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On the morning of On November 27, 2015 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Robert Dear Jr. pulled into the parking lot of the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood. Ke’arre Stewart, 29, had just stepped outside to make a phone call when Dear shot him with a semi-automatic rifle. Stewart made it back into the facility to warn the people inside that an armed man was coming, whereupon staff attempted to move everyone to safety while he succumbed to his wounds. At some point before police arrived, Dear also shot and killed 35 year-old Jennifer Markovsky who was there for a friend of hers, and University of Colorado, Colorado Springs police officer Garrett Swasey, 44. After police broke into the waiting room where Dear was holding out, there was an exchange of gunfire. Eventually Dear surrendered and was taken into custody. By the end of the attack, 9 other people, 5 of whom were police officers, had been wounded and taken to hospitals.

Before his arrest, while being arrested, and during the interview after his arrest, Dear was rambling, barely coherently, about his anti-abortion ideas, the government, and Obama, but he uttered one very clear, particular, and peculiar phrase repeatedly; “No more baby parts!“.

Even in the anti-choice movement’s parlance, ‘Baby parts’ isn’t a regular buzzword. It really wasn’t a phrase they used as a stand-alone description of any procedure… until the video came out.
Four months before Robert Dear would storm a medical clinic and murder innocent people, a video was released by an organization with the misnomer; “Center for Medical Progress”. The ‘CMP’ was actually a front for its director, David Deleiden, to set up a ‘sting’ operation whose goal was to entrap Planned Parenthood executives in admissions of illegal activity. In that goal, Deleiden failed. However, in the year between recording footage of conversations between Planned Parenthood executives while themselves posing as stem cell researchers and the video being released, Deleiden directed that the raw video be ‘creatively edited’ in order to give the very strong impression that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the deliberate use of unethical techniques for the purpose of harvesting ‘baby parts’ to sell for a profit. In creating this impression that PP was out to ‘kill babies and sell the parts’, Deleiden was somewhat successful.

After a year of editing and injecting context through narration, the video titled, “Planned Parenthood’s Top Doctor, Praised by CEO, Uses Partial-Birth Abortions to Sell Baby Parts” was posted on July 14th, 2015. The video spread like wildfire over the internet. Anti-choice activists went apoplectic over the ‘revelation’ that Planned Parenthood was slicing and dicing living babies to get at those sweet, lucrative, baby-organs and turn a massive profit.



Of course, this was abject bullshit. Planned Parenthood, like many medical facilities, give their patients the option of donating tissue for use in research. If a request for certain tissue is made, PP provides the material and is only compensated for the cost of storage, transport, and processing. In other words; they make ZERO money from ‘baby parts’.

Nonetheless, the video spread its insane narrative far and wide. Far enough for Dear to watch it, along with all the other insane anti-choice propaganda he consumed to feed his growing hatred for an ‘enemy’ that did not exist in anywhere near the form he imagined. Apparently it was that video, after stewing in his chaos-pit of a head for a couple of months, that set him off.

But Millions of other gullible fools who buy into every horror story that confirms their biased world views saw and believed the video. Robert Dear may have been the only one to kill people over it, but he wasn’t the only one who acted on the lie. That lie launched over a dozen investigations to find ‘wrongdoing’ by PP. Added together, the cost to taxpayers, for three congressional, one Justice Department, and nine different state investigations was astronomical. Many states cut funding to the local PPs based on the lies in the video.

In response to the shooting, the CMP stated: “The Center for Medical Progress condemns the barbaric killing spree in Colorado Springs by a violent madman.” Because of course they can hide behind ‘plausible deniability’.

If we work back through recent history, however, we can see very clearly that individuals do not resort to violence from inside a vacuum. They are programmed, like any terrorists, in alignment with their ignorance and fears, to develop an abiding hatred for those they are conditioned to despise. In some cases, the fears are well-founded, in most cases, the fears are not. In all cases, uncivilized violence is seen by the perpetrators as the solution of last (or sometimes first) resort. For those who are prone to violence to begin with, pushing them to cross that line is only a matter of choosing the right language to compel them.

