I like Twitter. It gives me short breaking news items 20 minutes before the Times publishes the full story.
Some days, like today, everyone I follow has picked up on and has something to say about one piece of news. Today*, it’s Sam Alito’s expensive fishing trip, in no way disconnected from some of his votes on the bench in support of his fishing pal, ultra-richo Paul Singer.
But there has been one consistent theme every day for the past year or so: MAGA GOP officials and Christian religious leaders (often “youth pastors”) arrested/convicted of awful sex crimes, predominantly pedophilia. Every day on Twitter, I see at least two or three mug shots.
So let’s bring up the subject of “projection.”
The pathology of projection as defined in my psychiatric dictionary:
In psychiatry, the process of throwing out upon another the ideas or impulses that belong to oneself…The expression implies that what is cast upon another is considered undesirable to the one who projects.
There was a time when projected accusations of behavior as awful and criminal as pedophilia were rare and would have been considered a sign of what used to be called mental illness.
Now, we have what seems like an entire major political party casting the word “pedophilia” upon opponents. It seems to be almost reflexive, as if in a secret MAGA GOP manual there’s a bullet point detailing how to use the word pedophilia to smear anybody you fear.
If flinging out the word “pedophilia” is not a cloaked confession of their own pathology — I realize I’m giving the MAGA GOP a lot of wiggle room here but honestly I can’t imagine all of ’em are pedophiles — then they’re using it as a learned political technique.
Where did they learn it? From Putin.
But if you spend a little time per day on Twitter, you’ll see that these officials of the MAGA GOP and associated religious figures are actual pedophiles. Not victims of projection; they are the real bad deal.
So I guess this, too, is where the MAGA GOP has learned about pedophilia. From their own ranks.
*Update: Alito and fish came before the Democrats on the Jim Jordan’s (see above, re pedophilia) House Judiciary Committee, uh, questioned John Durham about his near-eternal investigations. Now video of Adam Schiff, et al., including my own Congressman Jerry Nadler, sort of wrecking Durham is dominating my Twitter feed.