Its a cult.

What you are trying to describe… is a cult.

These people are brainwashed fanatics, to the point of either intentionally or unintentionally, nearly/effectively or actually committing suicide, for/because of the cultic belief structure.

We saw this with COVID.

Thousands of people, live blogging or live streaming their own deaths, basically caused by their adherence to idiotic nonsense ideas, that they held with the level of conviction of a religious extremist, many of them literally to their last breath.

Its literally a death cult, being a MAGA-type conservative.

They don’t believe they exist in “reality”, as any one not in the cult would understand it.

They’ll drink the KoolAid, they’ll off themselves to go to the spaceship behind Hale-Bopp… because nothing can change their core beliefs.

Just because their method of effective/literal suicide is economic/political doesn’t make it not a literal death cult.

It really is not that conceptually difficult to understand the basics of how a tariff works.

You can explain it to a middle schooler, without numbers, and …

(well ok, if we’re talking about roughly year 2000 middle schoolers, not roughly 2025 tiktok addict brainrotted middle schoolers)…

… most of them would get it.

Just like how most of them could be taught that drinking poisoned KoolAid will kill you.

EDIT:

The BITE Model of Cults:

https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-download/

Just go checkoff each one of the subcomponents of each main component there, that you routinely see MAGA adherents/leaders being subjected to, or enforcing on other MAGA adherents/leaders.

I’m not even kind of joking, it’s literally a death cult.