4. Biden is a puppet of radical leftist terrorist communist socialists like AOC and Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi. Plus he's sleepy.

5. Occasionally bad cops kill innocent black people but the way to stop that is to give lots and lots and lots of money to the police.

6. Everyone who knows Trump personally knows that he cares about people and wishes you could see that even though they can't actually come up with one example of him doing anything caring except maybe that time he went to Disneyworld with his kids.

7. Trump isn't actually a rude, narcissistic bigot who calls people racist names, makes fun of the disabled, and advocates rape – he's actually a fighter who doesn't have time for political correctness because he's busy playing golf I mean doing important things.

8. Democrats will force you to abort your unborn child by tearing it from your womb 5 minutes before birth so they can sell your baby for organ harvesting or child slavery.

9. We don't need no stinkin' regulations.

10. Crime is getting worse and worse and worse and if Biden is elected it will spread to the suburbs and they will be destroyed because brown people, who all belong to MS 13, will move in next door to you.

11. God wants you to vote for Donald Trump even though we can't actually talk about how a specific religion and church are an important part of his life, like we usually can with politicians, because we're hoping you're too clueless to notice that Donald Trump never goes to church and doesn't know a thing about religion.

12. Experts don't know anything.

13. We wouldn't have wildfires if we cut down all the trees.

14. The Democrats have closed everything down because they don't want you to go to church.

15. Oil and gas are really good because they provide jobs and energy independence, which is why the Democrats hate them.

16. Public schools are failing and the way to fix them is to give money to private schools.

17. I know you love gay Uncle Bob, so don't throw him under the bus just yet, but he and his San Francisco Democrat friends are interfering with your religious freedom.

18. Trump isn't a nasty career politician like that nasty Biden, and that's why he's gotten so much done, like, you know, those things that have made your life so good right now.

19. Unions are really, really, really bad because they want to tell you when and where you can work.

20. There's absolutely no reason to be concerned about wildfires and hurricanes and other types of destructive weather patterns that are increasing in intensity and number. It's so not a problem that we're not even going to mention it, as California burns to the ground and people in Iowa, Texas and Louisiana are buried under piles of rubble.

ANS -- The NRA and the Long Con

Here's another from Doug Muder.  It's about why the right wing people are so easy to con.  About mind sets and world views, how we look at the world.  Hard to imagine, but some people have very different views ...

Find it here:  The NRA and the Long Con 

The NRA and the Long Con The New York and D.C. attorneys general have uncovered self-dealing, lavish spending on executive luxuries, and ...

--Kim

The NRA and the Long Con

The New York and D.C. attorneys general have uncovered self-dealing, lavish spending on executive luxuries, and outright fraud at the National Rifle Association. Why is the conservative movement such fertile ground for this kind of thing?

Alarm bells. In 1973 I was a junior in high school, and a friend who had recently discovered the John Birch Society gave me a copy of their 1971 best-seller None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Thus was I introduced to the conspiracy theory of history: Forget all this talk of deep social forces evolving in unpredictable ways; in reality a cabal of powerful people has (for decades, or maybe centuries) been steering the planet towards a one-world dictatorship.

I was open to stuff like that in those days. Being 16, I wasn't exactly invested in any other theory of history, or in established worldviews of any sort. In addition to conspiracies, I also had an open mind about ancient astronauts, lost continents, and the Velikovsky theory of the solar system. I had recently broken away from the literal-truth-of-the-Bible religion I had learned in a Christian elementary school, so the idea that authority figures of all sorts had been telling me tall tales seemed pretty credible. Why shouldn't the world be explained by a sweeping hidden truth that the Powers That Be didn't want me to know?

So I was undecided about NDCiC until I got to the last chapter, the one explaining what You the Reader could do to save America and the World from these sinister forces: Buy a lot of copies of None Dare Call It Conspiracy and pass them out to people in your neighborhood.

To summarize: You do not necessarily have to be an articulate salesman to make this "end run" [around what we now call "the mainstream media"]. You do not necessarily have to know all the in's and out's of the total conspiracy – the book is intended to do this for you. All you have to do is find the wherewithal to purchase the books and one way or another see that you blanket your precinct with them.

If 30 million copies got bought and distributed before the 1972 election, the conspiracy would be exposed beyond the conspirators ability to cover it back up again. (Apparently they fell short, because the cover of the 2014 edition claimed only 5 million copies sold. And so the Great Conspiracy rolls on.)

In short, an author was telling me that in order to save the world, I needed to "find the wherewithal" to "one way or another" make him rich. That set off alarm bells in my head, and caused me to re-evaluate the book's whole argument.

Looking back, I now think those alarm bells are why I eventually became a liberal. Conservatives might have their internal alarm bells tuned to a variety of other threats — and perhaps are often appalled that mine stay silent when theirs start clanging — but apparently not to scams.

