Currently (via FB friend)

 "Trumpism is not a monolith. It is steered and exploited by some very dangerous people: current and former police and military, members of white nationalist groups, members of government at all levels, fanatical terrorists.

But it seems to me that the average people who have been seduced by QAnon are largely the same people who would've been seduced by televangelists, and tabloid newspapers, and scammy commercials for gold coins 25 years ago.

They are – to put it in a single unpleasant but accurate word – losers. Scrubs. People who lack the intellectual and emotional tools to make sense of the world around them, and therefore to succeed in it. People too dim and naive to know when they're up to their neck in bullshit.

And here's a rich man in a suit, in the highest office in the land, telling them that they're special. Heroes, even. Not just to an invisible man, in some hypothetical afterlife – but right here in the living, breathing world.

And here's an internet which feeds them a neverending stream of grand, slickly produced propaganda reels – casting them as righteous soldiers in a battle against the evil that's kept them down all their lives. Finally, someone is championing *them* – the "real", everyday people.

Now, one can fairly ask *why* these people ended up without the tools to not be losers. And on the other hand, one can fairly call bullshit on this "silenced all my life" narrative.

We'll have time for those New York Times human-interest stories *after* we've dealt with the imminent threat that these people pose to American democracy. I don't care to participate in either of those debates right now.

I have no particular point. It's just something I've observed, over the last week of doomscrolling. Yes, we're being undone by hate, and power-hungry sociopaths, and deliberate malice. But we're also being undone by grifters, and ignorance, and losers clutching at anything that tells them they aren't losers. And it's often difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.

It's been said before that fascism is to politics as multi-level marketing schemes are to business. It's all a giant grift. It's just a grift with potentially lethal consequences."