Birtherism has become irrelevant. There was never any chance that the birthers would prove their claims of a foreign birth for President Obama, nor that they would win a lawsuit to block his candidacy. Still there was always the remote chance that enough people might believe the birther conspiracy theories to change the results of the election. But that didn’t happen; Obama won handily.
Given the post-election realities, I think it is fair to consign the birthers to history. Even though they are still around and might file the occasional crank lawsuit, there’s really no chance that they will ever accomplish anything except perhaps depleting their own bank accounts.
Just as the cars on the Interstate highway1 slow down to gawk at an accident, and the evening news covers a train wreck extensively, there will always be some interest in looking at the birthers, either with condescending sympathy or indignant derision. There will be ongoing puzzles to see who can knock down the latest birther nonsense in the fewest steps.
I personally sense a sea change. Birthers on Twitter and Facebook are repeating really old rumors. We’re getting more drive-by nasty comments here on the site, both phenomena, I think, a sign of birther frustration. I’m personally becoming less bemused and more annoyed at Orly’s inept legal filings, and my interests are developing in other areas.
This isn’t any sort of “I’m shutting down the blog” article, but things have changed; we are now in the post-birther era.
1Not in San Diego
But, but… “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire!”
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2017
> Birthers on Twitter and Facebook are repeating really old rumors.
I think that’s because most birther figureheads have run out of new “breaking stories”, “evidence” or ideas “how to get him out”.
So now that WND, Arpaio, Apuzzo, Berg etc. are out of the loop (with only Orly and Birther Report remaining active), the poor keyboard commandos are totally out of new ammo, but with an itchy trigger finger, so what else can they do but recycle or pass some aspect of birtherism they hadn’t known before as “breaking news” even if it’s 5 years old?
As long as President Obama is in office and somebody thinks they can make money off hard-working morons, there will be birthers.
Think of the Birfoons as poor demented, deluded meth addicts in the midsts of cold turkey withdrawal.
Look at some of the symptoms of use never mind withdrawal….
Use
Emotional problems – an inability to feel any pleasure without use, the result of a damaged dopamine system in the brain
Malnutrition and the health deficits
Meth mouth ( well the cack that falls from the current crop kinda mimics…)
A greatly elevated risk of stroke (read Freak Rethuglic for the rants)
Motor activity problems (co-ordination is not a Birther characteristic, inability to organise a piss up in a brewery comes to mind)
An increase in aggressive behavior (’nuff said)
A decrease in cognitive functioning, including memory problems and verbal learning deficits (need more be said..?)
WE WON! WE WON! WE WON!
You forgot the Nyah, nyah, nyah!
“Birtherism has become irrelevant.”
Was it ever relevant as to anything other than a source of entertainment?
It still amazes me that, despite how suddenly WND dropped birtherism after the election, I haven’t seen any complaint from the WND commentariat.
I know not to take WND seriously, but it makes me wonder how many birthers are really serious about their birtherism.
Dang! I am now left wondering what other perfectly useless thing I can waste my time on? 🙂 It’s been a good run. Lots to amuse and bemuse about. But eventually every worthless idea finally goes away and leaves us all alone, usually only to be replaced by another equally worthless idea.
I suggest following the Facebook posts of Sarah Palin.
Thanks for the choice, Doc. I’m sticking with “indignant derision.”
Beware though…just when you thought it was safe to go back to surfing the Internet…
Orly Nevah Disappoints!!!!
Hey, what do you mean “not in San Diego?” I’m IN San Diego and we stop and gawk just like anywhere else!
It was a few years ago, but I was on the highway there and a car was on fire, with 10-foot flames coming out of it, and there was no slowdown.
Sad.
Even john isn’t bothering anymore.
There should be a hyphen in the title.
Yep, it’s getting about that slow in the anti-birfin’ game.
or no space at all.
Strange. Lookie-loos are one of the primary causes of slow downs here.
Maybe the car on fire was an attraction well-known to the locals?
I’ve done quite a bit of driving in San Diego, over several years about a decade ago. In my experience, the highways are free-for-all race tracks.
Darn! And I just discovered y’all.
Can’t you pretty please find something else to undo?
At any rate, I’m quite enjoying “Idiot America”, recommended here.