On January 6, 2021, a crowd of pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol Building in the moments that elected officials were discharging their Constitutional duty to formalize the electoral victory of president-elect Joe Biden. Like Robert Dear, those rioters did not develop their mindless rancor in a vacuum. They were there because they were commanded to be there by Donald J. Trump; the man they worshipped as a savior. Think I’m exaggerating? I shit you not:

(For the rest, with humor and links, go here.)

Remember that time when people were all Vote Blue No Matter Who before the election?
Remember when Liberals were championing the importance of the election and our future freedoms?
Remember when I said that the VBNMW Liberals were going to real upset when Roe vs Wade was overturned under Biden?
Remember how they all said that that would never happen and that I was being hyperbolic?
I ‘member.

Man Experiences Untreatable Growth after Getting Vaccine



Westshire, Illinois.
Ida Noe, Buzzsaw Correspondent

Larry Haskins, 34; a small business owner in Westshire, had grave misgivings about the COVID vaccines since their introduction in 2020. As a research hobbyist, he managed to find a great deal of information confirming what so many people also sought to believe; that the vaccines posed a myriad of undetermined threats to the health of those who were subjected to them.
Said Haskins, “I saw Dr. Fauci and so many other ‘experts’ dispensing complicated nonsense and realized that if they were so smart, then why did nothing they say make any sense to myself or any other people who can do basic research?”.
It was a fair question. Haskins displayed a number of links on his phone he says that he used to reference when confronted by what he called ‘maskers’, ‘sheep’, and ‘vaxxers’. They ran the gamut from Youtube videos of fully licensed podiatrists to outlets such as OAN, Newsmax, and even Tucker Carlson of Fox News. With such an arsenal nescient information, it’s easy to understand how any outcome-focused skeptic would have reason to resist the direction of what Haskins referred to as ‘glorified interns’.

But when his wife, Martha, gave birth to their son, Brandon, on December 17th of last year, his outlook would soon change. Brandon was born with a PID or ‘Primary Immuno-Deficiency’ discovered by the doctors within hours of Brandon’s birth. The doctors told the Haskins that the newborn could go home, but only after treatment and certain conditions were met.

“My wife is a school teacher, so she was forced into getting the vaccine herself.”, said Haskins, “The doctors all said that the baby would have to remain in the hospital under observation until they gave the okay to let him come home, but they said they wouldn’t let him go to a home where anyone was unvaccinated.”
Haskins, who said he passed a high school science class once, was torn. He said that he did his research and determined that the COVID vaccine was potentially more lethal than COVID itself. He cited an article from a website ‘Pajamamedia.net’ that quoted a bona-fide cousin of an optometrist who claimed that the re-written DNA from the mRNA vaccines caused some people very strange growths. Despite the risk, Haskins decided to get the vaccine. A week later the Haskins were able to take their son home.

But, only days after getting him home, Haskins began to feel something strange. “I didn’t know how to describe it, but I knew something was wrong. I felt different, like there was something happening inside me.” He couldn’t point to where the sensation was coming from, but he said it was “Like a feeling in my gut that something was there that wasn’t before.”
He said that he started behaving differently. “I felt nervous. I started using turn signals more often and driving more carefully. I felt uncomfortable in ways I’d never felt before.”
He explained how he started to say ‘Thank you’ to the baristas when he bought coffee and ‘excuse me’ when he bumped into someone, but, he said, it was after one particular incident that he decided he needed to seek medical attention.
“I gave all of my employees a $2 per hour raise. That’s when I knew something was wrong.”

This correspondent made contact, with Haskins’ permission, to talk to one of his employees. Leeroy Jenkins, 24, had worked for Haskins for nearly a year.
“The boss, I mean ‘Mr. Haskins’, we all thought he was, y’know… a little tight. Like always pinching every penny, monitoring our breaks closely, never putting enough people on and still expecting us to get it done, you know. But after the baby, he just kinda changed.”

