Closing Arguments

Throughout this long, miserable campaign season, every day the news was like “Trump vows to deport gay, left-handed Asian dentists.”

And the next day the news was like “Polls show surge in Trump support among gay, left-handed Asian dentists.”

I can’t explain it. Fuck it, give me another drink.

If a racist rally — a Coachella for bigots — isn’t enough to convince you that both parties are not the same, you are beyond reason. Maybe one day, you will snap out of your right-wing delusion and realize, “Hey, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to vote for guy who assaults women and tried to overthrow the government.”

We are going to elect a politically moderate, well-qualified woman who will continue economic policies that work pretty well.

Or we will elect a felonious, sociopathic lunatic who will likely drive the economy into the ground, open to the door to autocracy and oligarchy, and make life hell for everyone who is a not a white straight Christian male (until eventually turning on them too, because nobody comes out unscathed when under the thumb of an venal, incompetent dictator).

It really is one or the other.

Good luck, America.

The Exact Opposite (Part 2)

In my last post, I discussed how the GOP’s war on reality has convinced Americans that we are living in a dystopian hellhole where the solutions are idiotic proposals that will only backfire and cause calamity.

For example, after decades of obnoxious perseverance, pro-lifers succeeded in overturning Roe vs. Wade. As a result, “following the Supreme Court Dobbs decision that revoked the federal right to an abortion, hundreds more infants died than expected in the United States.” So congratulations, pro-lifers, on killing more babies. Oh, and those draconian abortion bans “also affect access to broader health care, which can lead to increased risk for both babies and mothers.”

Thanks again, religious zealots.

The GOP has convinced the populace that up is down, evident in the continued insistence that the Trump years were better for the economy, even though almost every indicator shows that this is not true. Despite our strong economy, a huge chunk of Americans “wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession.”

Republicans also want you to know that ice is hot, and fire is cold.

As a final example, let’s consider the idea that so many Americans think Trump is a tough guy who will stand up for our nation in times of crisis. They “support him precisely because they believe he can protect the country in a way no other politician will.” In truth, his style of incoherent, impulsive governance would create “a politically chaotic” America, where “other countries assert more global influence.” Indeed, our “biggest global rivals believe that a Trump victory will serve their interests instead.”

Clearly, millions of Americans are basing their decisions not on facts or even emotions. Rather, they are clamoring for what they sincerely believe is real, despite acres of easily accessibly evidence that shows them they are wrong.

They are listening to Republicans, whose stated goal is to “make America great again, because it’s not great now, what with Black people protesting the police, Pride flags flying, and immigrants seeking new lives in America.” Conservatives don’t want “to hear Spanish at the supermarket or be aware that someone is dressed in drag,” and they are filled with anger at all those “New York and Los Angeles elites who, in the estimation of many Republicans, are actively discriminating against White people and Christians.”

At this point, “it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.”

It is also becoming more difficult to deny that the GOP candidate for president has, right before our eyes, gone “from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention.” The guy is “one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” 

And yet, whole swaths of Americans will vote for him, vote for this Wonderland logic, and insist that the truth is on their side.

The Exact Opposite (Part 1)

In a sane world, a babbling old man who threatened to deploy the US military against American civilians would be shuffled off to nap time at the facility, rather than hailed as a conquering hero to millions of conservatives who have the audacity to call themselves patriots.

But the GOP has succeeded in turning our country into a bizarro world of contradictions and backward logic.

This accomplishment may be Republicans’ only achievement of the century, as every other project they have led over the past 20 years—Iraq, Covid, the economy, etc—has ended in full-fledged disaster.

As an example of the fun-house mirror that America has morphed into, consider that Republicans continue to insist that immigrants are invading the country, raping and pillaging at will, stealing everyone’s job, taking over whole swaths of the country, and eating all our pets.

In reality, immigration is a key reason that our economy is doing better than other industrialized nations. Furthermore,  “the ‘magic bullet’ driving the post-pandemic population revival of major US urban centers is immigration,” and immigrants are filling a labor gapthat, if left unfilled, would lead to financial devastation. In fact, studies show that “the large influx of immigrants” over the past few years have “helped grow the U.S. economy.”

As for those rampaging immigrants killing and looting nonstop, even Republicans admit that they are making those stories up. Immigrants have lower rates of crime than native-born Americans, as we all know.

