No One Despises MAGA Voters More Than MAGA Elites
Another day, another right-wing scam on right-wing sheeple.
1. ABP: Always. Be. Projecting.
We talk a lot about how projection is the sincerest form of Trumpism:
The people who defended Roy Moore being Very Angry about fictional political pedophiles.
The people who jeer about “cucks” turn out to be super into literal cucking.
The people who won’t stop obsessing about 2020 voter fraud when most of the arrests and prosecutions from 2020 fraud seem to have been from Trump voters.
The people on the side of the “deplorables” against the “elites” hanging with billionaires on their superyachts.
Anyway, now we can add a line to our listicle, courtesy of the Salt Lake Tribune:
Lions Not Sheep is a Utah-based clothing company launched in 2016 that makes stridently pro-America, pro-gun, pro-Trump shirts, hats and apparel. . . .
Every order comes with a free copy of the U.S. Constitution because they love America. So much so, in fact, that they had made a big deal about all their clothing being manufactured right here in the U.S. of A.
That is, they used to.
Last week, the owner of “Lions Not Sheep” agreed to pay a $211,335 fine to the Federal Trade Commission after the agency accused the company of cutting the labels that said “Made in China” or other countries out of their clothes and stamping them “Made in USA”.
You can’t make this shirt up. They called the forking company Lions Not Sheep and their entire business plan assumed that their customers would be mindless sheep.
Anyway, I get the sense that a large part of the MAGA mindset for Ordinary Folks is that they see it as a way of saying FU to people they believe look down on them.
But I promise you that no one looks down on the great unwashed as cynically and disdainfully as their betters in the MAGA movement do.
2. “Oppressed”
I want to highlight a really thoughtful contribution to the comments the other day. I’m just going to pull one passage out of it:
For those who live in that world, in which your political opponents are implacable, hate-filled monsters coming after you because of what you are, it's a lot like living in a sectarian failed state like Lebanon. No matter how corrupt, incompetent, or personally vile your sect's leader is, you have to vote for him because it's zero-sum, and the other sects hate you and will rob you and oppress you because of what you are.
So I’m sure that this is undeniably true for some swaths of Republican voters. If you’re living on government assistance in a Kentucky holler that’s been hollowed out by jobs being shipped overseas and the flood of opioids, I get it. I mean, I’d argue that you are misallocating blame, but I get that it feels like you’re living in a sectarian failed state.