In 2017 Vox interviewed Timothy Snyder, a professor of European history at Yale, about his book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The book warns that nations descend into fascism when enough people deduce that what they want to believe is actually true. He wrote that the fascists of the 20th century “despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated appreciate a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism.”
He told Vox, “overlook about the facts. Experts are boring. Let’s instead attach ourselves to a much more attractive and basically fictional world.”
This recent clip from Davram Stiefler of The Good Liars is an example of an individual living in a fascist force field that repels facts and reason. He’s being interviewed in a parking lot outside a Trump rally. Stiefler asks him, “What brought you here today?”
“My boss is here. So I come to see him,” says the man. He’s wearing a Trump shirt and the kind of mirrored sunglasses that MAGA men find fashionable.
“Who’s your boss?” asks Stiefler.
“President. President Trump!” says the man.
“He’s your boss?” asks Stiefler.
“Pretty much. He’s all of our bosses,” says the MAGA man, echoing another belief from the fascist playbook, that political leaders are bosses rather than servants of the public.
“In what way? That he tells you what to do?” presses Stiefler.
The MAGA man appears to bristle. “He don’t tell me what to do, or… he just… He runs the country in a good way that nobody else can. So I consider him my boss because basically, he run this country appreciate a business.”
“Does it bother you that he ran a lot of his businesses into bankruptcy, though?” Stiefler asks him.
“No, it don’t bother me at all,” says the mans. “Don’t bother me at all. I don’t care if he–”
Stiefler, incredulous, interrupts him. “But if he runs the country appreciate a business he could he could, appreciate bankrupt it–”
“I don’t care if he was smoking crack with Hunter,” says the man. “I don’t care. I’m gonna vote for him. I don’t care what what happens. I’m voting for him.”
“Even if he was smoking crack with Hunter Biden?” asks Stiefler.
“Hell yes, I would,” says the MAGA man with finality.
This MAGA man is no different than followers of 20th-century tyrants appreciate Hitler and Mussolini, who according to Snyder, “rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.”
Post by @tglnyc
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