Watching what is going on in MAGA land regarding the "Epstein Files", reminds me of what it is like to be in the thrall of a dictator/authoritarian. There is a lesson here. Towing the party line can result in mental whiplash, requiring all loyalists to be very agile and up-to-date. The mental and verbal agility required of followers of a wannabe King (dictator, etc) to survive in a regime is sometimes jaw-dropping. Three days ago, there was an Epstein file (a little black book) of his customers of pedophilia. There was a conspiracy to kill him to keep it under wraps. He didn't commit suicide; he was killed...and the FBI has the keys to the drawer where the evidence is kept." Today, per Trump," there was no list, nothing to see here; go on pay attention to other things like how he is getting rid of undocumented brown murderers and rapists. Amid a weekend, even some Epstein conspiracy theory backers heard Trump's call: "nothing to see here, no list, so shut up." And in a whiplash weekend, they started echoing the Trump line": no list, move on".
My late husband of over 50 years was a refugee from a communist dictatorship of Yugoslavia and had learned to keep on his toes to be successful and told me about an eye-opening event that illustrated this. I wrote this in a prior post last fall. Here is what happened when my late husband, Dr. Mike Muftic, was a medical student in Zagreb, then Yugoslavia, and at that time led by dictator Comrade Josip Broz Tito. The Tito regime had been in power for nearly ten years. It was a communist regime allegedly dedicated to all people being economically equal, a revolt from the time of the King and privileged classes. Milovan Djilas, a comrade-in-arms and close friend of Comrade Tito, was considered the ideological guru of the regime and, at one time, Tito's potential successor. He was a dedicated believer in Marxist ideology in its purest form. To him, the dictatorship of the proletariat meant that the workers were in charge, not the apparatchiks or bureaucrats. He had become appalled at fellow high-ranking government officials and overbearing government administrators who were becoming the new privileged lords, chauffeured in Mercedes-driven cars, with better housing, and vacationing at seaside resorts on the government's dime. Djilas wrote a book, "The New Class," to express his criticism of the new class. Mike arrived for the class at medical school as the communist party commissar in charge of keeping the faith, as medical school students were praising Djilas' book and righteously criticizing the privileged class. In response, however, Comrade Tito was not pleased, seeing it as a threat to his power since he relied on the support of those he favored and to whom he gave employment and perks, the new class, and issued a warning. The next morning, the same communist party commissar was holding forth, repeating Tito's criticism and telling the crowd of students around him how terrible Djilas was. It was heresy, and this was and is the party line the students had to repeat: Djilas was wrong. Failure to recite the party line could lead to loss of future desired hospital appointments, loss of preferred professors, or worse. Djilas spent years in prison. To get ahead, you had to repeat the party line in both public and private settings, as there were loyalists everywhere who would report you to their superiors.
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