Thanks to Cory Doctorow I now understand why liberals lost their fucking minds when Trump was elected.

Doctorow says that there’s a name for this phenomenon: “schismogenesis.” Or when one group of people define themselves in opposition to another: That’s when you decide how you feel about an issue based on who supports it. Doctorow says– “This notion grabbed me, because it explained so much about the changes in attitudes I’d seen among my (erstwhile?) friends and allies in the “progressive” world during the Trump years and through the covid pandemic. Specifically, it explained how people who considered themselves politically liberal or even leftist were transformed into defenders of voting machine companies and the pharmaceutical industry, and champions of the FBI.”

We witnessed this phenomenon in real time when Trump was elected and liberals embraced any and all unsavory characters who opposed him–like George W. Bush, Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney.

We observed it during the Covid pandemic with the treatment people that questioned the official story about vaccines.

Doctorow describes how this phenomenon influenced his Covid understanding. “But many of my peers had a different take on anti-vaxxers: for these friends and colleagues, anti-vaxxers were being foolish. Surprisingly, these people I’d long felt myself in broad agreement with began to defend the pharmaceutical system and its regulators. Once they saw that anti-vaxx was a wedge issue championed by right-wing culture war shit-heads, they became not just pro-vaccine, but pro-pharma.”

I marvel at the effectiveness of US propaganda, and the ways in which they innovate. Schismogenesis literally means the creation of division. Turning liberals into fervent cold warriors and cheerleaders for the FBI, CIA and Big-Pharma all because of their burning hatred for Donald Trump was genius.

Evil and diabolical but genius.