The most prominent feature of conservative psychology in the Age of MAGA (and a feature that has done nothing but metastasize over the past 25 years or so), is a now-sociopathic and intensely narcissistic lack of empathy combined with an intense sense of self-pity. The sufferings of any person who is not either the conservative himself or, in some way, an extension of his ego is, with tremendous consistency in that subculture, regarded as
1. non-existent;
2. contemptible;
3. funny; or
4. an attempt at guilt manipulation in a bid for power.Meanwhile, the extreme commitment of conservatives to a narrative of their own victimhood (an excellent fundraising tool) warps and destroys their ability to care about or relate to any human suffering or need not to their immediate advantage in the quest for lawless, nihilist power at any price.
So, for instance, one will look in vain for anything beyond the typical “gays are coming for us all!!!” stuff in this video, which imagines that something called “ideological progressives” are try to take away the rights of Catholics to live their faith and raise their children.
What such initiatives never seem to do, never even seem to dream of doing in their fantasies about jackbooted liberals turning your kids gay is attack the nihilist GOP when it actually really does assault Catholic freedom of conscience. Case in point:
Similarly, you will never hear Raymond Arroyo, devoted spaniel of Famous Catholic Convert Laura Ingraham, raise a peep against FOX colleague Jesse Watters as he voids his snot on the Catholic conscience’s care for the least of these:
When MAGA Catholics talk about “religious liberty” they mean the right to pity themselves because their non-Christian neighbors do not share their obsessions about aesthetics or their highly selective obsessions about certain pelvic issues involving certain (non-GOP) celebrities and others. They do not mean the sufferings or persecution of those Catholics involved in caring for people not useful to GOP power politics. Those sufferings are, as ever,
1. non-existent;
2. contemptible;
3. funny; or
4. an attempt at guilt manipulation in a bid for power.
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2 Responses
> “It specifically says “feed homeless” on the citation”
Unbelievable.
Back in the Before Times, when the Obama Administration was trying to make employers pay for their employers’ contraceptives [can I make a note here how utterly weird that whole setup seems to people outside the US], various religious conservatives made great play of the fact that the White House was litigating against an order of nuns called “Little Sisters of the Poor”. Bad optics, huh? What sort of secular jackboot bully picks on an organisation called “Little Sisters of the Poor”? I mean, sure, maybe if it’d been monks called “The Warrior Brotherhood of Santiago Matamoros”, maybe, but who wants to go on record suing “Little Sisters of the Poor”? Gotcha!
And then in 2020 the Antifa riots broke out and various left-wingers snarked on Twitter that “‘Antifa’ simply means ‘anti-fascist’, so if you oppose them, that makes you a fascist.”
In reply to which, the smarter right wingers pointed out that, eg, you could oppose the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea without being a bigot who hates democracy, republics, or the Korean people.
So, yeah, the names game kind of played out. But there’s names as nominalist labels and there’s names as signifiers of things, and to have to write “feed[ing the] homeless” as the reason for charging someone on their paperwork should set off some kind of alarm bell. You would think.
Also, of course, big difference whether you bestow the name on yourself as an official group title (“Feeders of the Starving Poor” or whatever, even if your outfit’s main activity is ripping rosary beads out of the hands of the elderly Italian grandmothers praying outside the abortion clinic) vs someone else uses it as a descriptor of what you’ve actually been doing.