Thread by @EdOverbeek

If you need proof the GOP’s gaslighting doesn’t start and end with Donald Trump, just watch the entire party try to pin mass shootings on anything besides easy access to assault weapons.

The GOP keeps making it easier to get assault weapons.

When their policies kill, they tell ridiculous lies. It’s about school prayer, or video games, or *not enough guns*.

Abusers, gaslighting their victims.
rantt.com/brett-kavanaug…

And they aren’t just lying about what drives our mass shooting epidemic. They’re telling blatant, transparent, absurd lies. We’ve just gotten used to hearing them. Trump lies like this about everything, but his party was post-truth before him.

Political scientists like @jtlevy have pointed out the significance of hearing such bald-faced, unbelievable lies over and over from politicians. It’s authoritarian behavior.
niskanencenter.org/blog/authorita…

Trump took this kind of lying to another level by lying about things like crowd size or the weather. But his party’s been telling this kind of lie for years, on issues like gun control, climate change, and social spending. Authoritarian propaganda with a focus.

Those bald-faced lies were tolerated, accepted and repeated by the press. Normalized. And eventually, the GOP’s habit of blatant lying about some things led to a president* who blatantly lies about everything.

Bald-faced pro-oligarchy lies from politicians like Paul Ryan are just one strain of RW gaslighting. The Christian Right also paved the way for a post-truth, authoritarian politician like Trump.

“You cannot understand [RW radicalization] apart from the theocratic element and the relationship between fundamentalist psychology and political authoritarianism.” - @C_Stroop
cstroop.com/2017/02/24/chr…

@C_Stroop White Christian supremacists and plutocrats have been natural bedfellows since long before the Council for National Policy - just google Ben Pitchfork Tillman. And their efforts reinforce each other in no small part thanks to each camp’s attack on the truth.

@C_Stroop These attacks on the truth would stand out more to the average citizen if the mainstream media didn’t, by and large, accept the plutocratic ones and ignore the theocratic ones.