Strangers in a Really Strange Land

We are goose-stepping toward a totalitarian state and nobody sane seems to know how to stop it. What happened to America?

What happened to the “land of the free and home of the brave”?

How can you say you love freedom and vote for fascism? How can you call yourself brave if you fear going out for groceries without lethal weapons?

We live in a separate mental universe from half of our countrymen, superimposed over the same physical landscape. While we are trying to hold onto our own reality — that of reason, facts, science and verifiable truths — they are savagely ripping it away from us, supplanting it with their own dark medieval world of superstition, ignorance, delusion, gratuitous cruelty, vengeance and religious fanaticism.

Do you recognize the country you grew up in? Do you recognize your fellow citizens wearing swastikas and waving confederate flags, cheering and applauding treason, torture, murder, Nazi ideology — and the violent insurrectionists who sacked our own nation’s capital?

Does it chill your blood to hear campaign promises of ‘mass deportation camps’ and ‘crushing the existence’ of people of your own religion, ethnic group, or political party? That immigrants have ‘poisoned the blood’ of our country? That what we need is a “strongman” as president?

Does it break your heart to hear the Republican candidate for president, lovingly praising the world’s worst tyrants, executioners, and bloody butchers — Putin, Kim, Erdogan, Pinochet, Duterte and others — and using Hitler’s words to demonize people seeking asylum?

And worse, all this met with glee, wild cheers and excited applause from his demented cultists.

Is this my beautiful country? Is this AMERICA? HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Where did all these god-awful, bleating, whining, shrieking, mindless sheep come from? Damage from drugs, drinking or toxic chemicals? Leaky Superfund sites? Lead paint?

Or maybe just decades of billionaire-funded, far-right propaganda on AM radio, cable TV and innumerable dark corners online.

Propaganda works. Worked in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia, Communist China/North Korea … and now, the America we once knew is being devoured by it.

Starting in the 1970s, Rush Limbaugh made billions simply by stroking the egos of weak men searching for someone to blame for their failure to achieve the greatness they were sure they deserved, by way of being born white men in America.

Limbaugh’s success spawned a a thriving industry of radio/cable/online copycats, all over America—the voices of thousands of fanatics, grifters, hysterics and political posturers, pouring their poison into America’s ears while we sleepwalked into a new era where truth is just a mouth sound devoid of meaning or relevance.

The Republican Party, starting in the Reagan era, began to model the Soviet Party apparatus, Pravda and state TV. The loudest brayers of “freedom,” Republican members of Congress, regularly appear on actual Russian state TV — Putin’s little puppets — to bash America. And then of course came Fox, Newsmax, OAN, the Drudge Report, Breitbart… the ocean of right-wing sewage that is drowning us today.

“...she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. ‘The human sound-track’ he nicknamed her in his own mind.”
— George Orwell, 1984

Orwell must be either laughing or crying, somewhere, to see his prophecy play out so precisely in what was once, if not an actual ‘beacon of democracy,’ at least a stable, reasonably free and functional country.

When people around the world hear the term “American man” these days, what do you think comes to mind? Not brave, or smart, and certainly not free— but enslaved by that peculiarly American mental illness, the gun fetish.

What do you most often read about mass murderers? The lone wolves, paranoid, grievance-soaked, marinated-in-self-pity and impotence and often with racist, illiterate “manifestos.” Always a lonely, raging loser with a grudge, who has no life nor identity but as a worshiper of machines that kill. Who regularly takes it all out on a crowd of defenseless people, often small children. And the gun cult then makes of these sacks of human waste — heroes.

It’s hard to fathom exactly what happened to these men, so often incels, that they became entirely obsessed with gun worship, often complemented by dimwitted, swaggering machismo and misogyny. But nothing seems to excite a Republican legislator more than finding new ways to arm and enable the disturbed, delusional, obsessed and irrationally outraged.

And nowhere is the sexually kinky component of it all more apparent than in the subconsciously homo-erotic-cartoon worship of the MAGA subculture.

It would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic. And if they were not in the process of forcibly separating you from your Constitutional, and human, rights — and sometimes, your life.

Make no mistake, these people are dangerous — and getting more so by the day, as they gain political power and increasingly engage in attacks on American institutions, death threats and vicious physical assaults on individuals or groups they perceive as “enemies.”

“Reasonable” Republicans like New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu say America has a problem with political violence “on both sides of the aisle.” That isn’t true. America has a problem with political violence against Democrats.

The proof lies in what unreasonable Republicans have been saying since Paul Pelosi, 82, got his skull cracked at 2:30 a.m. Friday morning by a hammer-wielding QAnon enthusiast shouting, “Where is Nancy?” Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a photograph of a hammer and a pair of underwear—an early news report, since corrected, said the attacker was stripped to his underwear—captioned, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.” Representative Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican, posted a tweet saying Pelosi’s assailant was a male prostitute whom Pelosi had hired (which of course wasn’t true).

Elon Musk, who appears drawn to the GOP’s more fetid precincts, tweeted along the same lines and joked about it rather than apologize. Charlie Kirk suggested the whole story was intended “to smear millions of conservatives.” (For a fuller review of such stomach-turning statements, see Michael Tomasky’s piece, “Paul Pelosi Almost Died, and Most Republicans Don’t Have A Big Problem With That.”)