The physicians ran a battery of tests… and found nothing. After a few weeks of appointments, he was referred to a neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Alyssa Vaunts, who put Haskins through an fMRI, a ‘functional magnetic resonance imager’ to check his brain and had him take a number of cognitive tests.
“When I got the call, I was ready for the worst.”
Holding his wife’s hand, he listened to Dr. Vaunts’ prognosis.
“She told me that after all of the tests, she had only one possible explanation. She told me she’d never personally seen this happen to anyone, but had read about it in medical journals. She said…”, Haskins voice quavered, “…That I’d grown a conscience.”
“My wife broke down in tears as I told her the news.”

According to Dr. Vaunt, Mr. Haskill’s growth had no treatment options and would mean that he might start caring enough about the people around him to keep from infecting people… that he would likely start wearing masks of his own volition in public. She told him that he’d likely experience a change not only in the way he treated people around him, but in how he felt about ‘different’ people.
Haskins confirmed this; “Two months ago, I could have told you that same sex marriage was destroying everything, but now… now I can’t think of a single thing that they’re really doing to hurt anyone.”
He lamented that he no longer felt that immigrants ‘of color’ posed any threat to the nation and that being a country as great as we are, we should help people. He said that he started to understand the messages his pastor gave at church.

“I don’t know how I’m going to get through this, but so long as I have Martha and Brandon, I’m sure we’ll make it.” Sitting across the kitchen table from me, Haskins picked up the remote and turned off Fox News. “I just can’t anymore.”

The future for Larry Haskins may be uncertain, but for those around him, his wife, Martha, said, “It may just be a little brighter.”

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Dear Climate Change Denier,

The person that referred you to this article probably thinks you’re too intellectually lazy to actually read it. While I’ve found that to very much seem to be the case with deniers, I’m guessing you have the modicum of intellectual diligence necessary to get through at least the next four paragraphs. I’m pullin’ for ya.
You are more than likely reading this article because someone tried to explain how we KNOW that current climate change is real, caused by humans, and potentially catastrophic. It’s likely that no matter what they said to you, you responded with derision, dismissals, silly graphics, or even stepped up and posted some denial page talking points that you believe settled it. Maybe it got to a point where you said what so many deniers do; “Where’s the proof?”. (That’s one paragraph)
Well, good for you. At least you’re engaged and asking for stuff. Thing is, in all the years I’ve gone around and around with you guys, I’ve found one commonality in those interactions. No matter what you’re shown, no matter what facts are handed to you, you won’t learn them. (That’s two.)
By now you’ve probably trotted out that old canard; “Scientists thought an ice age was coming” as though that somehow dispenses with all that we’ve learned since then. No matter how many times it’s been explained to you guys that the theory was never serious, and that when we actually took a look at what was really happening with the climate we found that the long term trend was an alarmingly rapid rate of CO2 and warming increases… you guys keep pulling it out because you simply refuse to learn anything that conflicts with your beliefs. (Almost there…)

This is your chance to prove that wrong. You asked for proof? You want well established facts that demonstrate the reality of human caused climate change? Then exercise some intellectual honesty and diligence and read on. Otherwise, you can prove I’m right by quitting here and living with the fact that you really don’t give a damn about evidence and that intellectual laziness is a fact of your existence.

(Image: dumbass)

You’re not a dumbass? Great! In the following, we’re going to cover where the denial propaganda comes from and why, and go over five simple facts that prove beyond doubt to anyone with the capacity to reason and understand facts that climate change is real, serious, and that we are responsible. Here ya go:

Amidst the damning mountain of evidence that we’ve tipped the climate out of balance, the greatest challenge isn’t coming up with solutions. We have those. The greatest challenge is communicating that evidence into a form that people who can’t understand the science can grasp so they can fully realize the gravity of the existential threat humans and all other species on Earth face.

(Image: tardigrade) “Pfft! I’ll be just fine.”