Grifters and their marks. As many writers have observed, entering the conservative information bubble puts you in a high-grift zone. Amanda Marcotte put it like this:

Look at the ads in conservative publications or on right-wing sites: It's a chaotic dogpile of snake oil pitches, predatory gold-bug scams, and "survivalist" supplies that are drastically overpriced or worthless. Most of the familiar characters in the Fox News pundit universe — as well as Donald Trump's Cabinet — have their own email newsletters, and subscribing to one means a nonstop onslaught of email pitches for "miracle" cures and get-rich-quick scams. There are countless shady conservative political action committees that promise to help elect Republican candidates, but whose real purpose is to enrich the folks who run them. Onetime GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin ran one such PAC that drew lots of incoming donations and spent very little of it on real-world political campaigns. To a significant degree, the conservative movement exists as a way to compile lists of gullible marks used by scammers and con artists.

Liberal media personalities like Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes may occasionally also have a book to sell you, but Sean Hannity endorses the Homearly Real Estate Group, which claims to donate $500 to the Wounded Warrior Project every time it sells a home. In daisy-chain fashion, Wounded Warrior has at times been a scam itself; its top executives were fired in 2016 after CBS News discovered that the "charity" was spending tens of millions of dollars a year on lavish parties at five-star resorts.

This kind of thing has been going on a long time. In his 2012 article "The Long Con", Rick Perlstein traced it back as far as the 1970s (my high school days), and gave 2012 examples like Ann Coulter's endorsement of a skeezy investment newsletter. (For contrast, I admire Nobel-prize winning liberal economist Paul Krugman, but it never occurs to me to wonder where he gets investment advice.)

Liberal and conservative pundits, it seems, are doing something subtly different. Liberals are telling you what is happening; conservatives are telling you who to trust. Liberals divide the world into True and False; conservatives into Good People and Bad People. Good People can introduce you to other Good People, and those introductions are worth serious money.

Foundational myths. If you wonder why conservatives are such easy prey for con-men, the answer is pretty simple. The conservative movement's whole ideology is based on a series of easily disprovable myths: tax cuts pay for themselves, the American healthcare system is the best in the world, racism ended with Jim Crow in the 1960s, more guns make us all safer, and so on. The movement's movers and shakers expected Obama's decreasing deficits to enrage their people to the point of violence, but Trump's increasing deficits to pass without comment. Obama's executive orders (like DACA) were outrageous steps towards dictatorship, but Trump's far more sweeping decrees (like this week's unilateral extension of unemployment benefits without the consent of Congress) are legitimate expressions of Article II power. And so on.

The people Rush Limbaugh refers to as "dittoheads" don't just mouth these absurdities, they actually believe them. They are, in short, easy marks. If you can collect a lot of them in one room, or on one mailing list, you have created an ideal fishing pond for hucksters.

In "The Long Con" Perlstein began with the pervasive mendacity of Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. (I believe Romney was the first major-party nominee to continue repeating a lie after the media had fact-checked him on it; that may seem like par for the course now, but as recently as 2012 it was flabbergasting.) Then he pulled back to examine the central role con-men and scams have played in the conservative movement.

The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.

To adapt another bit of Perlstein imagery: Once the politicians have you worrying about an invisible river, the grifters will happily sell you an invisible bridge.

The NRA. Here's what brings this topic to mind this week: Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James laid out in a lawsuit an explicit account of one of the conservative movement's longest-running cons: the National Rifle Association. According to the NYAG's press release:

four individual defendants [Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre and three other top executives] failed to fulfill their fiduciary duty to the NRA and used millions upon millions from NRA reserves for personal use, including trips for them and their families to the Bahamas, private jets, expensive meals, and other private travel.

These actions contributed "to the loss of more than $64 million in just three years for the NRA". The corruption is so pervasive that James is asking a New York court to dissolve the NRA, which it can do because the NRA has been incorporated there since 1871.

The same day, D. C. Attorney General Karl Racine sued the National Rifle Association Foundation, a charitable foundation incorporated in the District of Columbia. Donations to the NRA Foundation are tax-exempt, while donations to the NRA are not. Consequently, there are more restrictions on what the Foundation can do. (This arrangement may look suspicious, but in itself is not uncommon or necessarily corrupt. For example, the ACLU has an associated Foundation, which can pay legal fees for the ACLU's clients, but can't lobby for legislation. As long as the laws are followed, there shouldn't be a problem.)

Just as James accuses executives like LaPierre of using the NRA as a "personal piggy-bank", Racine charges that the officers of the NRA Foundation were allowing the NRA to abuse Foundation funds by making sweetheart loans to the NRA, letting the NRA overcharge it for management fees, and in general placing the interests of the NRA above the interests of the Foundation. In short, the Foundation was just a pass-through that allowed the NRA to use tax-exempt donations.

