Salon, Heather Digby Parton: The 2020 RNC isn’t a political convention — it’s a celebration of the Trump cult. Subtitle: Fear-mongering and corruption are nothing new in Republican politics. But Donald Trump has gone far beyond that.
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Washington Post: These 7 cultish moments at Trump’s convention add up to one Big Lie.
The seven are:
- Trump’s awe-inspiring ability to rise above opponents.
- The need to let Trump into your hearts.
- Trump as the most empathetic person in America.
- Trump as the heroic defender of Western civilization.
- The greatest economy in the history of the universe.
- Trump’s uniformly perfect handling of the virus.
- Trump as a glorious and benevolent savior.
Again: this is a cult, divorced from reality.
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CNN: At Fox News, ‘the inmates are running the asylum’
Excerpt from a book. Opening lines of the article:
“Everything I know about the Constitution, I learned from you on ‘Fox & Friends,'” President Donald Trump once told Judge Andrew Napolitano.
Again, is this the best Republicans can do?
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Mother Jones: Why Are Right-Wing Conspiracies so Obsessed With Pedophilia?. Subtitle: The story is the same, from the day-care panics to QAnon: It’s not really about the kids. It’s about fears of a changing social order.
These conspiracy theories go back centuries: the McMartin preschool scandal of the 1980s; “Wild claims of Jews killing Christian children and using their blood in rituals—the “blood libel”—date back to at least the 12th century and have popped up every so often since then, and long before that Christians were suspected of performing similar rites.”
The continuities between the McMartin case and Pizzagate suggest a broader explanation for pedophile conspiracies: They aren’t the residue of malfunctions in our media culture. They’re an outgrowth of the normal workings of reactionary politics.
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The New Yorker: The Stunning Predictability of Steve Bannon’s “We Build the Wall” Scam.