I’ve spent hundreds of hours trying to explain to deniers just HOW it is we know that climate change is real, serious, and that we are responsible. The obstacle I’ve found is that these people have been deeply ingrained with the notion that it’s a ‘political’ issue rather than a scientific one. They’ve been deliberately fed misinformation, each piece of which is easily dismantled, but taken as a whole, it is a self-reinforcing edifice of half-truths, logical fallacies, and lies. For the scientifically illiterate, that mountain of propaganda is just as valid as the mountain of real evidence that the vast majority of the world and the community of climate scientists take very seriously.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

“Of critical importance’, Hill argued, ‘they should declare the positive value of scientific skepticism of science itself.’ Knowledge, Hill understood, was hard won and uncertain, and there would always be skeptics. What better strategy than to identify, solicit, support, and amplify the views of skeptics of the causal relationship…? Moreover, the liberal disbursement of [industry] research funding to academic scientists could draw new skeptics into the fold. The goal, according to Hill, would be to build and broadcast a major scientific controversy. The public must get the message that the issue… remains an open question. Doubt, uncertainty, and the truism that there is more to know would become the industry’s collective new mantra.”

Does it sound like the energy industry’s response to their own discovery that rising CO2 levels caused climate warming? Does it sound like the construction of a strategy to sow doubt about the science of climate change? It does? Well it should, but it’s not. That was the PR firm of Hill and Knowlton coming up with a solution to the mounting scientific evidence that smoking caused cancer.

Back before the 1950’s, science was catching on that smoking cigarettes was linked to higher rates of cancer. As 1950 rolled around, the tobacco industry saw a threat building against it as the understanding of the toxicity of their product spread. As with any big business, the industry CEOs are beholden to the board of directors, who represent the stockholders, who expect a profit every quarter. It’s the CEO’s job to make the company profitable and the stockholders money no matter what. So, the heads of industry decided that along with marketing and cultural engineering, they would simply create their own ‘science’ to sow doubt among consumers that their product caused any harm.
Thus was spurred a long and well-documented history of industry-created propaganda being used to get consumers to think and behave against their own health and interests and for the interests of corporate profits.
This is so very well understood by now that anyone who says, “Well, we really don’t know whether smoking causes cancer.” gets the kinds of stares and laughs a hippopotamus wearing a sweater made of spaghetti and googly-eyes might draw. No one with a modicum of intelligence, education, and the ability to string two coherent thoughts together still questions the vast preponderance of scientific data that clearly concludes that ‘smoking tobacco greatly increases the risk of cancer’.

Some things that often clash, like the onward march of science and the profit motive for corporations, never change. Thus, history shall repeat. Just like with tobacco and cancer, a new mountain of evidence exists linking human activity and devastating climate change.

In the late nineteenth century, just as industrialization was on the rise, a physicist/chemist named Svante Arrhenius became curious about what changes in atmospheric levels of CO2 and water vapor might do to air and surface temperatures. It would be some time before Guy Stewart Callendar would discover a solid link between atmospheric CO2 levels and global warming. It would be even longer before someone said, “Wait… this might be bad.”.

Then, in the late 1970’s, one of the leaders in the energy industry, Exxon Mobil, said, ‘Huh, it looks like this global warming thing might be real.’. More specifically, Exxon’s head scientist, James Black, said in July of ‘77;
“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,”
As a publicly traded corporation, Exxon had no choice; they had to fight any attempts to curb CO2 emissions simply because their bottom line depended on the status quo remaining intact. So they not only stole the tobacco industry’s playbook, they improved on it.

Knowing these things:
-That the energy industry’s profits depend on preventing controls on emissions and their existence depends on preventing any major infrastructure conversion to renewables.
-That the tobacco industry used the exact same tactics to sow doubt that smoking caused cancer that the energy industry is using now regarding climate change.
-That every single piece of ‘skeptical’ research, every denial talking point, and every climate ‘scientist’ that states there is doubt of human caused climate change has energy industry money behind it…
…Tells us that the entirety of the denial movement’s potency is another energy industry product manufactured expressly to to protect profits, just like the tobacco industry attempted, with some success, to do.