The title of this blog is “Obama Conspiracy Theories” and the world sure isn’t running out of those although the birfoons have become totally boring.
Think of all the fun we’ve had watching this parade of stupidity. Its all been documented by the Doc!
Who would have thought that these idiots could go on for five years and manage to invent so many ways to fail.
My nominee for the stupidest Birther is Latkin because unlike the rest of these grifters and fools he actually managed to destroy himself. The Doc missed the recent update that latkin was DENIED a civilian Medical Licence in KS. He destroyed his military career, went to jail, lost his pension (how stupid is that), and is unable to work as a doctor.
Story on his recent hearing:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/02/07/birther-and-former-army-doc-denied-medical-license-allegedly-over-political-views/
I tend to not to cover these personal issues, although it’s relevant. In my opinion, not letting Lakin practice medicine is a waste.
the comments on the article there are something else – hard core crazy birthers, most of them… tho a few asking about how this refusal of a licence works given the shortage of doctors in Kansas.
This is entlrely reasonable, and I assume Doc’s point, and it is not clear why Lakin’s application failed. The man can be a crazy fool (which he was) and still be a good doctor. I note that Lakin’s foolishness has not been cured by his spell inside, since he seems to doubt that the President is a US citizen at all! (deep sigh…..)
I agree…to a point. The board’s complaint about him though is quite simply, if he was willing to throw away his Military career to disobey what he considered an illegal President, what laws would he refuse to obey for the same reason if they licensed him? That’s the feeling I got from the questioning.
I posted a thread back in June on the Fogbow of last year entitled “What will birthers do if Obama gets a second term?”
http://www.thefogbow.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=7872
My point was this, after Obama wins the second election all those motivations for birtherism will dissappear. Birtherism has been fueled in part with the hope that Obama’s first term and attempts at running for the presidency again would be a failure. It was never really about the “constitution” or what was “right” (as we all knew this already”). Once you take out any chance in the courts and any chance of Obama not gaining a second term, that fuel for birtherism dissappears.
Lakin is quite fortunate. He may have lost his license to practice medicine, his pension, and all other military benefits, but he’s alive. Desertion used to be punishable by firing squad.
Dr. Lakin’s judgment was so bad on the eligibility issue that it calls into question his judgment on everything else. Here’s a doctor who routinely relies on others telling him facts without his insistence upon seeing the underlying information (Nurse to Dr. Lakin: Doctor, the patient’s temperature is 102; Nurse to Dr. Lakin: the patient’s blood type is O+.) who insists in this one matter which simply does not concern him to throw away his career on an insane insistence on seeing something no other President has been even asked to show. And, as an officer, he ought to be totally divorced from politics.
He was warned multiple times to back down. He didn’t. There are consequences. As Andrew observed, in earlier times he might simply have been shot.
Agreed. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve become “too soft” everywhere in the enforcement of certain punishments…
…the haters out there seem to be mostly craven bully / authoritarian mindset types anyways. They misconstrue and abuse any acts of tolerance as a license to only become more outrageous in their behavior as a result.
I think we’d have had a lot less displays and spread of “Birtherism” and similar crass hate if the haters were more often swiftly met with penalties from the stricter end of the available penalty options scale for their poor behavior and stupidity.
Yep. I’ve always felt that most of Birtherism was nothing more than stupid propaganda/profiteering by sore ODS losers that know they can’t win against Obama legitimately and simply needed to come up with smear excuses to try to stir up some way of preventing his re-election.
Yes, there are a number of paranoid wackos and other feeble-minded gullible saps that become easy dupes, marks and “true believers” to whatever the propagandist smear merchants sell them…
But without the scam artist opportunists out there to rile up and poison the minds of the village idiots constantly, these stupid memes simply can’t “catch fire” and sustain themselves beyond the shadows and dark corners where hate and crazy talk always exist, chattering and seething to themselves with futility.
WND simply got into the action, because they thought this was their chance to pull another “Swift Boat” style attack on the democrats…their ideological foes.
They failed.
More importantly, the propagandists have little vested interest anymore in this particular ploy, now that the election is over with and Obama’s second term has started. Their efforts will move to trying to create new smears and new dirt on the next crop of democratic candidates for 2016….
