About fifty years ago, Erving Goffman published an article called, “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure.”
Goffman took a close look at confidence (con) men and how they would manipulate their ‘marks’.
Lets take our preconceived ideas on what we are and what the Republicans are and set them aside.
A con man is someone who attempts to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using a combination of the victim's credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed.
A mark is someone that is targeted by a con man be it money, property or soemthing else the con man values.
We ar ethe marks and the Republicans with few exceptions are the con men.
Con men allow and help the ‘marks’ to ginned up about an investment or and idea. Various stages are set up wot win the marks confidence. Sure the mark is allowed a few wins to gin up confidence even more. Then the hammer falls and the mark is out their investment. In our case though we are slowly being drained of our resources - our emotions and willingness to fight the deep state.
The thing that is relevant to my article today, is what happened once the con men disappeared or in our case do not. We are now in the cooler phase of the deep state con. Coolers are the ones left behind that direct the marks anger and help the marks deal with their loss.
The con men did not disappear in our case. The con man has left behind a host operators that is making us the ‘mark’ comfortable and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions and console us. An attempt is made to define the situation for the ‘mark’ in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. This is where the Republicans have stated time and time and time again we don’t have control of the House, the senate the White House. Their is always a reason they cannot take down the deep state, the spending the illegal activity.
Its time we face facts. The Republicans are our coolers and we are the marks. I am going to probably make some that read this very angry, but frankly we must take our rose colored glasses off For 5+ years now we have seen and heard about the deep state from the Republicans, For 5+ years NOTHING has substantive has been done to even start to punish the deep state.
We had Trump and his bloviating, in reality he did minimal things to keep us in his game. Things like the wall, meanwhile he kept deep state people on his admin for far too long - Comey, Fauci, Birx, even his VP pick Pence was a rouse. He hired new ones like Bob Barr, Chris Wray and gave them enourmous un checked power and did nothing when they used it.
The media and various media and political personalities are in on this also in my opionion. Fox News invites the like of Jim Jordan, Lindsay Graham and others on to talk about the corruption and how they are working on it. Hannity, Levin, Waters, Ingraham and others are more than happy to have these con men on and be their operators directing our outrage just enough to keep things going but never enough to tip the scale. If it gets close the operators start backing off to redirect our anger. Hannity is the expert at this in this cabal of operators. For years we heard that justice was just aruond the corner for these people, yet to this very day nothing.
These people have been working on “it” for 5+ years, for 5+ years they have lead us down a yellow brick road and many of us happily followed singing along. We are no closer today to holdin people accountable than we were 5 years ago.
The latest con is the Jordan committee hearing. Jordan has been on his rampage for over 5 yers and NOTHING substantial has been done by him or that committe to bring people to justice.
Is Trump part of the con game? Well I am beginning to think so. What else would explain his behaviour throughout his term in office where OBVIOUS deep state players were hired and allowed to run rampantly doing their dirty work, while he was bloviating to us at rallies and pressers? He did not stop spending despite all his talk, then when he signed the bills he did not have this or that in the House or Senate, and of course the deep state had to be funded and shutting it down was not an option,m so he caved even while talking the talk. We excepted his excuses, his reasoning - just like good marks do, we justify getting taken advantage of.
What can us marks do? 1) stop believing the operators, 2) call the operators out - get on their pages Facebook, Twitter or what is now X and call them out. Make the operators uncomfortable. 3) stop listening to the operators media personalities. Or if you insist - again get on their ocial media pages and call them out.
We must stop being compliant marks. Demand that the people we elect hold EVERYBODY accountable and do so publiclly and with letters and emails. Tell others to quit being compliant marks. The first step in solving a problem is to admiot you have a probelm - WE HAVE A PROBLEM and it is US.
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