For the deniers who laugh at this, a simple challenge; produce ONE study or even ONE opinion from any climate scientist that challenges the consensus on climate change that isn’t linked to energy industry money. You can’t.

That alone is more than enough proof that the reality of human caused climate change, demonstrated by a literal ocean of evidence, is not seriously contested by real science. The ONLY original sources of human caused climate change denial have a clear and potent motive for producing the BS the deniers regurgitate: Money.
Meanwhile, actual climate scientists struggle to save for retirement when they could have taken much more lucrative jobs as paid schills rolling in industry cash.
There is simply nothing; no study, no argument, no graph, no cartoon, no talking point, and no graphic one can produce that does not run straight up against a wall of impermeable facts. Don’t believe it? Fine, you don’t have to. But the following facts don’t care what you believe.

The Five Simple Facts:

1) Humans have been burning fossil fuels at an ever accelerating rate for over 150 years, and the resultant CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes the climate to absorb more solar energy.

(Image: Temp/CO2 graph)

2) Atmospheric CO2 levels have been increasing since then at a commensurate rate not seen at any time in our geological history. The last time CO2 and temperatures rose at this rate was never. But the closest we can get is the Permian Extinction which happened after CO2 levels rose by 2600 ppm over TWENTY MILLION YEARS. That’s just over 0.01 ppm per hundred years. Our current rate is almost 100 ppm in the last hundred and fifty years. That’s nearly ten thousand times faster than ever before in geological history. When CO2 levels rose at barely 100 ppm over a million years, half the world died. (Thus the ‘extinction’ part of ‘Permian Extinction’). If you’ve ever said, “The climate always changes” and you don’t realize how misinformed you were for it after reading this, then you’ve failed the basic test of reason.

3) We KNOW that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere was put there by us because we’ve identified the isotopes from the Carbon that’s been in the ground for millions of years and the Carbon that’s been in the natural cycle for the last several thousand years. They are different, and we know exactly how much we are responsible for… which is ALL the extra CO2 added in the last 150 years.

4) We’ve actually studied the various possible ‘natural’ causes such as solar fluctuations and orbital fluctuations and found that they were indeed part of the changes in the past… over millions of years. None of them correlate with what’s happening now.
Since it has never happened this fast in all of geological history, every single ‘natural cause’ can be ruled out; because if what is happening now was ‘natural’, it would have happened many, many times before. It has not. Ever.

5) Many of the predictions that were made decades ago about what might happen if we continued to put CO2 in the atmosphere at this rate are happening much sooner than we thought. Some haven’t happened… yet. But the fact that many have happened proves that those predictions were correct and we were being FAR too optimistic. And no, Al Gore saying that it’s ‘possible’ that Arctic sea ice could be gone by 2014 is ‘reasonable speculation’ (at the time), not a ‘hard prediction’. In fact, actual predictions are usually couched in terms like ‘possible’ or ‘likely’ because we only know some things are likely to happen, just not when. We also don’t know many things that could happen, so when they do, that will certainly demonstrate that the reality is ‘worse than we predicted’… unless we get very lucky and something happens that makes the climate fix itself.

(Image: good luck with that)

For anyone with the ability to think and reason, and understand the meaning of verifiable facts, there cannot be even a shadow of a doubt after reading and understanding these that climate change is happening, it is serious, and we are responsible. These facts have never been refuted, at least not honestly, and stand as the hard proof.

If, Dear Denier, you cannot understand the significance of these facts added up, or choose to believe that they are not the well-researched, established facts they are, or if you believe the roundly discredited, industry-paid scientists, then so be it.

(Image: Neil deGrasse Tyson)

And the Climate doesn’t give a damn what you believe either.