Any while we’re at it, please note that “crime rose rapidly at the end of Trump’s term but is now dropping.” In particular, the homicide rate recently saw “the largest single-year decline in the last 20 years.”

That hasn’t stopped the GOP nominee from advocating for a real-life version of The Purge, in which one violent day would bring down crime rates that aren’t that high in the first place.

There are more ways in which conservatives have it completely backwards, but I will save those examples for next week’s post.

Red State Utopia

As all know, life in conservative parts of the country is paradise. It’s euphoria and bliss mixed together and compounded. The red states are so goddamn stuffed with happiness that the only complaints the residents have is that their facial muscles ache from their nonstop smiling.

Well, there is the fact that “red state politics are shaving years off Americans’ lives.” And there’s also the myriad abortion bans that boost infant mortality, force teenage girls to deliver their rapists’ babies, harm literally every American, and basically kill women outright.

But at least you can get plenty of raw milk. You know, because of freedom, or something like that.

Ok, maybe an early death from botulism or an unplanned pregnancy isn’t appealing to you. Hey, there are other alluring factors that these areas provide.

There is the fact that doctors are fleeing red states, which decimates their already shaky healthcare systems. Or maybe you’re gay and want to live someplace where hate crimes against you have quadrupled. Or perhaps you are an ethnic minority, and really dig the vibe of fearing for your life.

That’s a whole lotta charm.

So why do people live in red states, besides the affordability and access to libraries with no books in them?

Well, the “disproportionate power that rural voters wield, and their unusual devotion to Trump” is a plus for those conservatives who hate democracy. They idolize places like Hungary, where free elections have been eliminated. These guys want the United States of America, “one of the world’s great superpowers, to sign onto the program of a landlocked country of fewer than 10 million people in central Europe.”

The GOP has based its entire existence on rural white people who see their power dwindling. These Americans believe they are being oppressed, which is hilarious in that being white is worth, by some calculations, hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of one’s lifetime, to say nothing of the cultural power and comfort that comes from being in the majority.

No, they are still upset over Brown vs. Board of Education, even though school segregation is on the upswing, and they go crazy if Latinos actually try to vote.

And what has all this anger, fear, and hostility brought us? For starters, the United States “is no longer among the 20 happiest countries in the world,” and we stand alone among industrialized nations for our rate of gun violence, which is highest in the red states.

Hey, sounds like heaven to me.

That Old-time Religion

Here are some fun statistics for you: 

“A majority (52 percent) of Trump supporters say they believe the claim about Haitian migrants abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.” Slightly fewer believe that “in some states it is legal to kill a baby after birth,” and almost a third think that “public schools are providing students with sex-change operations.” As nuts as these viewpoints are, they pale in comparison to the 81 percent of Trump supporters who believe “Venezuela is deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions to the United States.”

But they constitute a serious political party, and we should respect their opinions. Right?

Of course, among Trump’s strongest supporters are Christian nationalists. These are people who talk a lot about how much they love Jesus but in reality despise almost everything the guy actually taught. Trump-centered Christians “are not churchgoers and are looking for what they see as retribution against those they believe are destroying traditional values, those who defend a secular society in which everyone is treated equally before the law.” Their support for the GOP is “less about religion than it is about a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically, and Mr. Trump looms large.”

They have found a cozy home in The Republican Party, which is “68 percent white and Christian in a country that is 42 percent white and Christian.”

We’re talking about “Christians who had jettisoned their credibility—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.”

These religious zealots are “developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in [Trump’s] administration should the former president return to power.”

And what are those plans? Well, it’s the usual right-wing obsession with overturning same-sex marriage, enacting a nationwide abortion ban, and reducing access to contraceptives. But they also want to create “a restrictionist immigration agenda” that allows only those newcomers who “accept Israel’s God, laws, and understanding of history.” 

So basically, they want an America that is virtually 100% Christian, with a few conservative Jews allowed to hang around.

The GOP is so hyper-religious that they enthusiastically nominate fundamentalists who preach violence in the name of God. And if those lunatics indulge in all the behaviors that they condemn, plus a few straight-up vile acts that should disqualify them from society, well, the Republican Party will stand beside them.

This push for religious theocracy comes at an interesting time in American history. You see, about 28% of Americans say they are “religiously unaffiliated — a group comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is ‘nothing in particular.’ " This makes them the largest religious cohort in the country.

In essence, America is becoming less religious even as the dwindling group of extremists among us get more fanatical.

God help us all.