…while the “true believer” zombies they created with continue to shuffle along and drift aimlessly in their wake, suddenly forgotten and ignored by their former puppet masters, until there is a new target and new angle to sucker and rebrand their easy former “marks” with…
Well said! There will be new forms of non-Birther OCT that arise…as the sore losers and haters look for ways to claim “scandal”, “impeachment” or try to pine for their Civil War and “Go Galt” tantrum fantasies…
…so yeah, there should be new material to keep this place going, even if the frequency of updates and activity drops quite a bit…
Which is fine. I may not pay attention to this stuff as much as I used to, but I still always come back here…and I will continue to do so, as long as this site exists – period. Even if we all get some well earned periods of quiet and inactivity along the way…
I agree. Assuming he is competent they could have conditioned his license on practicing in a small community in real need of local medical care. He might have been able to redeem himself and then move on.
Do we really want to go down that path? Do we really want to punish people – forever, apparently – for doing something stupid, for believing something stupid?
And where do you draw the line? There are people who think believing in an omnipotent being – “invisible man in the sky” as George Carlin called him – are crazy.
Give those loony birfers some credit!
They got the king of the obots to invent a new method of presenting evidence!
They got the justice system to invent new ways to defend no-shows!
They got you to expose yourself!
You could be right, BUT, keep in mind that the true believers would welcome such penalties as a way of being martyred for the cause and as proof that “the regime” is a dictatorship. I think that Orly, for example, has intentionally tried to be held in contempt of court in order to martyr herself. Of course this would also allow her to continue to ask for donations to fight the evil regime. After all, she does see herself as a political decedent.
By not giving the stiffest penalties despite the most ridiculous and frivolous claims, the Courts have proven that people do can petition them for redress without penalty. I quite enjoy reading the opinions of the judges which point out the stupidity of the birthers. Is not the ultimate penalty being held up to ridicule and scorn?
While I agree heartily with Doc that the birthers are running out of steam and what little relevance they had, they are still causing chaos in courtrooms and strain on federal lawyers and judges, who have to waste valuable time with their nonsense.
More importantly, I fear that their more bloodthirsty disciples, as noted on the “Bad Fiction” blog, may act on that rhetoric and go out and kill people. We have seen numerous examples of American people overheated by rhetoric who cause mass destruction: Timothy McVeigh is the archetype, but James Von Brunn, Buford Furrow, Adam Lanza, and the Columbine kids, Klebold and Harris, stick out in my memory.
I can easily see a scenario where some despairing “brither,” determined to go out in a blaze of glory as a martyr, to light a “blaze seen around the world” and theoretically inspire the entire nation to rush the steps of the Capitol with nooses to string everybody up, goes into a school, museum, or day care center, and guns every one down.
We’ve had enough tragedy in our planet’s history.
I’m not talking about instituting measures that don’t already exist. What I’m talking about is exercising the maximum penalty already available to deter all these types of situations instead of going with lesser “slap on the wrist” options as mere gentle “warnings”, hoping that they will actually learn their lesson from being let off the hook gently.
Treating these folks lightly never seems to work. They are impervious to “getting the message” and only mistake getting out of bigger trouble with being able to get away with it and to come back and push the envelope of poor behavior further…
All the birthers have accomplished is wasting a lot of people’s time and money as well as making themselves constantly look like ignorant, hateful and crazy fools….
I hear what you are saying, but then again, these folks all have a “martyr” complex. Their very insecurities drive them to build a false sense of needing to be the center of attention in their own little universe all the time. Whether they pretend they are the hero of the world with secret knowledge that only they can understand or that they get their kicks out of playing the “woe is me” card, it really doesn’t matter.
Folks like that are going to pretend to themselves and their sycophants that they are “martyrs for the cause” no matter what happens to them (or they perceive to happen to them), no matter what.
Take Orly for example – she goes off all the time on tirades about small, unrelated stuff like when her computer gets viruses or her car has problems and embellishes it beyond belief in her own head into some terrible “Obot plot” to “get her”…
…As I said, these folks are already “martyrs” in their own minds, whether it is for getting a boo-boo papercut on their finger, getting a fine, going to jail or simply tripping over their own shoelaces.
