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  • The investment, held in one of Miller’s children’s brokerage accounts, raises conflict of interest red flags as the tech company continues to play a substantial role in the work of U.S. immigration officials.

    Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin called the group’s report “very silly”

    ... This is the same official spokesperson that downplayed concerns about Trump trying to shut down the office of Civil Rights and Liberties, and then like a month later defended DHS and the Pentagon hooking federal employees up to a lie detector test to find leaks

    The watchdog group that obtained Miller’s filing identified 11 other administration officials who either currently hold or have owned stock in Palantir, though none with holdings as large as Miller.

    Guess he has a vested interest in acting like a hateful psychopath, and gleefully breaking apart families. It's good for business.

  • Fear is not necessary.

    Really have to disagree with you here, fear is how groups of people are kept under control. It's the basis of authoritarian regimes

    How did Bush gain support for the patriot act despite the fact that it clearly violated civil liberties?

    Why did Trump stand in front of a camera a few days ago and yell about how much danger we're all in? You know he's full of shit, but the person who is in an echo chamber, and never exposed to any questions of regarding his greatness, will believe he's saying that because it's true and he's looking out for her best interest

  • But the pro life movement and the whole idea of a moral majority, was created by Weyrich to gain enough support for conservatives who created segregation academies in the south after the civil rights movement.

    https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/

    When the supreme court threatened their tax exemption status, they knew the majority of Americans would not be sympathetic to them, and they needed a more palatable issue than segregation to gain support for the idea of a right to "religious freedom," that would allow them to maintain tax exemption.

    When I say it was like an advertisement campaign. I mean they literally created films back when that was the best way to spread messaging, and toured the country screening those films and giving speeches in order to create the pro-life movement.

  • I don’t think anyone has to be trained into this. That’s the problem. This is humanity’s default.

    I think to some extent, that is the default when the amygdala is kicked into hyperdrive by fear and the prefrontal cortex goes offline.

    But dividing the U.S. into such black and white extremes of left vs right is directly the result of the heritage foundation creating the whole moral majority narrative, and essentially creating an advertising campaign out of abortion and Roe v Wade.

    Originally Americans weren't even very divided on the issue, but Paul Weyrich seized the opportunity and targeted evangelical Christians several years after the Roe v Wade decision was even made.

    Even leaders of the southern baptist church weren't opposed to Roe v Wade at the time the decision was made.

    I grew up in the southern Baptist church in the 90s, so well after the pro-life narrative had been established as unquestionable in the church. In no way was it some kind of rosey utopia back then, it was pretty awful, but even since then it's gotten more extreme and politicized. Straight up denial and disgust with the literal word of Jesus and saying things like "empathy is a disease," is something new that is being gradually inserted into everyday "Christianity," so that eventually (just like abortion) it will just be accepted without question.

  • Strict hierarchy isn’t their goal: it’s how they think everything already works. I cannot overstress: everything. If a rightful authority moved a “falling rocks” sign, the rocks would fall somewhere else.

    I don't think it's all conservatives, but I think this relates to an inability to understand what empathy actually is. When people see it simply as a "weakness," or a tool used to manipulate and gain sympathy, they're either ignoring or missing a very important aspect of how useful it can actually be.

    Empathy is a nonverbal means of emotional communication, and it allows you to "think about what others are thinking," and how it may or may not align with your own thoughts and conclusions.

    The inability to do this, is actually itself a very big weakness that results in all or nothing/naked tribalism behavior. Then when people are like "why the fuck would you do that?" That's when you start getting the justifications like if I didn't do it somebody else would have, bc that's what I would do, and I can't really comprehend on a non surface level that other people aren't me.

    I was listening to a podcast today about the Iran Contra and the advisors to Reagan during his first administration. This was when the Heritage Foundation presence was really strong.

    They tried to keep Reagan from ever interacting with Americans at a one-on-one level, because they knew if he heard about something from an individual (rather than just an abstract group of strangers), he would often feel compelled to help solve the issue.

    I believe that's kind of the case with the majority of conservatives, and humans in general. It's a lot easier to ignore something if you can't relate to it or if you just don't let yourself think about it too much.

    It was still shitty that Reagan's policies ultimately harmed so many people, and definitely helped us end up where we are now. But it's also kind of insane to think that the people advising him literally tried to shield him from the reality of what his policies were doing to individuals, because they saw his very basic level of empathy as a weakness, and the individual Americans who were asking for help as "manipulative," simply because they were turning to their president to solve the issues he had created and had the power to fix.

    I honestly believe the whole movement we're seeing on the right by Christian nationalists to convince people that "empathy is a disease" is a way to keep their base brainwashed and under their control. If they train people that anger and accusations of manipulation should be the default response to anything that makes you stop and think too much when something feels morally wrong or unjustified, it makes it easier to outgroup/distance from and label the people that are being mistreated as other or somehow less than human.