Yesterday, We Talked about the Scapegoating Mechanism at the Heart of the MAGA Antichrist Religion

As I have mentioned in this space in the past, the defining psychological trait of conservatism in the Age of MAGA is a radical lack of empathy that extends only to the conservative himself and that tiny minority of persons who are extensions of his ego, coupled with a sociopathic narcissistic indifference to the sufferings of all others as non-existent, contemptible, funny, and/or guilt manipulation.

That is why this guy, the editor of the thing that used to be CRISIS, can simply laugh off 18 million dead globally (including over a million of his fellow Americans) as nothing…

while idiotically scapegoating desperately poor Amazonian Catholics for the pandemic because they sought the sacraments and succor from Bolsonaro’s death squads, but honored Our Lady in a way not to the taste of self-pitying sociopathic narcissists and racists like him.

Everything in the whole wide world is All About Eric Sammons’ aesthetic tastes and the death of millions only matters insofar as it inconveniences him or gives him ammo to use against those he hates.

This scapegoating mechanism is, of course, used constantly by the MAGA Cult because it is used constantly by their orange messiah, who thrives on scapegoats his enemies and blesses his Cult for doing it. So the Pandemic’s deadliness on our shores was not due to the fact that he vindictively destroyed the Pandemic Preparedness Playbook created by Obama. It was because we all needed to scapegoat the Chinese, and stupid liberals who wore masks, and vaccines. Similarly, when brown refugees at the border are murdered by thirst or miscarry amid the GOP razor wire of the Rio Grande, the Cult laughs it off saying, “Tough. The law is the law. They should have thought of that before they decided to be poor and desperate.” But when the rapist fraudster and traitor who is the great extension of their ego is found guilty by a jury of his peers, they sob with pity for him and vow to burn down the rule of law to save him from the consequences of his own crimes.

The scapegoating mechanism is a constant go to for authoritarians and the people who adore them and we see it throughout history. Rene Girard identified this mechanism and called it out. Interestingly it was one of the reason for his turn toward the Christian tradition. Because instead of proposing a God who called us to scapegoat some designated victim group, it instead insisted that God had made himself the scapegoat and taken on to himself all the dysfunction, makice, crazy and evil we reflexively want to put on whatever scapegoat we choose in our moments of societal madness.

Whenever you run across that scapegoating mechanism being turned against some victim and proposing yet another human sacrifice, you are hearing the voice of antichrist, not the Holy Spirit.