Yeah, effectively, the whole idea is flipped on its head when you actually factor in the conduct of the cops. The person who coined it couldn’t be assed to consider that anyone wouldn’t side with the cops in this situation and had to come up with some other explanation for the “behavior” and ultimately drew this conclusion that people trapped with their captors for long enough become brainwashed by them. You can see the same kind of rhetoric around the captives who are released in Gaza, who say their captors cared for them. They don’t let them talk, and if they do, they color them as having been brainwashed or indoctrinated by Hamas.
By extension of this, the meme presented here casts innocence on MAGA followers as captives who have been simply brainwashed by their captors, when in reality what has happened is these MAGA followers have been given a license to finally express themselves fully through their support of the MAGA movement and its goals. Some of them will be rewarded for that support. Some of them will be strangled for it. It also ignores the reality that for some working-class people, the right has done a better job at appealing to their latent concerns and fears, promising resolution, only to discover what that resolution involves.
I don’t subscribe to the “you voted for this” notion, because I don’t believe that all people understand what they’re even voting for. If all people had a perfect understanding of exactly what was being voted for and saw through the vales and misdirection, you wouldn’t end up with immigrants thinking that they’ll get a pass because they’re the “good ones.” You wouldn’t have a working class seeking refuge under fascist umbrellas.
Misogyny was also a factor. Most of the hostages were women so it was easy to dismiss their concerns with police conducts by infantilizing them.
A lot of “brainwashing” stories are like that, ignoring the perspectives of the “victims” (especially if they’re from marginalized groups, like women) in order to prevent the “perpetrators” from being legitimized. A similar thing happened with Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army.
“Stockholm Syndrome”, “brainwashing”, “indoctrination”, etc. is all just gaslighting. Manipulation is definitely real but mind control is simply science fiction.
That’s a fascinating breakdown and it makes a lot of sense to me now, knowing how psychology has been used, or tried to be used, in the past to justify the status quo. Like one of those things where the answer is right there, but the real answer is incompatible with the status quo, so they look past it and try to rationalize a different one.
I don’t subscribe to the “you voted for this” notion, because I don’t believe that all people understand what they’re even voting for.
I think it’s both the ignorance and that it’s not an actually democratic system to begin with. The “you [the voters] brought this on” rhetoric assumes, implicitly, that the system is somehow accurately representing the will of the people. But it’s not. I remember someone even did a study on it, indicating there was very little correlation between what the public wants and what policy gets implemented in the US.
Yeah, I agree with that regarding the undemocratic character of US elections. While it’s also true that what the public wants and what is implemented seldom align, it seems clear in the case of the MAGA movement that (false) solutions were on the MAGA table and not on the Democrat table. Ignorance, naivete, and desperation could all be good explanations as to why some groups voted the way they did. I also think, however, that leadership can set a kind of hegemonic tone. Much of the MAGA movement, I think, is a reaction to the 8 years under Democratic rule, through Obama, and the kind of tone that set nationally. That was an era where liberal darlings and their media platforms like Jack Dorsey and Twitter were actively “combating” hate speech, celebrities were being held to account for their right-wing sentiments in full public view, and the Me Too movement was actively prosecuting and ostracizing sex pests and serial r*pists alike out of the public eye.
This presented an atmosphere that squashed right-wing sentiment, drove it under ground, and made people weary of expressing any kind of conservative thinking. The broad social attitude had shifted, and platforms had shifted with it. The one thing that had not shifted, however, was the economic situation, which gave rise to Sanders and his working-class message. When his campaign was struck down, it really broke the hold on the liberal hegemonic tone. 2017 marked a shift that allowed Donald Trump and Republicans to hitch their racist agenda to an economic promise they knew corporate Democrats had no answer to. They no longer had the full package, a liberal social perspective, with populist economic policy; they just had more of the same old neoliberal nonsense in Hillary Clinton.