Let’s get real: “Domestic terrorism” has become a polite euphemism for “right-wing extremism.” The Anti-Defamation League counted 29 people killed in the United States by political extremists in 2021; of those, 26 were killed by right-wing extremists.

This is not a new trend. According to an April 2021 tally by The Washington Post and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, right-wing extremists have since 2015 been involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities.

The primary domestic terror threat, according to a 2022 assessment by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the National Counterterrorism Center, comes from racially motivated violent extremists “who are driven by a belief in the superiority of the white race” and often “promote accelerationist thinking, which advocates committing violence to precipitate a large-scale conflict, often framed as a ‘race war.’” Since 2010, white supremacists have committed 17 lethal attacks killing 77 people.

You would think Republican politicians would want to distance themselves from the group that poses the greatest domestic terrorist threat. You would be wrong. White supremacy, rebranded “white nationalism,” has been embraced at the party’s highest levels.

As reported by Reuters,

“In contrast to the 1970s, much of today's political violence is aimed at people instead of property — and most of the recent deadly outbursts tracked by Reuters have come from the right. Case in point: the Trump supporter who shot a neighbor he suspected of being a Democrat.”

That could be YOU, couldn’t it?

Or most anybody you know. “Suspected” of being a Democrat — or a ‘RINO’, or gay or trans or planning an abortion, or jewish/muslim/atheist or ‘non-christian’, non-trump fan, in any form.

The chaos unleashed on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 has metastasized and entered the bloodstream of the body politic, with lethal consequences for the country.

A full one-third (33%) of Republicans say that violence may be the answer. That is ahead of the 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats who agree. But across the board, those numbers are trending in a dangerous direction: when first asked in 2021, 28% of Republicans saw the virtues of political violence, 13% of indies concurred, and 7% of Democrats. Among those who have a favorable view of Donald Trump, there is a threefold multiplier for the merits of violence, reaching 41% support among Trumpists.

And then there’s QAnon. Pollsters found 29% of Republicans now say they believe that the centers of American power are controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles atop a child sex-trafficking operation and that violence is required to remedy it.”

That is literally tens of millions of Americans — clearly delusional, dangerously unstable, crazed crackpots with genocidal tendencies.

“A spokesman for the Nassau County police department confirmed that there was an investigation at the house of the judge, Arthur F. Engoron, who in several hours is expected to hear closing arguments in Mr. Trump’s case. The threat involved a bomb and the bomb squad came to the house.”

Swatting attempts at the homes of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan have also occurred recently.

But it’s part of a larger pattern which reaches back years: Election administrators vilified and hounded from the their jobs over Trump’s false claims of election fraud; public health officials abused and threatened over COVID conspiracies and lies; law enforcement suddenly in the sights if they investigate Trump; librarians and school administrators targeted and ridiculed for doing their jobs.

Government employees have been on the front lines of this low-level conflict for literally years now. It is a hallmark of the Trump era. Their careers on the line. Their income in jeopardy. Their personal safety sometimes at risk. And, as we see this morning, in some cases their families and homes targeted.”

Perhaps the worst of it is that they are becoming more organized and mobilizing around the country.

Patriot groups in Wisconsin have found an awkward alliance with Republican officials and prominent activists in the state. A July gathering hosted by the Barron county Republican party, located across the state in north-west Wisconsin, drew closer to 500. That event, which included free beer and a gun raffle and was promoted by patriot groups, illustrated the common cause the movement’s activists have found with the grassroots of the GOP.

Many patriot groups are animated by the Christian nationalist viewpoint.

Patriots of Ozaukee County declares on its website that it views as fundamental “truths” that “God is our creator” and “Jesus is our savior”. The Ozaukee county group has also hosted Constitution Alive! events touting the claim that the US constitution is a Christian document – led by the Patriot Academy organization, a Christian nationalist group that also offers weapons courses.

Patriots United, a group in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, exemplifies the typical rhetoric of the Christian right, describing its membership as “constitutional conservative Christians who seek to glorify and honor God” with the explicit aim of increasing “Christian influence” in government.

Now, with the 2024 presidential election a few months away, the patriot movement and its allies are fighting for legislation that they believe will ‘protect the electoral process from fraud,’ and mobilizing supporters to work the polls, observe polling places and spread their conspiracy theories – pushing the GOP even further to the extreme right and threatening more challenges to the voting process come election day.

Mitt Romney provided some context for the moment, telling CNN’s Manu Raju:

“I think a lot of people in this country are out of touch with reality and will accept anything Donald Trump tells them. 

“You had a jury that said that Donald Trump raped a woman. And that doesn't seem to be moving the needle. 

“There's a lot of things about today’s electorate that I have a hard time understanding.”

John Kelly, the longest-serving White House chief of staff for Donald Trump, offered his harshest criticism yet of the former president. He set the record straight with on-the-record confirmation of a number of damning stories about statements Trump made behind closed doors attacking US service members and veterans, listing a number of objectionable comments Kelly witnessed Trump make firsthand.

Kelly recently made the point that he and others have spoken out about Trump: “I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce.” 

“You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up,” he continued. “It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous  zone in our country.”

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand.

Will we watch our country warped into a North Korean-type authoritarian state, or Soviet-style gulag? Headed by a a befuddled old despot who backed by the might that billions of corporate dollars and a massive network of politicized ‘pastors’ can buy?

We have no defense but our vote and our voice. Use them.