So I say F-them. It is folly to let them off the hook for legitimate bad behavior they do, or to treat them lightly, just because you worry that they will be viewed by some other small segment of idiots as a “martyr” in return.
That will happen no matter what.
So who cares.
I say apply the strongest and most effective legitimate deterrent as frequently as possible and suddenly you’ll start seeing less “martyr fantasies” and more “oooh crud…my bad behavior has consequences…and maybe I don’t want to go there…”
Fuhry Us: Give those loony birfers some credit!
let’s ALL defend prosecutions WITHOUT court qualified forensic witnesses and let’s ALL defend prosecutions by admitting “Stuff Printed From the Internet” as evidence
i guess we can omit “civil procedure” & “rules of evidence” from law school curricula and questions on bar exams
Penalties exist for a reason. If you don’t have a valid range of penalties to apply for legitimate given scenarios, then they lose their effectiveness and abuse and waste increase as a result.
I see a vast difference between learning how to effectively “petition for redress” and preserving that right (which the courts do well) and having to endlessly tolerate ridiculous and frivolous crap.
It is one thing to try to help teach and guide people to learn and help them understand when they are going about their petitioning the wrong way. …But abuse of the system is abuse…and there must be a line and legitimate deterrent somewhere.
“No” is a valid answer from the courts. Refusing to accept a legitimate “no” and just repeatedly coming back to ask the same question over and over again constitutes a form of harassment of the court system, IMHO. Same as admitting to a crime and then becoming unrepentant and going back to your original false claims afterwards (i.e. Terry Lakin). There is no remorse there for their folly. These folks don’t get it and appeasing them by “going easy” on them is a mistake.
I’m not even talking about the stiffest of penalties always being needed – just that more deterrent is needed in many of these cases towards the harsher end of the available option spectrum than what we usually see – which is way, way towards the “kid gloves” treatment, IMHO. All that does is encourage them and further increase their own spoiled entitlement behavior.
Disciplinary measures exist for a reason in society. There is a vast chasm between authoritarian overreach and simply enforcing an effective rule of law with legitimate “teeth ” to it.
Yes and no. Some people are without shame and incapable of grasping the intended societal impact of scorn… which seems to be most Birthers problems.
Sure, they will cry and whine about it… but they don’t learn from it ….they only see themselves as “victims” instead of the spoiled and wasteful fools that they are…
I simply look at ridicule and scorn as mere natural reactionary responses to ridiculous and shameful behavior…it comes with the territory, simple as that.
To look at such things as an intentional form of calculated “punishments” instead of simply reasonable cause/effect, is often a failed strategy. Just because you yourself would prefer not to be subject to ridicule and scorn and would seek to modify your behavior in such instances doesn’t mean folks that think like they do will. You are simply projecting your own sense of rational behavior and sense of self-respect upon petulant and irrational actors…
Well said, Kiwiwriter!
I just wanted to let you know that I’m glad you’ve come out from just lurking and have joined us here in the conversation over the past few weeks. I’ve really valued what you’ve had to say and how you state it in all of your posts! It is insight and commentary such as yours that keeps me always eventually coming back here… 🙂
Well, thank you for those warm words…I also write on Hatewatch, and Beyond Black and White, and have my own web page on the history of World War II.
It’s interesting to watch these Birther clowns’ behaviors…they all contain their own seeds of self-destruction within them…paranoids behave in a way to make their script come to life, even if they have to do it themselves.
I think they would rather be martyrs than winners. I think the birthers would like it better to be honored for their failed warnings coming true, to be immortalized in statues after the fact, regarded as prophets. They would not know what to do if they were handed actual power.
Look what happens to those neo-Nazi compounds and whatnot…the Aryan Nations boys fell on their faces when they hired dangerous ex-cons as security chiefs. They shot up a car with a family in it when they mistook its backfire for an “enemy attack.” The resulting lawsuit put them out of business. They didn’t even get the chance for martyrdom. My point is that given the chance to set up their own separate utopian society, the neo-Nazis failed abysmally and were nailed.
Orly Taitz thinks Obama will go to jail and she’ll be carried off in triumph on the shoulders of the grateful American people. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself after that.
