Boy, if anyone wants to commit political suicide take notes from today’s MAGA party.

• Pow – make a deal not to shut down the government
• Pow – 3 months later, shut down the government
• Pow – former leader buried under an avalanche of civil and criminal charges
• Pow – back that leader to the hilt
• Pow – claim that current president committed impeachable offenses without any evidence or with disproved evidence
• Pow – ignore laws and start a kangaroo court impeachment process
• Pow – Representatives refuse to deal with real problems of women’s rights, abortions, mass shootings, poor people, concentration of wealth and income inequality

And that was just this week. What is amazing about all this is that there are Americans out there who are totally aware of all these problems and still back MAGA to the hilt. Certainly there are hundreds of elected officials across the country are so fearful of losing their position if they say anything against Trump that most in MAGA Party shuts up in fear of Trump.

Whether the MAGA cult followers are looped into the cult through self-delusion, fear, hate of the same people that the cult hates or simple laziness someday their cult hero will be dealt with in the way he deserves. At that point most of the cult members will either have dealt with the trauma of realizing that what they believed in was false or  they will have to deal with it.

Most of us at some point in our lives go through a personal assessment. Such assessments are often triggered by a personal trauma, such as finding out that a hero is really a zero – or finding that something you thought ordinary was truly extraordinary.

I bring this up after reading an awakening story by Robert Reich this week on his sub stack email. Reich as most know is height disadvantaged. Sadly, as often happens in this country those who are a bit different become targets of bullying. Reich had those problems. 

Because of this bullying the school Reich attended assigned him a type of bodyguard service to escort him to the restroom. Over time an older boy kind of stepped up to volunteer to help Reich. The young man was just a good kid who did good things like helping a youngster who was bullied. Reich knew him as Mickey.

As they grew, they parted ways. Reich lost track of his helper. From Robert Reich’s sub stack email: 

Years went by, and I grew into a teenager who no longer needed older boys to protect me from bullies. I lost track of Mickey.

It wasn’t until September of 1964, my freshman year in college, that I heard what had happened to him.

Early that summer, Mickey had traveled to Mississippi to register Black voters.

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Mickey — whose full name was Michael Schwerner — was among the first wave of volunteers to arrive in Mississippi.

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That night, after they paid their speeding ticket and left the jail, Price followed them in his police car, stopped them again, ordered them into his car, and took them down a deserted road, where he turned them over to a group of his fellow Ku Klux Klan members.

The group beat Mickey, Goodman, and Chaney with chains.

Then they murdered them. And buried their bodies in an earthen dam that was then under construction.

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When the news reached me that Mickey, who had protected me from childhood bullies, had been tortured and murdered by white supremacists — by violent bullies who would stop at nothing to prevent Black people from exercising their right to vote — something snapped inside me.

It was as if I got a new pair of eyes. I began to see everything differently.

When the news reached me that Mickey, who had protected me from childhood bullies, had been tortured and murdered by white supremacists — by violent bullies who would stop at nothing to prevent Black people from exercising their right to vote — something snapped inside me.

It was as if I got a new pair of eyes. I began to see everything differently.

There will be some cult followers that will never snap out of the pull of the cult, but at some point most will have an awakening moment. Will they react for the positive the way Robert Reich did? Or will they double down on the hate and the fear and the selfishness?