Yeah, it is amazing that I understand them instead of merely dismissing them all as inbred racists.
They're not being dismissed as much as being held accountable. The "political correctness" they've been trained to complain about is exactly why they haven't been held accountable until we're up to our necks in a diseased GOP. We softies on the left insist on respect for people but not necessarily for beliefs, but we've been too stupid thus far to notice that this policy is useless in dealing with people who believe they
are their beliefs. It might be too late, though, to try to fix our mistake now, not that we'd have a clue how to fix it anyway. And now we're all flying by the seat of our pants while the right wing horde blames everyone besides themselves and actively support (if not commit) the most heinous acts on the most vulnerable human beings, including themselves. There is no other direction to go with this now. The closed, infantile, stunted ideology they worship has a life of its own now. The US is a toddler with a gun because of that very ideology being unleashed on secular society through not questioning it, not challenging the pedestal it sits on.
And it's not even the particular flavor of the religious ideology that I accuse, but the mechanisms that apply to any cult or social dominance ideology: submission to unquestioned authority of one or few over everyone else, emphasis on conformity, value of the group identity over humanity as a whole, discouraging or punishing doubt and questioning, etc. Fine if it's only a small fraction of the world to think this way, but when large numbers operate under such a stupid and inhumane framework, why should any of us be surprised?
I'm not saying I have a useful answer for how to hold each other accountable for examining our beliefs going forward, much less for how to stop the current right wing disease now that it's jumped the secular barrier completely. I do know that we have tools for mitigating the effects of bad ideas. We still have a public school system that has the capacity to teach these tools. We have advanced technologies and a massive virtual world of information and communication that make these tools widely available. But the right wing monster simply turns phrases like "critical thinking skills" into demons that the base will fear.
We're held captive by a dangerous infant propped up by ideological corruption, all because so many of us were indoctrinated to follow an authority and avoid developing our own conscience.