I’m not sure I understand what “measures” you are talking about. Lakin got in trouble for failing to follow orders. Orly may get in trouble for filing frivolous lawsuits and practicing stupid law.
As far as believing President Obama was born in Kenya or any of the other wacko theories I’m not sure there are any “measures” to deal with them……other than what Doc has done here.
Don’t get me wrong. I wish that Judges would be much tougher on birfers, but I also enjoy the disconnect between the world that birfers think exist and the one that really does. Apparently it is lost on them that if “the regime” was as evil and corrupt as they claim it is Orly and others would be dead or in prison. Every day that nothing happens to them proves how wrong they are.
I think the Birthers would like it if they did get hauled off to prison…they would be able to play the martyr game and get more attention.
But it’s true…if this country was really a dictatorship, Orly would be rotting in a prison, probably being tortured by the secret police, or lying in a shallow grave in the woods somewhere.
People who complain that the United States is a tyranny don’t know the meaning of the word. They should talk with survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps, Iraqi prisons, Rwanda’s genocide, Cambodia’s killing fields, East Germany’s Berlin Wall, and real tyrannies. Getting sneered at by passersby, flamed by internet opponents, ignored by the media, and snarled at by irritated judges is NOT tyranny. It’s the real world. Get a batting helmet.
Yup. Pretty much spot on, can’t really add much. It was a con game from start to finish and there just isn’t much interest left from the financiers. IMHO, the propaganda wing could never have actually drawn enough from the ‘true believers’ to pay for their operations, so now that the project funding has run out so has the energy for pursuing it.
Nah, I exposed myself a long time before the birthers were a gleam in the Koch brothers eye.
I lived in San Diego for a couple of years, and they have a place there called “Black’s Beach”. Its a nude beach, and it was just across the Torrey Pines Golf Course from where I worked.
Nude is not rude!
I agree completely. I’d further broaden what you said about them not knowing what to do with real power to include that they wouldn’t know how to handle success – period. Folks with such blinders on have difficulty seeing or handling the “what happens next” beyond their little paranoia fantasy fulfillment…
Besides, their “solutions” would rarely “solve” whatever is really and truly motivating and driving their personal angst… they would just remain hollow, looking for some new excuse to fill the void of their paranoia, fear and anger…their bogeyman targets are usually just manifestation excuses of bigger underlying problems in their own psyche, after all…
Again, I think they more fantasize about being the “martyr” than really wanting to be one.
As I said before, I think the whole “martyrdom” thing is vastly overrated and overused as both a worry and a cause celebre…at least for such silly and small potato matters such as crazy Birtherism.
I mean really, let’s take a look at their main existing jailhouse “martyrs” – that would be Terry Lakin and Walter Fitzpatrick.
What has their “martyrdom” achieved for them, that they didn’t already have from the rest of the Birtheristani? I would argue – NOTHING substantially more at all.
They already had “cred” in their insular Birther circles before going to jail for their stupidity. Yes, getting arrested, convicted and serving time warrants a small blurb in some news outlets at each of those stages. But there are endless dumb criminal stories that happen and make a small amount of news everyday…and then are quickly forgotten and replaced by the next dumb criminal story…
So I would argue that in the end, such “martyrs for the cause” really don’t garnish enough additional attention or support at all. But they serve time for their crime…and through their own stupidity, foolishly ruin aspects of their own personal lives and income in the process.
So while “martyrdom” might sound appealing to these types in their little fantasy minds, the reality of that “accomplishment” really doesn’t measure up…nor hold much threat of turning them into bigger symbols that propel their little fan base much beyond what it already was…
Let’s face it – these folks are no Obi-Wan Kenobi at all and never will be. Striking them down doesn’t make them any more “powerful”.
I think you’ve been taking what I’m saying and misconstruing it into tangents beyond anything I said or suggested.
If you would re-read my posts on this, I was mainly referring to the spectrum of applicable punishments as such “measures”. In the Lakin situation, that would be the range of measures applicable to the sentencing for his crimes. As others have stated, such failure to follow orders (failure to deploy to a battlefiled, mind you) have been met with much more severe, harsher or longer penalties in the past.
