Mr. Write's Page

Now and then, you get a peek at how the brain of a modern-day political conservative functions. You get a glimpse of how the mental gears mesh, how the thought processes unfold. The experience is always depressing.

Last week, while out shopping, I stopped for lunch at On the Border. Being a party of one, I was ushered to a small booth in the bar.

Sitting here and there around the bar were several other parties of one, all 50-ish white guys. One was chatting with the female bartender. Mostly, I was tuning everyone out, until the man got my attention.

“Did you hear?” he said to the girl. “Obama’s new house in Washington has a damn bunker built under it. A huge compound for illegals. Might be 20,000 of ’em camped out there.”

The girl replied matter-of-factly, but I couldn’t make out what she said. It came across as sort of a wah-wah-wah, like Charley Brown’s teacher in the Peanuts cartoons.

“They’re gonna expand it, so many are crossin’ the border,” the man said. “They’re on Obama’s payroll. He sends ’em to the anti-Trump riots to cause trouble.”

The girl gave another wah-wah-wah reply and departed to help another customer, whereupon the tirade ended.

I thought about the incident on the way home, and it seemed obvious that the man got his information from the right-wing propaganda machine.

The aim of the story he related was clear: to vilify immigrants, vilify anti-Trump protesters, and stick it to Obama, who is still the cartoon evildoer of the conservatives.

I didn’t think it was a Fox News story. It seemed a step too preposterous, even for Fox.

I mean, really. A bunker under a rented house in a ritzy Washington neighborhood? For 20,000 people? Wouldn’t the neighbors object?

Actually, it sounded more like the kind of caustic, over-the-top, conspiracy-theory crapola peddled on talk radio. Maybe from Alex Jones and Infowars.

So, when I got home, I went online and Googled “Compound under Obama house.”

Sure enough, there it was on the Infowars website:

SABOTAGE: OBAMA IS COMMANDING AN  ARMY OF 30,000 ANTI-TRUMP ACTIVISTS FROM HIS HOME 2 MILES FROM THE WHITE HOUSE

The only real fact in the story is that the Obama family rented a house in a D.C. neighborhood. Two miles from the White House? Probably. The rest is baseless nonsense, fabricated from thin air.

The story uses words and images designed to incite the easily incitable — “command center,” “army of activists,” “riots,” “bunker,” “shadow government,” “community organizers,” “global elite.” If your brain functions in the normal manner, you can easily see it as a spin job.

But the man at the bar fell for the story. In fact, he embellished it. And it was interesting to see how much of the message, and which parts, he got wrong.

The article called its fictional subjects “activists.” The man heard “illegals.”

They were described as an “army” under Obama’s command. The man took that to mean they are literally on the premises. Under the house. The idea of  plans to expand the bunker, he seems to have dreamed that up on his own.

Also interesting is that he remembered the number 20,000, which was in the text of the story, not the number 30,000 from the headline. Maybe he was trying to be, you know, conservative. Wouldn’t want to exaggerate or overstate things.

I didn’t hear the man mention the proximity of Obama’s house to that awful Islamic Center, but there’s a story online about that, too.

My point is, the man at the bar is a prime target of right-wing propaganda and a poster child for absorbing the intended message.

I don’t mean to imply that the man is villainous in any way. He probably thinks of himself as a good citizen. He may well be an honest, hard-working, church-going family man.

But, like legions of his fellow conservatives, he gets most of his information from sources that are, on purpose, not factual. Sources that present outright lies as truth.

The man is fed, and he believes, information that is misleading, self-serving, sometimes preposterous, and often easily proven wrong.

But he and his fellow righties are okay with that. They are neither deterred nor impressed by reality, logic, or facts. The truth is, they chose a side long ago, and that’s that.

At this point, they are well-conditioned and do not flinch. If an inconvenient truth slips into the conservative bubble and slaps them in the face, they simply dismiss it. They literally don’t believe it.

What the right-wing has done is cynical and diabolical. But you have to admire the genius of a brainwashing apparatus that has, in just a few decades, successfully rewired the synapses in the brains of millions of people. They’ve managed to train people to dismiss reality and believe the unbelievable.

People like the man at the bar.

This is the Obama family’s new home in Washington’s ritzy Kalorama neighborhood. It’s a rental, nine bedrooms, 8,200 square feet. Among their new neighbors: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Secretary of State/oil magnate Rex Tillerson.