- How is it the Republican party is increasingly dominated by cranks and crackpots? Ideas from Robert Reich and Heather Cox Richardson, and examples from the debates, and about Hurricane Helene.
- NYT is finally paying attention to Trump’s mental decline;
- JD Vance and Lance Wallnau again, and the Pentacostals who believe in angels and demons.
Either the crazies have always been with us, and they just haven’t been as apparent as they now are through social media, or something has happened in the past few decades to turn the Republican party and its followers into… well…
Robert Reich, 7 Oct 2024: How did the GOP become the party of cranks and crackpots?
(The cartoon, widely circulated over the years, is credited to Randy Molton, 2015).
Mark Robinson, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina and current lieutenant governor, is in trouble again.
Not just because Robinson has referred to himself as a “black NAZI” and a “perv,” expressed support for reinstating slavery, said he watched transgender pornography, called homosexuality “filth” and the Holocaust “hogwash,” and has asserted that “some folks need killing.”
He’s in trouble now because he blew off a vote on a declaration that would have granted Governor Roy Cooper key emergency powers ahead of Hurricane Helene’s landfall. Robinson was the only member on the Council of State — a board of nine — who didn’t vote in favor of the declaration. Cooper got the power he needed, but Robinson is now criticizing him for not doing more in the wake of the storm.
Yet Robinson still commands the support of 63 percent of Republicans in North Carolina, according to an East Carolina University poll released Wednesday.
Something seriously troubling has happened to the Republican Party. It’s become filled with wacko candidates for office who are being supported by large percentages of Republican voters.
Reich then summarizes the history of the trend. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News. Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump.
It’s become a doom loop. As both the demand and the supply of these lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and racism have grown, the Republican Party’s base has ventured farther from reality. Meanwhile, sane Republicans have left, reasonable people have drifted away, and normal Republican officials have been purged or voted out.
With examples of comments and behavior from recent candidates.
You see the problem. When the base of one of our two political parties both fuels and is fueled by crackpots, some of those crackpots get elected.
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Now, Is it deliberate with Trump and his colleagues? Or is Trump simply more and more incompetent?
NY Times, 4 Oct 2024: Every Falsehood, Exaggeration and Untruth in Trump’s and Harris’s Stump Speeches
Trump wins!
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And this:
CNN, 7 Oct 2024: Fact check: Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response
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Which Heather Cox Richardson summarizes here: October 6, 2024. She thinks the lies are quite deliberate.
This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts.
Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.
Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.
And she goes on about Putin, Steven Bannon, Trump, Hitler, and the concept of the “Big Lie.”
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And part of it is right-wing media, who shamelessly lie about how the government actually works.
Media Matters, 4 Oct 2024: Ignoring praise for federal aid from GOP governors and officials on the ground, right-wing media falsely claim that Hurricane Helene is “Kamala’s Katrina”
Meanwhile, Governor DeSantis refused calls from Kamala Harris — the sitting vice president — about help for Helene, because such calls would be “political.”
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NY Times, 6 Oct 2024: Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age, subtitled “With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.”
Critics of the NYT have accused them of being too harsh on Biden and letting Trump slide, which NYT has rationalized because Trump’s decline is “old news.” Finally they’re paying renewed attention to this.
[I]t happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.
He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.
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As well as….
- Salon, Joe Hayden, 6 Oct 2024: Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and America’s long history of racist disinformation, subtitled “Donald Trump’s racial insults belong to a lengthy history of false, fantastical and contradictory claims”
- Boing Boing, 5 Oct 2024: Actual climate scientists debunk Marjorie Taylor Greene’s weather-related conspiracy theories. Does this even need to be said? But some of the comments to MTG’s [Twitter] account are spot on, e.g. “Okay, but if ‘they’ control weather, then the next logical extreme is that humans caused climate change. She really didn’t think this talking point through.”
- Slate, Mark Joseph Stern, 7 Oct 2024: Ron DeSantis’ Administration Is Threatening to Prosecute the Media for Airing Pro-Choice Ads. Is this democracy and freedom of speech? Or…?
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NY Times, David French, 6 Oct 2024: JD Vance and the Prophets of Trumpism.
This is more about Vance speaking at that event hosted by Lance Wallnau, whose “Seven Mountain Mandate” is anti-Democratic and fascist. They’re not hiding it. I’ll quote some bits.
The terms “Pentecostal” and “charismatic” refer to Christians who believe that the supernatural signs and wonders that are described in the New Testament still occur today. There are differences between the two groups, but they both believe in divine healing and in words of prophecy. Like virtually all Christians, they believe that angels and demons exist, but Pentecostals and charismatics are more likely to engage in what they call “spiritual warfare” — the use of prayer to try to directly attack and defeat demonic spirits.
Angels and demons, oh my. The Pentacostal movement goes all the way back to… 1906.
[T]he Seven Mountain Mandate provided a theological justification for supporting Trump’s quest for power. The core concept of the Mandate is simple: It states that Christians will be able to save the nation only if they or their allies gain control of each of the seven “mountains” of cultural influence: the family, religion, education, the media, the arts, business and the government.
This sorta addresses my opening thought in this post. French concludes:
Vance’s presence at a Wallnau event means that Wallnau’s influence within the MAGA movement and within Trumpist Christianity is undeniable. Vance’s presence also helps illustrate why he refuses to acknowledge that Biden won a free and fair election in 2020. He’d be directly contradicting the prophets of Trumpism, and if you contradict the prophets of Trumpism, you will be made to pay.
So, maybe at least, it’s just that there’s a large portion of the population whose beliefs and behaviors are not reality-based. And this has always been so.
