Lively and possibly cantankerous rhetorical criticism, research and musings about: Eric Hoffer, True Believers, Wingnuts, The Tea Party, President Obama, Rhetorical Theory, Fanatical Political movements, symbolic devils, Kenneth Burke, and identification by antithesis. Est. 2010.
Same true believer tactics, but different brotherhood and different target audience.
People join to be part of something - a brotherhood, fellowship - not because they necessarily feel passionate about the cause itself.
The lonely - the disaffected - the bored middle class young adult ----> true believers.
Easily persuaded to join a hate group, not necessarily because they HATE, but because they want to be part of a GROUP. and because they need a purpose for their lives.
See Hoffer, True Believers.
From the article:
What happened next tracks closely with the recommendations in a manual written by Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that became the Islamic State, titled “A Course in the Art of Recruiting.” A copy was recovered by United States forces in Iraq in 2009.
The pamphlet advises spending as much time as possible with prospective recruits, keeping in regular touch. The recruiter should “listen to his conversation carefully” and “share his joys and sadness” in order to draw closer.
Then the recruiter should focus on instilling the basics of Islam, making sure not to mention jihad.
“Start with the religious rituals and concentrate on them,” says the manual, which was reviewed in the archive of the Conflict Records Research Centerat the National Defense University in Washington.
Hamad instructed Alex to download the “Islamic Hub” app on her iPhone. It sent her a daily “hadith,” or saying by the Prophet Muhammad.
She felt as if she finally had something to do. (emphasis mine)
. . .
By the last week of October, Alex was communicating with more than a dozen people who openly admired the Islamic State. Her life, which had mostly seemed like a blurred series of babysitting shifts and lonely weekends roaming the mall, was now filled with encouragement and tutorials from her online friends.
. . .
After dropping out of college, Alex worked for a year at a day-care center, only to resign after a disagreement with her manager. She quit a call-center training program after three weeks, she said, unable to handle angry calls from customers.
Her online conversations became a touchstone at a time when she was increasingly adrift.
"This network has been particularly active ever since the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, and has adopted the rhetoric and vocabulary, and reasoning, of age-old white supremacy."
Exactly. They have been the mouthpiece of the Tea Party from the veyr beginning, too. This is not coincidence.
"LIMBAUGH: Do you want to know why Jeb Bush is thinking of running? I'll give you a poss -- including the fact that he may actually want to be president, he may actually want to do this -- but he's also being looked at as a savior by the big money donor class and the consultant class, the establishment of the party, to head-off the Tea Party. They're going to pull out all the stops to make sure that a Tea Party-type conservative doesn't get the nomination. And if that means -- somebody like Jeb -- it could be a sacrificial run just to make sure that a conservative doesn't get the nomination in 2016. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 12/16/14]"
David Brooks believes the "Palin spasm" of the GOP is finally over - that a return to sanity is imminent judging from those elected during midterms.
"During the Palin spasm, Republicans seemed to detest the craft of governing. Hothouse flowers like Senator Ted Cruz preferred telegenic confrontation to compromise and legislation.
But current party leaders are talking about incremental progress, finding areas where they can get bipartisan support: on trade, corporate taxes, the XL oil pipeline, the medical devices tax, patent reform, maybe even tax reform generally."
Has the tea party finally run its course? One can hope. But inevitably there had to be an end, because without Barack Obama to identify against, there is no Tea Party ala Palin and Cruz.
When we started this project in 2009, one big question I had was where does the GOP end and the Tea Party begin? For a long time, Republicans themselves didn't understand the difference - or even the question. It has puzzled me time and time again why the GOP didn't jettison their crazies and take back their party - and while that answer isn't a simple one, and there were multiple advantages to letting the Tea Party run rampant, the GOP does now seems poised to let them go - to push them out if necessary.
Now they're talking Jeb Bush for President (ahem - see my analysis of his speech to CPAC two years ago - I called that one) and Jeb is most definitely NOT a tea party yahoo. In that speech then he called for GOP values of exactly the type of thing Brooks wrote about today - they aren't the crazy policies of the Tea Party - and it doesn't involve Sarah Palin - at all.
But for those of you who miss Sarah, I saw on my Roku the other day an ad for the Sarah Palin channel. Don't know anything else about it, but I'm willing to bet it isn't a free channel.
