Ad Orientem wrote: ↑Fri Nov 20, 2020 7:31 pm
Cortopassi wrote: ↑Fri Nov 20, 2020 7:22 pm
If he does this, I sure hope at least some percentage of his adherents realize they've been bamboozled.
I think many of them are too far gone. For them Donald Trump has become a messianic figure, which is why I have said that the GOP has become a cult of personality. For the true believers, some of whom do post on this forum, they have become drunk on Trump's Kool-Aid. A few years back Trump bragged he could shoot someone in broad daylight and would not loose many supporters. It was a very rare case of his being truthful.
The below is at the beginning of a book I am just starting to read. It echoes what you have written above.
Vinny
For a few years, Gingrich was regarded as a sideshow member of Congress, and his speeches reinforced this status. Among the choicest examples was his claim that under Democrats, “we in America could experience the joys of Soviet-style brutality and murdering of women and children.” He said Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill “may not understand freedom versus slavery” and that in contesting the election results in one congressional district Democrats resembled Nazis. As he used this talk to claim the pure center of the GOP, Gingrich moved from the fringe to a place of influence. By 1985, he would lead a coterie of like-minded House members and declare, “I’m unavoidable. I represent real power.”
Hillary Clinton was among the first big enemies Gingrich promoted. (He famously called her “a bitch.”) Thus he applied his warfare method to the GOP’s opponents and then to purge moderates from the party who were called RINOs for Republicans in Name Only. As Gingrich and others became even more rabid they attacked the very idea of verifiable facts like the science behind climate change and adapted to admit conspiracy theories about everything from vaccines to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
In some corners, a conservative’s identity would depend on his or her willingness to embrace such extreme notions. The more feverish the thought—the Clintons order murders!—the more stalwart the believer.4
The swell of distortion and hatred had begun cresting after the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Even before he took office, Obama was accused of plotting to overthrow the United States on behalf of Muslim antagonists, secretly marrying a Pakistani man, and refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. After his inauguration Obama was blamed for mass shootings and individual murders. One congressional Republican warned Obama would soon send young Americans to political reeducation camps.
Faith in such outlandish ideas seemed to be part of GOP identity. A year after Obama released his birth certificate in 2011, only 27 percent of Republicans believed he was native-born. By 2016, Hillary Clinton was the primary subject of GOP voters’ fever dreams, which placed her in the middle of countless crimes and conspiracies, including of a pedophile ring operating in the basement of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.
There was no pedophile group, and the restaurant had no basement, but in a poll, nearly half of GOP voters said they either believed, or were open to accepting, the pizza pedophile story.5
Much of the energy behind the anti-fact extremism was generated by long-standing appeals to so-called culture war issues framed in apocalyptic terms. Beginning in the 1970s, right-wing activists and fund-raisers sought to terrify voters with mass mailings and broadcasts that purported to reveal hidden forces of depravity and destruction. Urgent action was needed because, among other things, Democrats were trying to force parents to pay children minimum wage for chores; the United Nations was bent on destroying American families; schools were teaching children that “cannibalism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.” Much of this harebrained propaganda emanated from television evangelists such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who, in 1981, told his flock that gay people were out to “recruit” their children into homosexuality, and the Reverend Pat Roberston, who, in 1986, called non-Christians “termites” worthy of “fumigation.”