The D.C. lawsuit is not seeking to dissolve the NRA Foundation, but to force the NRA to repay the money it took from the Foundation, and to reorganize the Foundation to restore its integrity as a charitable institution.

Marcotte comments on how the con has worked:

The NRA's grift has been almost comical in its bluntness. The group traffics in over-the-top rhetoric designed to play on some of the darkest and most irrational emotions of American conservatives, including racist fears over the nation's changing demographics, overblown fears of crime and paranoid fantasies that liberals are trying to "take over" the country in illegitimate ways. So much of the hyperventilating conspiracy-theory discourse found on the right, especially the wild fever-dreams about progressive "violence," starts with the NRA, which sought to convince conservatives that they needed to spend ungodly amounts of money on buying guns and on supporting the NRA itself, in order to protect themselves from the imaginary threat of gun-grabbing libtards and antifa terrorists.

Misdirected outrage. The two lawsuits led to howls of rage from conservatives pundits. You might think the howls would be directed at LaPierre and his crooked cronies, for ripping off the millions of NRA members and contributors, and for spending the conservative movement's money on themselves. But no: The outrage is at the two attorneys general for catching them. Marcotte summarizes:

Far from thanking James for trying to shut down an organization that spreads shameless lies in order to separate conservatives from their money, Republican leaders and right-wing pundits are crying foul. Some of the defenses have been, uh, interesting.

"I prosecuted organizations or individuals who cheated their organizations, OK," said Jeanine Pirro, the former New York prosecutor turned histrionic Fox News commentator on Friday morning. "It happens all the time. It's no big deal, all right?"

The previous night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham warned that this was a sign of things to come and Democrats will soon "go after pro-life groups, conservative think tanks, conservative radio shows, cable networks, even churches."

And well they might, if executives of "pro-life groups, conservative think tanks, conservative radio shows, cable networks, even churches" have been ripping off their organizations and spending the donors' money on their own lavish perks. Ingraham seems to be taking for granted that they are. (I'm particularly amused by the "even churches" in that quote, because mega-church and televangelist ministries have been famous for spending money collected for "the Lord's work" on the lavish lifestyles of their ministers. The worst offenders are preachers you have probably never heard of if you don't watch Christian cable channels, but Jerry Falwell Jr., who finally lost his job this week for a fairly silly reason, had previously been accused in Politico of self-dealing with Liberty University's money.)

And of course our Law & Order President is perfectly fine with thieves running the NRA. New York's lawsuit is "a terrible thing", Trump says, and he suggests that the organization dodge the law by moving the Texas. (He should know that wouldn't work, because it wasn't an option when New York dissolved the fraudulent Trump Foundation, or when he had to pay $25 million to settle the Trump University fraud.)

Marcotte sums up:

It's not just that the NRA has been a major player in helping Republican politicians over the years, both in terms of funding and in keeping the right-wing base riled up over imaginary threats. It's that grifting and con artistry are the backbone of the conservative movement.

If New York is actually successful in dissolving the NRA, it's quite true that, as Ingraham suggested, similar efforts could follow against right-wing activist groups. But that won't happen because of their ideology, but because so many of them rely on the same kinds of grifting and fraud the NRA has thrived on for years. The entire right-wing movement is awash in this kind of corruption.

Will they learn? It would be pleasant to imagine conservatives all over the country finally hearing the kinds of alarm bells I heard in 1973, and realizing that they need to be more careful about what ideas they accept and who they send their money to. But that's almost certainly not going to happen.

When a series of televangelists had scandals in the 1980s, the effect on televangelism as a whole was small and short-lived. Believers disillusioned by one preacher mostly just changed channels and watched another. And when Jim Bakker got out of prison, he made a comeback. After all, why shouldn't you send your money to a convicted fraudster, if he sounds good on television?

There is still considerable attraction in conservatism's Manichean worldview, in which Good People struggle against Bad People, and you don't need to do the work to figure out what's true, you just need to know who to trust. It is in some perverse way comforting to believe that our problems do not arise from the fact that life is difficult, or that substantial effort is required to find solutions to hard problems. There is no need to spend your life looking for cures and treatments, like Dr. Fauci has; miracle cures like hydroxycholaquine are everywhere, and we just need to listen to the Good People like Donald Trump who tell us about them. There are simple secrets to getting rich, and we could all be rich if only we could put aside our doubts and trust the Good People who want to let us in on the ground floor. No one needs to work out the details of complex programs like Medicare for All, we just need a Good Leader with the courage to tell the healthcare system to work better.

And so, as the NRA faces a possibly fatal legal storm, Q-Anon is rising. They have a conspiracy theory that swallows all the others like the plot of Illuminatus! made real. And their founder can never be discredited, because we don't know who it is.

And guess what? There's plenty of merchandise you can buy.

Like the fringe conspiracy theory Qanon? There's plenty of merch for sal... Shoppers are presented with over 1,000 results when they search Amazon for the term "Qanon."