For Orly – yes, it is certainly a different spectrum of measures which can be applicable to her poor behavior in front of the courts. She gets a lot of leeway, IMHO from many of the judges, which go beyond just the mere vexatious frivolity of her actions.
For instance, she *is* a licensed attorney and she does repeatedly make public and written statements that threaten judges and other officials…actions which I’m pretty sure judges and the legal establishment can issue severe admonishments and punitive action against…just for disrespecting the court alone.
On that same note, she gets a lot of leeway with her courtroom antics, as if the judges are always viewing her as a “pro se” plaintiff, instead of being held to the same professional standards as most other real lawyers in her position in front of a court would be treated.
She’s also included a number of very “improper” things in many of her filings…often despite repeated warnings (not redacting key private info, such as full SSNs, etc.; proof of fraudulent use of certain databases to access info, including fake documents (such as some of the fake BCs…etc, etc). Technically, she could be held accountable for such things…but so far, they all let it slide.
I never discussed “measures” against such merely belief-based wacko statements – only against actual legitimate rule breaking.
So I’m with you on the “to deal with them……other than what Doc has done here” aspect of things that amount to nothing more than crazy stuff being spouted by fools and con artists. The actions of such nonsense bring about their own ridicule and debunking and rebuttal. That is sufficient in such situations.
The cognitive dissonance level of their disconnect on such matters is truly mind boggling… but then again, I’ve seen a similar level of conflicting disconnect in a lot of RWNJ claims out there…so it is a defect in rational thinking that goes beyond just the the paranoid conspiratorial freaks and birthers…
I predict a minor birther bump when President Obama leaves office, and another (presuming the events aren’t concurrent) when a non-Democrat President takes office. So many of them are so hungry for vindication, they’ll be clamoring for that long-suppressed “real investigation” to finally be carried out.
Has Zullo gone back to selling used cars yet?
Then again, quite a few of these people are the same ones that have been talking about “black helicopters” and FEMA camps since at least the ’90’s… or have been underground Birch Society folks for even longer than that…
…so yeah, I think many of the older ones have been “hungry for vindication” for much longer than just their Birther activities…or worse, their Birther activities have led them to get on board the rest of the crazy train…
Either way, I have trouble seeing true “Birtherism” being able to “rise again” on its own…
I supsect instead that some newer form of related “stupid” will arise for them to refocus how they tilt at windmills for their “vindication”…
Post-birther era?
How about post-stupid of those that honestly wonder if the President was born in Kenya?
Some wonder as to the criminal nature of a fraudulent birth certificate, his selective service enrollment, and collection of funds for office. Not one of which has anything to do with his eligibility to be President.
There are those that wonder exclusively if a person born to a foreign national father can be President. They will continue and persist in their derangement despite the ridicule and banning.
Since 2 have done so, there is no need to wonder. Obviously, they can. Do you also wonder whether anyone will ever climb Mount Everest?
It is impossible to “honestly wonder” if President Obama was born in Kenya. Anyone who still “wonders” if Obama was born in Kenya is by definition dishonest.
I seem to remember a lot of people getting all excited thinking about how, when Nancy Pelosi was no longer speaker, her Big Safe o’ Sekrit Things would be thrown open and at last we’d all learn the truth, about… something.
I can’t even remember what the fixation was on at that time; maybe it was that the Speaker would know the real truth about the usurpinator.
Clearly, that didn’t happen. Probably because Boehner’s in the tank now, too, after being hypmotized on the golf course, or some such.
“There are those that wonder exclusively if a person born to a foreign national father can be President.”
According to U.S. law and precedence, history, Congress and the majority of voters, the answer is undeniably yes.
Actually, we’ve seen what happens when paranoiacs get power…Hitler and Stalin being the archetypes. Alan Bullock’s “Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives” is a fascinating comparison of the two dictators. They had a lot of similarities…they spent a lot of time living like men who had won a magnificent lottery, sitting up till dawn, boring their court with the same old stories about the good old days of the early struggle, surrounded by psychophants seeking favor, periodically bursting into energy to destroy various enemies: Jews, Kulaks, Poland, each other.
Ultimately they were afraid of their own bodyguards and closest advisers, who turned on them as they neared their macabre ends.
