@HoarseWisperer 1/ The process of grooming people to participate in or acquiesce to an atrocity entails a stepwise escalation of cruelty against the Others. A critical feature is that each escalation has the effect of normalizing the prior step, even if the latest step encounters pushback.
@HoarseWisperer 2/ If the pushback is too intense, the regime may temporarily step back as the Nazis did with Aktion T4 (the "euthanasia" program). But regardless, the escalation of evil immediately preceding the one they provoked the response loses its capacity to outrage.
@HoarseWisperer 3/ And then, after a bit of time, they resume doing the thing they backed off on under a more opaque pretext and then we find that that level has been normalized too, has lost the capacity to shock and people are more willing to accept the pretext out of emotional exhaustion.
@HoarseWisperer 4/ After this horror, are we still really going to be able to muster any outrage over the policies of arresting people dropping their kids off at school or making court appearances or pulling people and demanding their papers because they're 99 miles away from a border or port?
@HoarseWisperer 5/ When they swear they've stopped separating kids but really have only relocated the camps to rural red areas and renamed them Happy Smile Totally Awesome Fun Boncentration Bamps, will we shrug and avert our eyes?
@HoarseWisperer 6/ When Fox is normalizing the next escalation of horror-supermaxing asylum seekers or firing "warning shots" or waterboarding suspected Coyotes or whatever other evil spews from Miller's cesspit mind, will we even pay attention to the separation of kids from their parents?
@HoarseWisperer 7/ This is how the grooming process works. Training supporters to cheer, defend and feel validated by ever greater cruelty, training them to blame the victims no matter what evil is perpetrated (not that Republicans need any help with that), ever more inhuman policies.
@HoarseWisperer 8/ Emotionally exhausting opponents, overwhelming their senses with so much horror and evil that they have to triage, focus on the latest and worst escalation, and, eventually succumb to a sense of powerlessness that makes it easier to just look away and pretend not to see.
@HoarseWisperer 8/ And, not least important, this is how the leadership cadre hardens its heart and steels itself to the descent into still greater depths of depravity. This is how they push through their own humanity en route to the end they sense but cannot yet admit even to themselves.
