Like every other person on this planet, you undoubtedly have RRR’s (rabidly right-wing relatives) and friends or acquaintances of the same stripe. If you pay attention to their behavior, you will see certain patterns, certain earmarks that will enable you to spot the same traits in other people — which might spare you the effort of trying to get involved in any kind of fruitful discussion with them. As it happens, I recently saw these attitudes demonstrated in grand fashion by an RRR of my own.

First, indulge me in a bit of backstory. For the past three years, my wife and I have been serving as volunteer teachers in several countries (most recently in India). To keep loved ones abreast of our activities, we started sending out a brief monthly newsletter. At the end of our message for November 2024 was this little paragraph:

Meanwhile, we’ve been sickened to learn that American voters have wholeheartedly embraced authoritarianism and demagoguery. We, of course, never will. We’ll continue to believe in democracy, justice, integrity, fairness, equality, decency, civility, compassion, and other such antiquated values.

It was no more than an hour after we dispatched our bulletin that I received this reply from the RRR in question:

Dennis, while we enjoy keeping up with you guys through your e-mails, I have no interest in reading your political nonsense. I can get that kind of “garbage” the same place you do. So, please remove me from your e- mail list.

To which I responded:

As you wish. In saner times, I might have been taken aback by anyone characterizing a commitment to the most constructive and positive of social dynamics as “political nonsense” and “garbage”. But I have long since lost any capacity for shock.

And he promptly dashed off a response to my response, which we’ll get to in a moment. But notice that even the first very brief comment is already packed with dead giveaways that he’d been gorging at the Fox teat. In this statement and its sequel, he displayed virtually all of the behavioral bling sported by the MAGA Cult. Let’s look briefly at these tendencies.

1. Reactionsim

It was once common to refer to right-wingers as reactionaries, but that term seems to have fallen out of vogue now. There’s no reason it should, because it’s more accurate than ever. They always feel obligated to react to everything, and quite often the reaction they favor is ginned-up anger or at least faux outrage — hence the thriving of Fox “News”, talk radio, etc. , which work around the clock to get fans riled up about anything they possibly can — as long as the ratings and the profits get pumped up. Conditioned by this toxic ecosphere, members of the faithful flock are utterly unable to just let anything go.

2. Confrontation

Conflict is one of the most vital food groups for right-wingers. They absolutely must have somebody to fight with, or at least against, at all times. And if they don’t see a foe handy, they’ll try to manufacture one through confrontation. This RRR could have simply stated he did not want to receive the emails anymore, without giving a reason. For that matter, he could have simply marked one as spam; he would not have seen any more of them, and I never would have been the wiser. But nope. He felt that he must, absolutely must, make an issue of it, a statement of some kind, an in-your-face proclamation. And furthermore, that he must try to ruffle my feathers by branding my words as “nonsense” and “garbage”.

3. Egocentrism and Entitlement

There was no way, of course, he could have kept his reactionism to himself. He felt the world is entitled to know his feelings. And, I gather, he thought perhaps he could affect the content of future newsletters by making his feelings known. It’s all about them. Everything is always all about them. Naturally, this carries with it a sense of unbridled entitlement. Republicans believe they have a God-given right to be in power, to win every election — and when they don’t, it must be because they were cheated somehow. How else to explain their not getting what they richly and irrefutably deserve? They want to outlaw same-sex marriage, abortion, and “wokeism”. Why? Because they don’t approve. Case closed.

The defense mounted by the Felon-In-Chief against his criminal charges was not so much that he didn’t commit the offenses as much as that he was entitled to. He sues newspapers and pollsters for publishing polls that show him behind — because after all, he’s entitled to always be leading. Right-wing outlets like PragerU sue social media platforms for subjecting them to the same community standards as mere mortals.

4. Closed-Mindedness

Let me point out that this was the first time in the whole three years that one of our newsletters had said anything even remotely political. But this one brief passage was too much for him. He doesn’t want to hear anything that might cause the slightest wrinkle in his rigid worldview. And he’s hardly unique in that regard. In fact, as we saw in the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, indoctrination is dependent on saturation with a limited range of homogeneous input — and any deviation from that can disrupt the indoctrination. Right-wingers try to seal out all disruption because they are addicted to the indoctrination.

