A Certain Sameness

Addicting Info ran a piece about how the Wingnut Militia Goons who were supposed to gather en masse along the US-Mexico border have come up just a tad bit short.

As it turns out, patrolling the border isn’t exactly the adventurous and glamorous life that right-wing militia members thought it would be.
In fact, the militias are all talk and no walk with internal disputes and just plain boredom leading to many armed vigilantes taking their weapons and going home.

Last month, a Minuteman militia member named Chris Davis announced via video a plan for stopping undocumented immigrant children from crossing the border. They’re idea? Aim guns at them and shoot if they don’t turn around and go back to the hell they’re escaping from. After catching much flak for it, the man who issued the call in the first place backed away from his words and removed the video. His plan failed and his hope for a groundswell of volunteers to militarize the border fizzled as well. Currently, Davis and a tiny band of militiamen are spread out along a wide swath of the border along three states.

So the effect here is pretty interesting.  These guys (prob'ly) got all het up about patrolling the border cuz they spend way too much time surfing the wingnut website whirlpool where every link they click on takes 'em to another page that says almost exactly the same thing as all the other pages, and so they end up believing not only the bullshit story, but that everybody buys the bullshit story, and it's driving millions of good decent Muricans - just like their-own-bad-selves - to take up arms and defend our sovereign purity from the hordes of filthy vermin blah blah blah.

The Right Wing Echo Chamber's a real thing, but it's actually intended just to make you think you'll be joined by a gigundous mob of like-minded cheese fritters just itchin' to go for a little target practice while playing Rambo Junior in the desert southwest.  The Panic Pushers are hoping to manufacture a critical mass when there really isn't the slightest potential for such a thing to happen organically.  That kind of self-delusion is what got you that Romney Landslide in 2012, remember?

Do ya just never get tired of chasing the tin cans they're tyin' on your tail?

As a simple exercise, every once in a while take whatever nonsense du jour pops up and google the main point; something like "immigrants infected".  No matter what it is, an awful lot of the time, you'll get several pages of hits that say practically the same thing - including a bunch where it's an obviously copy-n-paste-verbatim kinda deal.  And it's not just DumFux News and Breitbart and Wingnut Daily either.

It's good to refresh your memory about just how In The Tank these chuckleheads really are, and how way too many Press Poodles are doing anything they need to do to cater to some people's willing ignorance in order to sell 'em some extra camo shirts or dippin' snuff or gold-leaf-plated pot metal "coins".  Business is the first order of business after all; and the "News Bidness" is no exception - not any more.

But it's just as important to remember that rubes are always willing to buy into the belief that no matter what they get talked into doing, as long as they're convinced they're acting in the name of some greater calling or higher power, nothing is out of the question, so everything is acceptable.

'Twas ever thus, and ever thus 'twill be I suppose.  Society carries the seeds of its own destruction just as our own individual bodies carry a host of harmful bacteria and viruses that can kill us whenever the balance of "good germs vs bad germs" goes a little wacky.

The body politic seems in dire need of a powerful high colonic right about now.