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The picture is much clearer when you accept that they are never jokes.

"They're trolling" is simply a juvenile defense that provides the cult and its members with plausible deniability.

The world might be slightly better off if we'd all taken them seriously from the start, but taking clowns and the accompanying circus seriously is unintuitive to most.

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Right, it's the same strategy as when an animal marks territory, seeing if the other animals will resist. They are marking the constitution, many stable norms, the idea that good faith can be assumed, the idea that courts will be obeyed, etc.

Meanwhile the US now has a collapse of due process, concentration camps on domestic soil and abroad, many officials and family members who are suddenly billions of dollars richer, crony firms that are billions richer, and a docile and captive congress that seems unwilling to stop any of it.

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