Sarah Palin is really pissy that liberals are not kowtowing to Cheeto Hitler.

From the dumbest part of the internet, Sarah Palin's website: 

Unhinged! 2016 Presidential Candidate Says UNTHINKABLE About Trump 

Sadly, we have seen the liberal left become absolutely unhinged following Donald Trump’s election victory. (It's funny how she confuses the word "unhinged" with "patriotic.")

Celebrities have threatened to leave America. Riots have erupted across the country. Politicians have tried to delegitimize Trump’s victory. The media has blamed the election results on Russia. (And your point?)

It has been a mess. 

The list of liberals who have said outrageous things about Trump seems to grow by the hour. (Actually there are a number of conservatives on this list as well.)


Then Palin references this tweet from Martin O'Malley.

Now is not the time for reconciliation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer didn't reconcile with the Nazis. MLK didn't reconcile with the KKK. Now we fight pic.twitter.com/BoQNl0on1N

— Martin O'Malley (@MartinOMalley) January 15, 2017

Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Okay back to the bitching.

Embarrassing. 

Can’t we do a little better than that? (Yes we can, we are already organizing protests all over the country.)

Nothing Donald Trump has ever done is even remotely comparable to the Nazis. (Let's see, target one group of citizens as being the cause of all our problems, rallying white supremacists to follow him, having a private secret security force, attacking the press, using totalitarian language, yep nothing comparable to he Nazis.)


It’s foolish to even try to make the comparison. (Foolish = Patriotic.)

Martin O’Malley didn’t gain any traction in the 2016 race and statements like this are part of the reason why. 

No he lost because he was up against Hillary Clinton, the same Hillary Clinton that her candidate needed the Russian government and FBI's help to defeat.

You know after all of these years of arguing about preserving American values and standing up to authoritarianism you would think that Sarah Palin would be on the front line in fighting against Donald Trump, and his Russian puppeteer.

But instead, like many conservatives, she has allowed her partisanship to interfere with her patriotism.

Which of course is not surprising since that patriotism was completely false to begin with.

Taking a frightening tour of the Right Wing mindset.

I'm right because I say I'm right!

I received an interesting link the other day which led me to this rather disquieting article at Truthout:

 Robert Altemeyer, a Canadian psychologist, has done extensive testing to isolate and describe the traits of the authoritarian personality. His results are distilled in his book "The Authoritarians." He describes religious fundamentalists, the core of the right-wing Republican base, as follows: 

"They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites." 

There are tens of millions of Americans who, although personally lacking the self-confidence, ambition and leadership qualities of authoritarian dominators like Gingrich or Sarah Palin, nevertheless empower the latter to achieve their goals while finding psychological fulfillment in subordination to a cause. Altemeyer describes these persons as authoritarian followers. They are socially rigid, highly conventional and strongly intolerant personalities, who, absent any self-directed goals, seek achievement and satisfaction by losing themselves in a movement greater than themselves. One finds them overrepresented in reactionary political movements, fundamentalist sects and leader cults like scientology. They are the people who responded on cue when Bush's press secretary said after the 9/11 attacks that people had better "watch what they say;" or who approved of illegal surveillance because "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear;" or who, after months of news stories saying that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, nevertheless believed the weapons were found.

If you are anything like me you have probably spent many hours trying to understand just how ANYBODY gets sucked into trusting these obvious charlatans, and how seemingly lucid people allow themselves to be convinced to vote against  their self interests time and time again.

Apparently they are raised to put their faith in those who talk with a voice of authority, despite their obvious shortcoming, or who appear to have some access to information not readily available to the masses, despite no evidence to support their claims.

So what are the circumstances in place which create these "authoritarian personalities?"