They Plan the End of America

The fake patriots. (Faketriots?) The phony law-and-order-for-thee-but-not-for-me types. The cretins who think America is about waving flags at overpasses and owning libs rather than representative democracy and the rule of law. We are witnesses to some unique things in the last 18 months.

We have witnessed an attempted coup. Coups d’etat are especially rare in the Anglophone world – countries created through British colonialism, which adhere to common law and rely on some form of parliamentary representative democracy to hold the reins of power.

Did you know there was a “stop the steal” astroturf group ready to accuse a victorious Hillary Clinton of stealing the election? Miracle of miracles, Trump won so that plan was tabled until 2020, when it was revived. The 2020 election was run in the midst of a global pandemic, which resulted in states making temporary changes to make ballot access easier and contact-free. As the in-person vote was tallied, it looked good for Trump. But the absentee and mail-in votes needed to be counted, and the Republicans have pretty uniformly decided that these votes were somehow unworthy and uncountable.

So, “stop the steal” was revived, Trump and his henchmen worked overtime to literally try to steal the election. The Roger Stonification and Steve Bannonization of America They had Republicans in swing states concoct fake, unchosen slates of “electors” in an effort illegally to change results in places like Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. They falsely claimed the machines were rigged by faraway Communists. They brought lawsuits – almost all of which were summarily dismissed – trying to change the results of various states’ elections. Trump himself used the power of the Presidential office to demonize and harass innocent civilian election workers. Trump pressured state officials to rig the election in his favor and to overthrow the will of the people – the ballot box.

It culminated with an armed insurrection on January 6th that stormed the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the Congress from carrying out the will of the American people, and to force – literally – that Donald Trump be re-elected as President for life. These people are not the principled heirs of our Enlightenment-guided Founding Fathers – they are instead the ignorant offspring of Confederate traitors. Local fool Carl Paladino is their pro-Hitler avatar.

To call the Trump MAGA cult un-American is an understatement. This was a coordinated coup attempt. It was a conspiracy to defraud the United States and to end our system of rules, laws, and elections as we know it. Our republic still hangs by a thread as an entire major political party remains in the thrall of a grifter charlatan who would destroy the country for the sake of vanity and power.

Maybe in addition to vanity and power, it is also a last gasp of good old-fashioned white Christian nationalism as a reaction to societal changes that they fear and reject. It all starts with abortion and it has morphed into equating anything having to do with LGBTQ+ rights as pedophilia and “grooming“. It has to do with terrorizing drag queen library readings and abolishing Pride Month displays at libraries.

I mean – drag queens. They say that this is somehow sexualizing kids. Kids who play dress-up all the time.

Florida banning the mere mention of anything having to do with gender identity, likely unintentionally banning kids playing house.

But it’s not just discriminatory legislation and terroristic action – it is the legitimization of this transformation of this country into a white Christian nationalist authoritarian country by a Supreme Court hand-picked by one trad Catholic man, Leonard Leo. By the time you read this, the Supreme Court will have likely overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1972 SCOTUS opinion, which held that states cannot restrict abortions in the first trimester of a pregnancy. Many Justices likely to vote to do this also told the country and its elected representatives that Roe is “settled law,” lying to convince people they would not do what they have done. To lie to the people to gain a lifetime appointment should be disqualifying in a functioning republic, but it isn’t. The libs will be owned, and this is the primary goal. Doctors, medical providers, and ultimately women will have a medical procedure rendered illegal overnight, and they will all of them face criminal sanctions or perhaps, if the Christian nationalists have their way, involuntary psychiatric committal. This is all an Orwellian nightmare of democratic backsliding – of reactionary authoritarianism, which one can only hope is short-lived.

As usual, Democrats as the sole political organization of sanity and western liberal democratic values are ill-equipped rhetorically to combat this right-wing eruption of sheer insanity.

Western New York, which was recently the target of a racist attack by a white nationalist terrorist from Binghamton, has a disproportionate number of homegrown Trump cult fascists in its midst. WBFO is doing a great job on this front right now, as has Investigative Post. A must-follow is Heidi Jones on Twitter. When you see indicted insurrectionist Pete Harding lead a group of people to wave flags on Walden or on an overpass by the blue water tower, this is not some grassroots outpouring of patriotic love for democracy and the rule of law, but an outspoken effort to end them in favor of right-wing authoritarian hegemony.

The battle isn’t about left-of-center pragmatism versus fiscal conservatism anymore. It is about American democracy versus authoritarianism. It is an existential battle of normalcy against nihilism, and now is the time for choosing.