Most of what makes conservatives what they are, I’ve already touched on here, here, here, here, and here. To try and sum it up, it’s like this: They are basically evolutionary throwbacks with neural architecture that lends itself to tribalism and authoritarianism. While this is not unique to conservatives, it is a stunningly common trait that they share. They are literally hard-wired for prehistoric survival. Therefore they are out of time and place in modern civilization. They represent over 20 million years of evolutionary strategy based on fear and tribalism that really was quite successful. Once civilization came about, all the ‘weird’ people who didn’t fit in with their tribe and would normally have been fed to wolves were suddenly able to thrive. These ‘new people’ tended to be intellectually curious, highly creative, and became the force that drove civilization from a wheel to a spaceship in the blink of an evolutionary eye. In less than 6000 years, we made vast strides that our tribal ancestors could not have imagined. I like to informally, non-academically refer to these people as ‘Homo-Meta-Sapiens’ due to their more complex awareness… starting with their ‘awareness’ of their awareness. I like to think I’m one of them because I know for a fact I’m not a conservative. If you’re reading this and made it this far, you’re probably meta-sapient too, because conservatives don’t tend to read this much.

Ever wonder why conservatives treat politics like a sport? Why they all seem to own and wear Trump paraphernalia? Why they’re almost universally white, Christian, and ‘straight’? That is the ‘tribalism’. To a conservative, everything is ‘us vs them’. They tend to be unable to think outside of exclusive dichotomies. So for them, there are ‘two sides’ to everything. Everything is either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, or ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and their ‘side’ believes it is the ‘good and right’ one just because it’s their ‘side’. Wearing the hats and shirts is to affirm the tribal identity that makes them feel ‘secure’. So anyone who isn’t a white, straight, Christian conservative is ‘suspect’. That brings us to the what of the why:

Due to their tribal ‘fear’ wiring, conservatives are motivated by old evolutionary impulses. Among those are tactics that were part of a cognitive function that helped our ancestors avoid threats. Those are ‘negativity bias’ and ‘apophenia’. Apophenia and negativity bias are actually related, but not quite the same. ‘Apophenia’ is the tendency to associate a false cause to an outcome or event due to a flawed perception of a link between something that is extraneous and an observed outcome. This is where we get ‘superstition’, ‘conspiracy theories’, and to an extent, ‘religion’.
Know anyone who ALWAYS wears the ‘lucky hat’ (Jersey, sunglasses, underwear, etc.) to watch sports because they were once wearing it when their team won the championship? Even though they know it’s a superstition, they still wear it because at some level they believe it will have an effect on the outcome of the game.
Conspiracy theorists (for the most part) operate on something similar: There’s a big scary power out there so devastating that event ‘x’ must be caused by them!
When we saw lightning, it was really scary. So what did we do in our ignorance? We invented ‘sky gods’ to explain it away… and we believed in them. Those are all examples of ‘apophenia’.
Negativity bias is simply how we have a much greater tendency to react to negative stimuli than neutral or positive stimuli. If you get in a beautiful luxury car with a hot date, but the inside of the car smells rotten, you’re going to focus more on the smell than the nice stuff. This was a good evolutionary strategy because by paying more attention to the things that were ‘scary’ or ‘gross’, one was more likely to avoid a potential hazard. Today, negativity bias is much stronger in conservatives. This means that conservatives tend to react to anything they don’t like or understand with greater hostility than non-conservatives. Yeah, I’ll bet you’re shocked, right?

*Shocked*

Negativity bias was a good evolutionary strategy because it meant our ancestors would just kill things they thought were a threat rather than taking any chances. It’s not a coincidence that so many conservatives are chomping at the bit to resort to violence to ‘eliminate’ anything they don’t like.
When we add up negativity bias and apophenia, suddenly we can see why conservatives are so much more susceptible to the Lie Machine that uses fear to condition people, and to things like Q-Anon conspiracy theories. It doesn’t help in the slightest that conservatives can’t understand how evidence works. The combination results in their tendency to blame scapegoats for anything they don’t like. Again, 10,000 years ago, this was just being extra-cautious in a hostile world. Today it is a serious threat to civilization. Remember why the Nazis killed so many Jews? They were absolutely convinced that Jews were an existential ‘threat’ to Germany. That is that ancient hardwiring that tells the throwbacks they have to ‘eliminate’ anything that might be a threat. Today’s conservatives are being similarly brainwashed to believe that everything they don’t like about society is a ‘threat’ to them. That means non-Christians, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, Immigrants, Liberals, and anyone else that isn’t suitably similar to them. To the conservative brain, ‘different’=’dangerous’. That is part of the negativity bias function.

