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Something I've been thinking about the past few days is how I've watched people in my life manipulated by pundits and people in power since middle school. Q is what you get from a lifetime of listening to people like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck.
Conservatism, from my experience with it growing up, is an ideology centered around manipulating people's fear and their faith. If you can get someone to conflate a political platform with Christianity or if you can leverage someone's insecurities against them, you have power.
A lot of what I'm seeing from my friends on the left is "I want the quality of life to be better for people who are struggling." And a lot of what I'm seeing from my friends on the right is "I'm afraid of losing my liberties." That's telling to me.
That's not to say that there aren't people driven by fear on the left or aren't people driven by the desire to improve quality of life on the right. It's only to bring up that the language I see used by so many people on the right is packed with fear, not progress.
When I look at the people who stormed the Capitol last week, I see a lot of things, but I primarily see a group of people motivated by their own fear and manipulated into being afraid.
Their distrust of institutions has been manipulated over and over and over again by, ironically, distrustful individuals who are part of the institution.
Anyway, how do we eliminate the fear and shed light on the manipulation? That's what I'm asking myself today.
