How MAGA Infiltrated The Capitol
By Leo Gura - July 6, 2021
A stark documentary look at the madness that is MAGA.
This is what it looks like when the human mind is rotted from the outside-in with ideology.
Antifa my ass. This is the true face of MAGA.
I want you to see how bad epistemics creates catastrophic social and political situations. People think of epistemics as mere philosophy but as I’ve said elsewhere, you cannot avoid philosophy. The avoidance of good philosophy ensures bad philosophy by default, and bad philosophy does not confine itself to the classroom or the armchair, it spills out into everyday life.
For all the fear-mongering that right-wingers like Jordan Peterson do about the “radical left”, the bottom line is that it was right-wingers, incited by the right-wing ideology and propaganda machine (of which Jordan Peterson plays a part) that actually executed an insurrection against the US government. Post-modernists and cultural Marxists did not storm the most powerful government in the world. It was people who’s minds were addled by the likes of FoxNews, Rush Limbaugh, PragerU, conservative YT, conservative Facebook, and right-wing fear-mongering about “socialism”.
The irony is that right-wingers are supposed to be the defenders of traditional hierarchy, yet there is nothing traditional about doing an insurrection against a democratically elected government. This is a classic contradiction within right-wing and fascist ideology: it tends to revere the past and hierarchy, but also will not hesitate to subvert it in order to exercise power.
When I say that the right and the left are not symmetrical, that the left is more developed and more conscious, this is precisely what I mean. I do not just say that merely because I have a personal bias towards the left (which I do). I mean that the right is more prone to low-consciousness mentality and behavior such as fear-based propaganda, conformist thinking, ideology, judgment, hatred, closed-mindedness, selfishness, corruption, oppression, and violence. Objectively, the right wing poses a greater threat to democracy than the left. The above video should make that obvious. Which is not the say the left doesn’t have some of it’s own ideological problems and group-think, but if you cannot acknowledge that these things are objectively worse on the right, you are the biased one and you are living in a bubble. But this is not acknowledged by the likes of Jordan Peterson. If people like JP were intellectually honest they would come out and say: “I was wrong. I miscalculated the political dangers of the left vs the right. The right is the greater political danger today.” But he does not do that. Precisely because of bias. Instead they try to hand-wave it away, refusing to even call it an insurrection. But as the video above clearly shows, this was a serious insurrection attempt. This was a full-on coup attempt. Failure and incompetence does not make a bank robbery any less of a bank robbery. You can’t do a bank robbery and then say, “Oh, but I wasn’t serious” when caught.
The culture war that is so popular in right-wing media today is a smoke-screen, exaggerating dangers which are mostly benign while obfuscating those that are serious. The serious political dangers in America are not LGBTQ, not Antifa, not BLM, not SJWs, not socialism, not critical race theory, not immigration, not gender relativity, not post-modernism, not higher taxes, not a higher minimum wage, not stricter government regulation, not abortion. The serious political dangers are: corporate money/lobbying, a shrinking middle class, environmental pollution and climate change, demagoguery, corruption of the collective epistemic framework through toxic and fallacious media, conspiracy theories, overly lax regulation, and generally: inaction on badly needed basic governance.
At this moment America is missing a serious approach to governance, and this is largely due to the right-wing media’s ramping up of the culture war — which pisses people off, gets them fired up, gets them clicking and foaming and buying guns, but produces no improvement in the quality of governance. Quality governance cannot be done off the back of heated emotions like fear, hatred, and conspiratorial thinking. And this all comes from a general ideological trend on the right which preaches that “government is bad”. Which comes from a deep ignorance of the crucial functions of government.
This example also serves as a stark warning about the dangers of populism. Populism might sound good in theory, but in practice populism appeals to some of the dumbest, least developed, and least conscious members of society, foaming them up with a hate and fear -based ideology which cannot lead to better governance.
The solution to all this is simple: we need better governance. We need more intelligence, consciousness, and love in governance. And the only way to get that is to deeply care and value government and its functions, and to genuinely desire to improve them, rather than blow things up to spite the elites. It should come as no surprise that you cannot improve complex systems from a pissed off mental state.
If you love America, if you think America is great and special, recognize that that specialness came from the profound intelligence and sober contemplations of its founders. People like Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and others. These were exceptionally well-educated elites. These were philosophical people who had the wisdom to design self-balancing systems. What we have today, especially on the right, is the empowerment (via democracy) of a horde of fools in the tens of millions, pissed off over silly culture war stuff, spurred on by right wing propagandists and social media companies like Facebook who profit from these toxic ideologies by the billions of dollars. It is a toxic mix of the worst aspects of Spiral stages Blue + Orange.
Lastly, some people will wonder: “But Leo, why must you be so political?” to which the answer is simple: if you want to live in a democracy it is your responsibility to do your part to maintain that democracy. If you have a public platform and you are not speaking out against this shit, how can we have a democracy? You see, I am not neutral when it comes to letting low-consciousness fools govern me. I suggest you shouldn’t be either.
Guess what dies first when low-consciousness fools seize power? Consciousness, Truth, and Love.
Philosophy has practical real-world consequences. One of the key functions of philosophy is to discern how to create a better society.
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