5. Domineering/ Overbearing

Not only do right-wingers feel the urgency to confront, they feel the urgency to believe they have “won”, that they are always on top and in command. Republicans in office have mostly one priority, and indeed one objective: to acquire, maintain, and extend, power — and to rub it in the faces of people who don’t. All other pursuits are subservient to this prime directive. My RRR not only decided he didn’t want to receive the newsletter anymore, he also insisted in his followup that ” I WILL NOT read or respond to anything else on the subject.” It’s always vital for them to believe they’ve had the “last word”. (Exactly the same thing happened with a “friend” years ago, as I mentioned in the piece on the Culture Of Confrontation.)

6. Selective Subjectivism

In his retort to my response, he wrote “I would not expect to be accused of embracing authoritarianism and demagoguery… especially by a member of my own family.” As if it was just a matter of me making an opinionated accusation, and the words have no meaning except what someone chooses to assign them. In fact, they have rather precise dictionary definitions; and the Felon-In-Chief embodies them to a T. There’s absolutely zero room for equivocation on that point. For example, after he lost the 2020 election, he proclaimed on Truth Social:

A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude [i.e., the electoral defeat of poor little him] allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.

Not merely suspension of the Constitution. Termination. For his benefit. How much more clear-cut and blatant does it need to be?

In general, right-wingers have the attitude that definitions — and facts — are entirely negotiable; and that you can completely alter or negate them with strong enough beliefs. But this applies, of course, only when it’s to their advantage. At other times (often when subjectivity actually is in order), they insist that TRUTH is etched in stone. Those, for example, who are fundamentalists are immovably convinced that there is only one way to interpret certain biblical passages — namely their own.

7. Straw Man/ Oversimplification

He also indicated he was surprised that I “accused” him of not believing in democracy. justice, etc. Well, that should come as a surprise, because I said no such thing. What I said was that I do believe in such things. But I did strongly suggest — and will explicitly state — that the Felon-In-Chief does not believe in such things, but in fact represents the exact antithesis. And therefore anyone who supports him is supporting the exact antithesis — regardless of what they may “believe in”. A few years ago, this same RRR called some of my statements “communist propaganda”; and he’s hardly the only one to use that epithet. The straw man is the constant companion of the right-winger.

8. Presumption

He has no clue, of course, about where I get my “garbage” that contradicts his beliefs. But he seems to know he does. And he’s probably thinking CNN, since that’s been the favorite whipping boy of the Right-Wing loony fringe for the past few years. (In fact, I have not watched CNN, nor any other network broadcast in literally decades, except for the occasional snippets I watch in doing research. And I probably watch more from Fox than CNN.) This is more than just a guess; a few years ago, this same RRR suggested that I’m indoctrinated by NPR (which likewise I rarely listened to), because at that time that was the favorite media villain du jour among wingers.

9. Projection

The relative’s last comeback also included the observation that “I realize that sanity went out the window January 20, 2017”. Which is an astoundingly accurate observation, but based on contextual clues, I’m going to hazard a guess that it was a Freudian slip, and he really meant to say 2021. Because that would be much more in line with the obligatory right-wing practice of turning reality upside-down: the truth is a lie and the lies are the truth, good is bad and bad is good, insane is normal and normal is insane. The utter worship and apotheosis of a perennial con man narcissist who lies for sport, openly vows to use government power to settle personal grudges, couldn’t utter a coherent thought if his fortune depended on it, has a criminal record, has absolutely no knowledge of government and zero interest in learning, and has never done anything that didn’t benefit him? Perfectly normal and healthy. The election of an ethnically mixed female vice president? Absolutely bonkers!

Okay, okay, before someone launches the mandaotry parade of whataboutisms, let me acknowledge that, yes indeed, these traits can be exhibited at times by individuals who are not right-wing extremists. But wile normal people display them only on occasion, they are for right-wingers as routine as breathing and farting.

I guarantee that you’ll see these badges flashed all over the place if you tune in to the words and actions of right-wing fanatics. Chances are you’ll be amazed by how frequently and distinctly they give themselves away.