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IDIOT, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in
human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's
activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action,
but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in
everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and
opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes
conduct with a dead-line.
- Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
The more local definition of 'freeper' comes right wing verbal extremists who congregate mostly at a site FreeRep---ic.com and have certain delusions about the world not acceptable here at DU. We didn't invent the word 'freeper'- they invented it and used it themselves- but it's become generalized, perhaps mostly by DU, to a standard label for a right wing online blowhard who has not intentions for and is incompetent at actual dialogue. They disrupt and try to exploit and intend to sabotage, and they're unapologetic about it. They're Uebermenschen... (warranty void if/when user attempts to apply fantasy to reality). Watching them play among themselves, their common ground and behavior fits August Bebel's famous verdict on the ressentiment-driven social regressives (the anti-Semites) of his time perfectly: "the socialism of fools".
They're on the opposite side of the partisan argument of the age, which is the extent to which to enforce Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. Which is about 'equal protection', or nondiscrimination, i.e. there being no group of people that government systematically privileges or deprivileges. This is of course not the way our society is, and freepers are the psychological or material mercenaries and selfimportant guerrillas, 'patriots', fanatics, and agents of the classes and groups that are hereditarily privileged and vehemently resist the stripping of privilege that comes with equality. People fight atrociously viciously to retain privileges- when rights are lost, simple justice tends to restore them. Privileges can only be regained by proving exceptional merit of a group or class, and realistically no one who loses hereditary privileges ever has the provable merit (or luck) to regain them.
It used to be that if you were a minimally educated, in practice fairly stupid, straight white man in this country born into the working class or higher and pretending to Christianity and willing to kiss ass of higher status people grossly like yourself, you could have a pretty good life compared to almost all the women and all non-whites and most nonChristians and any people who happened to be gay. In fact, fealty to the top boss generally counted for more than competence- average competence threatened your intermediate higher-ups substantially in those days, and they'd kick you down- and that was the American social order and the way to advance in it from the colonial days into the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. The top of the hierarchy of white men bosses used to wage the occasional raid on other countries and plunder a bit; it was a common occurrence as a corporation and occasionally done by the federal government. Nowadays every element of this system of privilege and division of spoils is endangered. But the millions of people who do/did better in this faux/degraded/vulgarized colonialist-aristocratic system than a pseudomeritocratic one want the world to remain that way. It's a privilege system, and if Am. 14 Sec. 1 is fully and accurately enforced it is destroyed. They all talk 'freedom' and mean 'my privilege'. There are some freepers that are not whitebread white 'Christian' American males pursuing profitable 'business' and from the conservative sections of the country, but they're all easy to connect to benefiting from that class in some ways- collaborators, toadies, bedmates basically.
So you see every benighted 'thinking' and extirpated heresy and hatred and blasphemy on their side mustered that should have died out with the Huns and the Middle Ages, or with Jefferson Davis at the latest- bigotry, fascism, chauvinism, American Messianism, triumphalism, racism, colonialism, slavery, and the wierdest (yet banal) idolatries remaining on the planet. If it's soulless and unChristian, it will be what they endorse and desire under a banner of soul and Christianity. If it's oppressive, they'll call it Freedom. If it enables murder, they call it true religion. Like German neoNazis, they love Israelis and hate Judism. The more pagan and the more occultic the assertion, the more barbaric the emotion, the better they like it. As Nietzsche said, the reason Men behave like beasts is because it takes away the pain involved in being real Human Beings.
But it's actually quite typical for the losing side of a Constitutional argument to be almost willing to toss out the whole of it, and all of their integrity and commitment to civilization, in order to prevent the enforcement with integrity of a part they don't like.
That is what being a freeper means, as I understand it. The mental and spiritual barbarians who live among us and their fellow travelers.
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