Psychopathic souls at the edge.
A writer friend from the neighborhood posted an article about the immigrant children on Facebook -- yes, I still use it, kids and relatives and creative/vegan groups, eh -- and a friend of hers commented with a long screed about how Obama did it so shut up. The standard, right? It's all they got. Evil Obama did it so we get to do it. Works on idiots, makes no sense, who cares.
Ignoring my general common sense, I riposted. I commented with the Snopes link and pointed out that nothing the man had said was true in any sense.
His response was a video from a YouTube channel called 'White House Brief'. CRTV -- Criminal Russian Television, I suppose. These videos all have between eighteen and five thousand views, and it's wall to wall Pizzagate and Muslim Brotherhood and all the good stuff the KGB is cooking up for the Really Stupid Among Us.
I didn't want to get ugly on my writer friend's thread -- this guy is a real estate agent she met at some point, not real friends, just an associate. So I kept it measured and fact-based.
Now, I know the routine. This stuff is always useless. All their energy is spent in shoving their fingers in their ears and going 'LALALALALALA', pffft.
However. In so many words, I called him a traitor to the United States. He responded without rancor, as if I had said nothing wrong. I began to get the feeling that he was keeping it cool too, perhaps he didn't want to go Full Nazi in front of my writer friend. I conversed for two days with this man, always eliciting only calm, measured, irrelevant responses. He objected to nothing I said.
He did say he had '27 years of service', and had held security clearances. He also said I was 'being lead (sic) around by the corporate media'. I remarked that these facts made it all the more sad that he would fall for such obviously calculated misinformation. He dd not object. We ceased the contact with his suggestion that we revisit the issue after 2020, and I thanked him for his civility in the conversation.
But the truth -- the dialogue was seriously disturbing to me. This man's Facebook profile shows real estate stuff and a new girlfriend -- he's a white guy in his late fourties, some old photos of him in uniform, not much else.
I called him a traitor, and he shrugged. His only response is a video from a clearly whacko KGB-created site, full of misinformation and outright lies.
Bland. Empty. Unconcerned. Disengaged. Unreal.
I know I made a mistake. The dialogue injured me, because I was unable to say what I really wanted to say, the social proprieties bound me like iron chains. When you call someone a traitor and a racist you expect a little more reaction than a shrug of the shoulders.
It was frightening. Who raised this mild psychopath? He has a dog and a girlfriend and sells houses, and yet he unapologetically longs for a white militarist America propped up with Russian help. He supports torture of children and probably much, much more -- and the only defense he offers is that 'Obama did it too'.
It was a minor but spiritually expensive window into the madness of Not America. I was glad to leave the conversation because I started to get the feeling that he was really one of Them -- the neo-libertarian anarchist orcs who are pushing us over the edge into chaos and blood in the streets. Mild-mannered. Not angry at all. Quietly, calmly defending torture and murder and blood and barbarism and betrayal of all this is Actually American.
I've been struggling with my feelings about this for days. I know about these things intellectually, statistically, and through humorous videos -- but to converse with a full-on Actual Psychopath -- "Yeah, I want to burn it all down and rule over the rubble, so what?" -- made me think that this is not going to end well.
Mueller may end Trump's presidency. But this guy will still be out there, happily extolling the virtues of Ragnarok and baby-cages.
I won't engage again, not for a long while. My alarms are still going off, and the repression of my anger for social balance was costly to me. He was shockingly evil in his own quiet way. And there are many like him. And they are dreaming of Evil Things.
In the Alt-World, the Constitution calls for White Supremacy and Autocratic Dominance. "So?"
I'll be at the March next Saturday.
