We’re incredibly fortunate that the GOP is so weird. We need to take advantage of that before that weird becomes normal.
I was unlucky enough to catch about a minute of that while flipping around c-span’s coverage to find biden’s speech. It was gross being dumped into the middle of that (yes, weird is the word for it) rant, I felt nauseous and anxious.
“My husband, Wesley, and I just watched President Biden’s State of the Union address from our living room…”
Considering she likely wrote that before he even gave the address, I doubt it would have mattered what he said or how he said it.
“My husband, Wesley, and I join hands in prayer around our kitchen table. Then we worry about the Mexicans.”
And we SUDDENLY GET REAL UNSETTLING ANGRY TONE without any change of facial expression when certain topics start to get brought up.
You can almost see her kids in therapy years from now breaking down examples of how it was in their house growing up.
I watched several minutes of this when it first aired. It felt like a transmission from aliens who are really bad at the whole mind control thing.
This author is naive. It’s already ‘normal’ for half the country. Even the GOPers who don’t go in for hardcore Trumpism are perfectly used to seeing this stuff in their circles. My dad is a “never-Trump”, former-and-maybe-future Republican, and basically all of the other people at his catholic church are these kind of people. He’s used to it, and just thinks they’re misguided or that they espouse it for the sake of building community with the other nutters.
While authoritarianism gestates it is vulnerable. Upsetting. Revolting. In its early stages it hides in the dark as adherents gather and the mythologies and narratives that will eventually propel it are accumulated and turn inward and then outward. Nazism and Fascism would’ve never gained power had this not been this case, had they not practiced outside the eyes of the public and created their own worlds to inhabit. And then, as they begin stepping into the light, there is still a moment to reject them. To see exactly how twisted the ideologies are.
This is where your reaction comes in.
Even when the Nazis were in power, there were people in Germany who were disgusted by their rhetoric. By then, it’s too late to ask, “how do we stop this from becoming normal”. We’re there. The question now is, “how the fuck do we de-program 70+ million ethnonationalist theocrats”? We’re no longer in the “hides in the dark” phase, we’re in the final “turns outward” phase, with even politicians at CPAC calling for the end of democracy, and judges issuing overtly and willfully religious legal rulings.
This author is talking to their 40%, anti-ethnonationalist-theocracy bubble, and thinking they have an advantage over the 40% nutjobs.
It’s underestimating just how fucked we are.