This opened the door for the hardcore and casual racists who had been swallowing their tongue for 8 years. It finally gave them state power to back their racist worldview. It took several years to really cut the liberal hold on public discourse. From the Unite the Right rally to the crackdown on BLM protests, eventually the shift crystallized in 2020 around COVID and its racist linking with Asian Americans and Chinese people specifically. It again allowed these people, who already had these ideas from the H5N1 era, to finally express these ideas publicly, with a state that would see the public reaction to this racism and say, “No, what you’re doing is wrong, and these racists are correct.” The public backing of the Proud Boys by Trump allowed other right-wing groups to be more public and begin canvassing more publicly. This included the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and the founding of new organizations like the Patriot Front and NSC-131.
The incoming Administration didn’t have the same social power and charisma that Obama had to allow it to size control of the tone. The conflict over the election results, the events of January 6th, and the total lack of meaningful material consequences for it meant that the conservative hold on discourse remained intact. There would not be 8 years of charismatic leadership out of the Democratic camp to attempt to re-calibrate the national tone, and many democratic supporters were becoming radicalized by the events unfolding in Gaza and the total bipartisan crackdown from the state on those sympathetic to Palestine. Liberalism was and still is being attacked at both ends, and its unwillingness to give in to its left flank and its need to turn to the right for the preservation of capital, et al. means giving conservatism more control over the national tone.
Couple this with an alliance between Musk and the MAGA movement, his acquisition of Twitter, transforming it into a Nazi playground, and being another powerful voice, one that even staunch liberals viewed as one of their own, the gates were now wide open for even liberals to join in on the act and finally say what they all had been thinking for years, to finally speak and have the backing of powerful figures to codify what they believe into the public canon. Anti-trans sentiment had a stark rise during this same time frame. It isn’t as if the world during the Obama years was suddenly less transphobic, and that suddenly there has been a change of heart. Transphobia had always been omnipresent; it was simply kept behind closed doors until the sentiment of the state shifted enough to allow those people to finally express those thoughts publicly.
At the end of the day, it IS ignorance, as you have pointed out, but that ignorance can be silenced through social pressure, but silencing ignorance doesn’t create tolerance; it only makes the tolerant louder.
Yeah, effectively, the whole idea is flipped on its head when you actually factor in the conduct of the cops. The person who coined it couldn’t be assed to consider that anyone wouldn’t side with the cops in this situation and had to come up with some other explanation for the “behavior” and ultimately drew this conclusion that people trapped with their captors for long enough become brainwashed by them. You can see the same kind of rhetoric around the captives who are released in Gaza, who say their captors cared for them. They don’t let them talk, and if they do, they color them as having been brainwashed or indoctrinated by Hamas.
By extension of this, the meme presented here casts innocence on MAGA followers as captives who have been simply brainwashed by their captors, when in reality what has happened is these MAGA followers have been given a license to finally express themselves fully through their support of the MAGA movement and its goals. Some of them will be rewarded for that support. Some of them will be strangled for it. It also ignores the reality that for some working-class people, the right has done a better job at appealing to their latent concerns and fears, promising resolution, only to discover what that resolution involves.
I don’t subscribe to the “you voted for this” notion, because I don’t believe that all people understand what they’re even voting for. If all people had a perfect understanding of exactly what was being voted for and saw through the vales and misdirection, you wouldn’t end up with immigrants thinking that they’ll get a pass because they’re the “good ones.” You wouldn’t have a working class seeking refuge under fascist umbrellas.
Misogyny was also a factor. Most of the hostages were women so it was easy to dismiss their concerns with police conducts by infantilizing them.
A lot of “brainwashing” stories are like that, ignoring the perspectives of the “victims” (especially if they’re from marginalized groups, like women) in order to prevent the “perpetrators” from being legitimized. A similar thing happened with Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army.
“Stockholm Syndrome”, “brainwashing”, “indoctrination”, etc. is all just gaslighting. Manipulation is definitely real but mind control is simply science fiction.
That’s a fascinating breakdown and it makes a lot of sense to me now, knowing how psychology has been used, or tried to be used, in the past to justify the status quo. Like one of those things where the answer is right there, but the real answer is incompatible with the status quo, so they look past it and try to rationalize a different one.