Now, here’s the why of it:

There is no “culture war” anymore than there is a ‘rising Sun’ war. The evolution of culture, society, and humanity is simply inexorable. But conservatives have been very easily brainwashed, due to their wiring, to believe that there are ‘devious forces’ behind the changes in the social paradigm. Like blaming a sky wizard for lightning, conservatives can’t understand that what’s happening to society is natural. It is an outgrowth of human diversity stepping ever more out of the closet and into the sunlight. They can’t understand that the push for social justice, equal rights, and fair universal treatment is simply a human compulsion. In a nutshell; the evolution of humanity towards the embrace of diversity and improvement of civilization is never going to stop. Conservatives cannot understand this. Instead, as they have throughout the ages, they perceive these changes as a deliberate ‘assault’ on their tribe by malicious actors. This frightens them because to a tribal partisan, ‘other people’ getting equal rights means that their tribe is ‘losing’.

Let’s look at a few of the things conservatives are convinced are part of a nefarious plot to ‘change society’;

Potato Head.

About a year ago, Hasbro toy company dropped the ‘Mr.’ from “Mr. Potato Head” in a bid to be more ‘gender inclusive’. The Right-Wing media went apoplectic and its audience mindlessly accepted its characterization of the move: “Liberals Destroyed Mr. Potato Head!”. They ranted and raved about how the ‘socialist liberals’ somehow managed to ‘force’ Hasbro to cave in and emasculate a toy.
This is funny because Mr. Potato Head was already pretty gender-fluid depending on how you dressed it. So it’s kind of a microcosm for the concept of gender to begin with… which is complicated.
Of course there was no ‘movement’ or ‘push’ or literally any campaign or effort by anyone to get Hasbro to do what they did. Hasbro made their decision based on the disposition of society. That’s right; they did it because they recognize the inevitability of society’s acceptance of human diversity.
Similarly, the estate of Dr. Seuss discontinued printing books that they felt were outdated and offensive. Again conservatives blamed liberal ‘cancel culture’ for the move despite the fact that literally no one actually put pressure on the estate to do so.
They feel the same way about LGBTQ+ rights, BLM, Anti-Fa, Critical Race Theory, and pretty much anything that they perceive as a ‘threat’ to their primacy. It’s all a ‘conspiracy’ backed by George Soros, Obama, Clinton, social media, etc, etc, etc. They can’t understand that what’s happening is a result of very real but somewhat abstract things like biology, systemic racism, and a number of organic issues that drive people to seek security, equality, and acceptance.

They can’t win a culture war because they don’t understand what’s happening. They’re so tied up in looking for individuals or groups to blame because their ancient fear wiring forces them to seek ‘something they can attack’. They’re tilting at windmills, boxing with shadows, and chasing rainbows. They cannot grasp the fact that humanity is spectacularly diverse and that as society evolves, change is inevitable.

Now of course conservatives throughout history have fought against the evolution of society. In some cases they’ve succeeded… but it has never been permanent. They’ve never ‘won the war’ against progress, they’ve only set it back. We had the Dark Ages. If conservatives could have ‘won’ the culture war that brought about The Enlightenment, we’d still be in the Dark Ages.

The bottom line is this: They can’t tell the difference between the natural evolution of society and the deliberate manipulation of culture by individuals or groups. They are hard-wired to fight threats that have corporeal form, and they simply do not possess the cognitive empathy and the ability to learn and evolve in order to understand the complex dynamic of society and humanity. If they did, they wouldn’t be conservatives to begin with.




HMU on Twitter too! https://twitter.com/TheGarthThe1