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Thank you for posting this thread. It led to an epiphany. First, a little background. I have been active on this site for quite some time, and I’ve been a birther for a very long time. As such, I made a lot of online friends who are active in the FR birther community. Some have been pretty good friends: fun, funny, witty, and just overall enjoyable people to know. Others were just brothers-in-arms, but as such they were solid compatriots and really decent people.

But of course I’m speaking about these people in the pre-SADO-Not-The-Mother-Theory [SNTMT] days. One by one, as my good friends embraced this theory, they changed. They went from friendly, collegial and engaging people to hostile, vicious and aggressively uncivil people. They turned on old friends on a dime, and attacked them w abusive posts of the type formerly not even allowed on FR. The rest (of the SNTNT subscribers) looked on w approval. All because one nonbeliever or another questioned their theory.

So I asked myself, how can a person’s personality change so much? What can take a formerly decent, pleasant individual and turn him/her into a rabid attack dog?

What did it in this case is what amounts to ‘birther enlightenment’. They discovered ‘the truth’. A truth known only on FR—it has not one single proponent on the Net’s preeminent birther site, BirtherReport/ObamaReleaseYourRecords. Not one. The only place on the entire Net where this truth has a toehold/even-a-very-limited-following is on FR.

Now here’s the really interesting part. Once a person sees the light/embraces this particular truth, they turn vicious. It doesn’t matter how long they may have known a good, solid conservative, or how friendly they were w that person in the past. If that person fails to embrace the SNTMT, they become The Enemy. They are brutally and very personally attacked. What’s even more interesting is this: no matter how vile and protracted the attack, none of that person’s former friends ever, not once, intervenes. I.e.: no one [who embraces SNTMT, anyway] says, ‘Hey, that is a good conservative and a long-time Freeper. How about lightening up a little on the personal stuff?’

Rather, once a person knows the real birther-truth, no personal attack on a nonbeliever is over the top. The goal is to destroy the nonbeliever, and to that ends any degree of nastiness and even dishonesty is condoned.

So I asked myself, what other truth has this effect on its believers? I couldn’t think of any. Normally, when a person discovers a great truth—such as that Jesus really is the Lord and Savior—they become nicer, not meaner. They care more for their friends, not less. Disloyalty and abusive behavior don’t replace kindness and caring.

So what is it that is so unique about the SNTMT that causes such a vicious reaction in its proponents? Why does this truth singularly convert warmth and friendship into hatred and abuse?

The truth may be found in a post written by FN. Here it is the revelatory part:

[me] “ ‘...You may disagree w Edge, but a more staunch defender of the Constitution you will not find. Just a little something to think about, when the rhetoric turns heated.’

[FN] Deserves an answer...I’ll remind you I am an Australian. What I have seen so far is that your precious constitution hasn’t been able to save you from your current situation. The truth might.”

Notice the pejorative toward our Constitution. It’s ‘precious’ in a demeaning sense, and it hasn’t ‘saved’ us from our current situation/crisis. But the truth might.

And there it is in a nutshell. To the proponents of birther-enlightenment, what they have discovered trumps even the US Constitution. It rises to such a level of criticality, it may end up saving us as a nation, as opposed to the Constitution which has failed.

Obviously any truth of this magnitude is going to trump all else: friendship, kindness, decency, you name it. The truth becomes everything. Once you come to the place where the truth (re: Barry/Barack’s parents) supercedes even the US Constitution, of course you have to browbeat, attack and destroy anything that gets in the way. The survival of the nation is at stake, and only true believers can save it. No amount of collateral damage is too high a price to pay. Thus former friends do indeed become The Enemy, and no kind or degree of personal attack, no matter how dishonest or vile, is over the top. This is the real truth of SNTMT. Nothing less explains it. Period.