I think it’s both the ignorance and that it’s not an actually democratic system to begin with. The “you [the voters] brought this on” rhetoric assumes, implicitly, that the system is somehow accurately representing the will of the people. But it’s not. I remember someone even did a study on it, indicating there was very little correlation between what the public wants and what policy gets implemented in the US.
Yeah, I agree with that regarding the undemocratic character of US elections. While it’s also true that what the public wants and what is implemented seldom align, it seems clear in the case of the MAGA movement that (false) solutions were on the MAGA table and not on the Democrat table. Ignorance, naivete, and desperation could all be good explanations as to why some groups voted the way they did. I also think, however, that leadership can set a kind of hegemonic tone. Much of the MAGA movement, I think, is a reaction to the 8 years under Democratic rule, through Obama, and the kind of tone that set nationally. That was an era where liberal darlings and their media platforms like Jack Dorsey and Twitter were actively “combating” hate speech, celebrities were being held to account for their right-wing sentiments in full public view, and the Me Too movement was actively prosecuting and ostracizing sex pests and serial r*pists alike out of the public eye.
This presented an atmosphere that squashed right-wing sentiment, drove it under ground, and made people weary of expressing any kind of conservative thinking. The broad social attitude had shifted, and platforms had shifted with it. The one thing that had not shifted, however, was the economic situation, which gave rise to Sanders and his working-class message. When his campaign was struck down, it really broke the hold on the liberal hegemonic tone. 2017 marked a shift that allowed Donald Trump and Republicans to hitch their racist agenda to an economic promise they knew corporate Democrats had no answer to. They no longer had the full package, a liberal social perspective, with populist economic policy; they just had more of the same old neoliberal nonsense in Hillary Clinton.
This opened the door for the hardcore and casual racists who had been swallowing their tongue for 8 years. It finally gave them state power to back their racist worldview. It took several years to really cut the liberal hold on public discourse. From the Unite the Right rally to the crackdown on BLM protests, eventually the shift crystallized in 2020 around COVID and its racist linking with Asian Americans and Chinese people specifically. It again allowed these people, who already had these ideas from the H5N1 era, to finally express these ideas publicly, with a state that would see the public reaction to this racism and say, “No, what you’re doing is wrong, and these racists are correct.” The public backing of the Proud Boys by Trump allowed other right-wing groups to be more public and begin canvassing more publicly. This included the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and the founding of new organizations like the Patriot Front and NSC-131.
The incoming Administration didn’t have the same social power and charisma that Obama had to allow it to size control of the tone. The conflict over the election results, the events of January 6th, and the total lack of meaningful material consequences for it meant that the conservative hold on discourse remained intact. There would not be 8 years of charismatic leadership out of the Democratic camp to attempt to re-calibrate the national tone, and many democratic supporters were becoming radicalized by the events unfolding in Gaza and the total bipartisan crackdown from the state on those sympathetic to Palestine. Liberalism was and still is being attacked at both ends, and its unwillingness to give in to its left flank and its need to turn to the right for the preservation of capital, et al. means giving conservatism more control over the national tone.
Couple this with an alliance between Musk and the MAGA movement, his acquisition of Twitter, transforming it into a Nazi playground, and being another powerful voice, one that even staunch liberals viewed as one of their own, the gates were now wide open for even liberals to join in on the act and finally say what they all had been thinking for years, to finally speak and have the backing of powerful figures to codify what they believe into the public canon. Anti-trans sentiment had a stark rise during this same time frame. It isn’t as if the world during the Obama years was suddenly less transphobic, and that suddenly there has been a change of heart. Transphobia had always been omnipresent; it was simply kept behind closed doors until the sentiment of the state shifted enough to allow those people to finally express those thoughts publicly.
At the end of the day, it IS ignorance, as you have pointed out, but that ignorance can be silenced through social pressure, but silencing ignorance doesn’t create tolerance; it only makes the tolerant louder.