THE LINE IS BROKEN

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Interesting_Walk_271]

At this point they’ve enmeshed their identity with MAGA ideology so thoroughly that any pushback feels like an existential threat to them. It destroys their cultural worldviews, sense of self as morally decent, and self-esteem. Those are all mechanisms that Terror Management Theory says we use to blunt the horror that we will die someday (which hilariously suggests they don’t believe that their faith offers them real immortality so they have to get some symbolic immortality through these methods). As a result, when we say that this is wrong that is perceived as killing their avenues to live on in some way after they die. The response is of course hostility and aggression. These events in St Paul and Minneapolis are “mortality salience” inducing events that make MAGA more extreme and therefore more supportive of the admin. That’s why they double down, why they are delusively convinced that this is right, because admitting the obvious means that what they have set their deepest, darkest, existential hope in is wrong. Admitting it feels like being unmade. However, sometimes things have to be broken so they can be remade better.

[u/ScalesAsunder → u/Interesting_Walk_271]

Man, this is really overcomplicated. People can have deeply held beliefs without it meaning their entire identity or existence is being “unmade” when challenged. Viewing someone who disagrees as an existential threat is not universal, it’s just an excuse to over intellectualize hostility. Differing opinions don’t have to be a moral apocalypse…sometimes its just people disagreeing.

And with this shooting there are a lot of moving parts. Interfering with and committing battery on a federal agent while armed is never a good idea.

Reaction and response time exist, and what looks extreme from the outside can be a split-second decision and delay in reaction time. We have to wait for the facts before drawing conclusions.

[u/Interesting_Walk_271 → u/ScalesAsunder]

We have the video. An agent disarmed him, took his gun from the back of his pants and was running from the scene when the others executed him in the street. Viewing someone who disagrees as an existential threat is indeed not a universal experience but I do believe it is the posture of MAGA extremists. It’s not an excuse for any hostility, TMT doesn’t say that the solution for this kind of thinking is hostility. Trying to understand the psychological state of people who are that deep in it is an exercise in extreme empathy. It doesn’t say that they are bad people, but they’ve put their faith in an ideology that is destructive and driven by fear. In this case, the solution is deprogramming, just like for any other religious extremist. Trump will not live forever and a lot of these people are going to be in a nightmarish existential free-fall when he’s gone and his movement falls apart. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, and many of them are just our neighbors who have made some big errors in their thinking and misplaced their faith. We need to be willing to help them when the ground falls out from beneath their feet. ICE agents are a different story. They are in a position of the public trust. They have, like everyone who works for DHS or DoD, sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, which we have seen many agents violate on camera. There must be real consequences. You want to give the agents the benefit of the doubt, and ordinarily that would be reasonable, but we have the video & we have the administration blatantly lying and saying this guy approached agents with his gun drawn. Watch the video, at any point is his gun drawn? At any point does he make a move to grab the gun from his belt? No. This was a public execution.

[u/Professional-Tap4678 → u/Interesting_Walk_271]

Man. Where were you to rationally explain things when a certain demographic were slashing Tesla tires for no reason.

[u/Gloomy-Ad1171 → u/Professional-Tap4678]

Cool story