Same thing is true with lesser paranoids…I enjoyed reading Patty Hearst’s account of her kidnapping and captivity because of the paranoia and insane ideas of her captors. They had absolutely no clue about what they were for, how they were going to achieve it, but were full of paranoia, theory, endless debate, and rules on how they were going to live…arguing endlessly about whether it was “bourgeois” to celebrate birthdays. Uterly disconnected from reality. Reduced to stealing purses from gym locker rooms to stay afloat. If they hadn’t kidnapped and murdered people, they would have been funny.
They would become more paranoid if they got into power, when their “solutions” failed in the face of reality, and they started irritating the very people they thought would love them. They would wind up like most dictators, hiding behind flunkies and goons.
I think they REALLY want to be martyrs…they’ve read about famous folks who spent time in jail and then wound up in power: Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mandela, even Dr. King. They surely know about Joan of Arc, Thomas More, and John Brown, and they might have even heard of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. They all think that if they go inside jail, they’ll emerge from captivity as conquering heroes, surrounded by an adoring public, walking down the road like Hitler or Mandela, clutching their prison memoir, like “Mein Kampf,” and be bigger names than Hitler or Mandela.
A lot of this is narcissism and inflated senses of self-importance and grandiosity…these clowns think they are more important to the world than they are.
If you walked into Times Square with a clipboard and asked people at random if they had ever heard of Orly Taitz, you’d probably get at best 10 percent who have heard the name. That anonymity has to bite at these people. John Wilkes Booth himself said, “I must have fame, fame!”
Excellent points throughout your entire post (as usual). I picked the summary here, as it drove the whole point home. I completely agree with your assessment: delusional paranoids in power are a BAD, BAD, BAD thing, all around…
Yes, a lot of them THINK they want to be martyrs…because they simply have that fantasy view of it…the reality of what they would face to become so would not be so “fun”…but then these folks can’t think that far ahead with their blinders on.
That is why punishments with real “teeth” to them serve as a deterrent. It helps to dispel such fantasies of martyrdom being such a fun little ride towards fame.
I completely agree with you about the narcissism and grandiosity aspects and how they tie into all of this. What needs to be added is that such narcissism is often just a necessary blanket they have to wrap their fragile little egos up with, in order to cover for their deep, deep insecurities. It is a coping mechanism to hide and live in denial from facing the deep truths about themselves and their lives.
You can wonder all you want, Pieter…but “wishing won’t make it so.” I wonder why people with the intelligence that God gave maggots, opossums, and badgers, whip out checkbooks and Paypal numbers and give money to charlatans and frauds like Orly Taitz.
But there are also hordes of folks who whip out checks and make them out to “psychics” like John Edwards, who claim they can speak with the dead, and send messages from the other side. And hordes of folks who send money by Western Union to Nigerian princes and Zimbabwean widows, hoping for a big payday at the end of the e-mail trail.
And hordes more of folks who sent money orders and checks to David Duke to “advance the white race,” which he used to study the laws of probability on Mississippi River gambling boats.
They can believe anything they want.
Doesn’t make any of it true.
And they get neither their payday, nor their message from the dead, nor their utopia.
And worse: WA woman Jette Jacobs, 67, scammed, murdered in South Africa
Because the ends justify the means.
I have seen many cranks starting out small (believing one judge deliberately mistreated them because he was best friends with the other side’s lawyer) and ended up deep down the rabbit hole (our local version of the SovCits who believe the German state is illegal and that the Reich still exists as a separate entity) – not because they are inherently evil or racist or fascist people but simply because they clutch at any straw that promises them to “right the wrongs” they feel were done to them.
Yes, those Nigerian folks are killers. The only response to such an e-mail is to send it to the “junk” box. If you open a dialogue with them, you will lose a lot of money. If you go to meet them, you may get killed.
However, there are some counter-scammers, web page like the “Lads From Lagos,” that play internet games with them, driving them berserk, sometimes getting them to send money themselves, and pose with signs that read, “I am a fool,” and suchlike.
They do provide some amusement…I still like the guy who said the government was threatening him with “levity.” I guess they were surrounding his house with stand-up comedians.
Interesting that Germany’s version of “Sovereign Citizens” think that the Third Reich still exists. I guess they missed the memo from Admiral Doenitz.