I made it all the way through Reza but I could not get through the Jim Bakker video. That disgusted and angered me on a level that made me want to smash things.

Here's what I would say to Reza...

The cult of Trump has been coming for years. It has been years in the making. It did not happen overnight and did not occur just because the Democrats ran the worst possible candidate they could have run in Hillary Clinton in 2016. That was obviously a major contributing factor but something like this takes planning and strategy and it could have been somebody other than Trump...Trump just ended up the benefactor of a lot of mistakes and heavy duty propaganda and basically...hardcore brainwashing.

One of the key methods to indoctrinate a person into a cult and keep them in it is the control of information they receive. Unfortunately there has been a decades long assault on Right Wing voters that has brutally wiped out their ability to discern between facts, truth, and beliefs.

This is no question, cult brainwashing. Through the invention of "conservative media" -- FOX News, Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, "conservative" newspapers -- the entire thrust of that has been to whittle down until it is gone the consumers of these media outlets ability to discern between facts, truth, and belief and as it has become more effective...to remove these people from all facts and truth and feed them pure propaganda.

Turn on FOX news during the Trump presidency and it is literally insane how far removed from what is happening in the world their shows are. That's not an accident. Sadly, the office of the president now functions as the center of a misinformation system that works only to isolate the cult.

This is what Donald Trump's "Fake News" and "the media is the enemy of the people" is all about. He did not invent this nonsense but he has turned the volume up on it to 11 so his "followers" can hear nothing else.

They began with this decades ago now with white evangelicals and the reason why is sadly because these people are used to, in fact fully indoctrinated already, the idea that their "beliefs" are most important and all facts be damned.

So, they were already prepped and ready to accept somebody like Trump, who is working from the idea that these people are programmed to follow "beliefs" before facts and truth.

In other words, guys like Karl Rove knew long ago you could lock these people down as voters through their susceptibility to follow "beliefs" before facts. Rove did not take it to the extreme Trump takes it to but this fully explains how and why these "Christians" will ignore the facts and truth before their eyes to instead follow blindly and "believe" in Donald Trump.

Yes, it seems utterly insane that a Christian would believe that Donald Trump is part of god's plan...who knows what sort of god that would be...but they can do it because to a person of faith "beliefs" (meaning things that can't be proven but make them feel good to believe) are a very important part of who they are.

So, it is not hard for them to "choose to believe" Trump and the nonsense on FOX News over cleanly and clearly presented facts. So, this explains the gigantic "white evangelical" vote. Also, I won't deny that part of this vote is about race but I think more to the point...these voters are "choosing to believe" Trump because they have also chosen to ignore facts and truth.

I mean in order to back Trump there is mountains of evidence you need to "choose not to believe" in order to actually vote for him...particularly if you claim to be of the Christian faith. White evangelicals were particularly ready to ignore facts and truth and so they, long before Trump ran, were already in the "cult" that was being created. I don't say this to insult them...it is just a sad fact.

Here's a key fact to understand, the GOP wants to kill off the law that prohibits churches from being able to endorse political candidates, if a nonprofit organization does this they lose their nonprofit status and the IRS can come after you to collect taxes. Of course we know religious leaders, Kevin posted the videos, violate this law all the time and tell their flock stupid and insane shit like "I had dream that Donald Trump was sitting at the right hand of god in heaven!" and sure it is easy to say "Who would listen to nonsense like that?" but the answer is...people in the cult.

Trump speaks like a cult leader. He uses phrases over and over and over that are all about insulating his "followers" from information from the outside world while at the same time, and his staff directly has admitted this, providing all kinds of false information to the press.

This is Cult 101.

"Fake news", "the media is the enemy of the people", "no collusion" are all repeated again and again and again. All of these phrases are specifically designed to push the "followers" to shut themselves off from what is really going on.

And it works.

Just look at the results. People in this country are ending relationships with friends and family over support of or not supporting this corrupt president. This is how cults operate. They want you to shut out family and friends that might point out to you that what you are hearing from the cult leaders is absolute nonsense.

This is why I do not believe we should allow Trump supporters to isolate themselves from those of us that do not support Trump. If these people have any connection to you at all and value you at all in their lives there exists a chance they might listen to you. Don't let them slip away into the "cult of Trump."

Marc might not be reading a goddamn thing I say but I'll keep reaching out to him.

All these years of Republicans pushing conspiracy theories about the Clintons has also contributed greatly to creating this cult. The Clintons have become a trigger word for those that have been inducted into the cult.

Look, I think the Clintons totally suck but mainly because they pass themselves off as "centrist Democrats" when what they really are...particularly Hillary...are Republicans. She has always been at her core a Republican and all the Clintons did was pull the Democrats way over to the right. If you look at where this has taken us and how their philosophy influenced the Democrats...right through to Obama...it did us absolutely no favors and you could say, rightly so, that the Clintons are in a big way responsible for gifting us Donald Trump.

It is kind of darkly funny that if these people that voted for Trump really wanted a conservative Republican to be president they should have voted for Hillary Clinton...but thanks to years of pushing stuff like Whitewater, Benghazi, the Clintons supposedly paying to murder people, crap about the Clinton Foundation (when hilariously the Trump Foundation is in a load of hot water for actually doing all the things the Clinton Foundation was accused of doing), and the idiotic Uranium One story...just to name few...well, you just say the word Clinton and these people start screaming "Lock her up!" when it is Trump that has actually lived a life of crime.

So, all the cult programming has worked and we end up with Donald Trump as president. A man that has no values, no morals, no loyalty to anybody or anything except putting money in his own wallet.

We have never had a president that has cared so little for the country he is president of and the truth is...we could only end up with a guy like this in the White House if you spent years building a cult that would follow him.