McJulie is a centrist, not a leftist, I'm serious

But just because I think I understand it doesn't mean I have the faintest clue what to do about it.

And that's what I think is going on here. It's like a very big, elaborate & weird version of what often happens when cults go into the final meltdown.

Humans work like that, right? If we ACT like we're sure of something, we can MAKE ourselves sure. For a time. To an extent.

I don't believe that people die for the cult because they really are that sure in their faith. They die because they WANT to be that sure.

The problem is that one cults go full bore into their acceleration phase -- that's usually, like, the DEATH SPIRAL of a cult. It gets more extreme and more extreme and more extreme, and then everybody dies.

When Trump became the leader of this cult, the fervency and other obvious cult signals accelerated, it gradually became almost mainstream to observe that they were a cult.

The Republicans liked it because it brought them power, money, etc., while the Democrats & others couldn't say anything about it because if you suggested that Republicans & evangelicals had become a cult, everybody acted like YOU were the loony.

So, my general thesis here is that -- 20 years ago, at least -- the white evangelical church and the Republican party merged and became a full-blown cult, but nobody seemed to notice or care.

But then you have cults, where a greater fervency of belief is what's rewarded. Things escalate until belief in doomsday goes from talking about it on Sunday to selling all your possessions and waiting for the rapture on a mountain-top.

They believed it, but they didn't believe it. They believed it to the extent that it was comfortable for them, given the circumstances of their lives. Which, let's be honest, is how most people believe most things most of the time.

So, what I'm leading up to is this: I grew up with a bunch of doomsday cult evangelicals who were "sure" that the world was going to end *any day now* but that never prevented them from buying mortgages and stuff.

But the pandemic has been much longer-term and affected more people -- as in, you know, EVERYBODY ON THE PLANET.

The pandemic should have been a similar wake-up call -- and perhaps it even was. Donald Trump did LOSE the 2020 election, where it's possible, had Katrina hit in 2004 instead of 2005, that George W. Bush might have lost.