Every so often you see an article that perfectly expresses the essence of a situation. The Atlantic just published such an article: The Republican Freak Show. I’ll share some excerpts, intersperse them with some of my images, then I have a couple of things to add.
Regarding the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, in 2011, [Republican candidate for NC Governor Mark] Robinson wrote, “Get that fucking commie bastard off the National Mall!” Robinson also has referred to the slain civil-rights champion as “worse than a maggot,” a “ho fucking, phony,” and a “huckster.” During the Obama presidency, Robinson wrote, “I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!” He promoted the conspiracy theory claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. He referred to Michelle Obama as a man and Hillary Clinton as a “heifer.” He compared Nancy Pelosi to Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Castro and mocked the near-fatal assault on her husband, Paul Pelosi. He is also an election denier, claiming that Joe Biden “stole the election.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has blamed wildfires on a Jewish space laser, promoted a conspiracy alleging that some Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring, and agreed with commenters who suggested that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Florida, was a “massive false flag.” Another House Republican, Paul Gosar, has promoted fluoride conspiracy theories and posted an animated video depicting him slashing the throat of a Democratic congresswoman and attacking President Biden. Yet another Republican member of Congress, Lauren Boebert, was ejected from a family-friendly musical for vaping, being disruptive, and groping her date (and vice versa). She also falsely claimed that school authorities “are putting litter boxes in schools for people who identify as cats.”
Tucker Carlson, a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention and an unofficial Trump adviser, recently hosted a Holocaust revisionist on his podcast. He praised the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as having been “vindicated on everything” and described Jones as “the most extraordinary person” he has ever met. (Two years ago, Sandy Hook families won nearly $1.5 billion in defamation and emotional-distress lawsuits against Jones for his repeatedly calling the 2012 school shooting, in which 20 first graders and six educators were killed, a hoax staged by “crisis actors” to get more gun-control legislation passed. As The New York Times reports, “The families suffered online abuse, personal confrontations and death threats from people who believed the conspiracy theory.”)
From Daily Beast
There is much more in the article, including stuff about RFK Jr. that will almost make you physically ill.
THESE PEOPLE MUST BE DEFEATED. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE IF WE WANT OUR BELOVED NATION TO SURVIVE.
This has been building for a long time. David Corn makes a vital point:
In my book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, I lay out this sordid history in great detail. But even a highlight reel makes it clear that the GOP has bowed to, depended on, and promoted far-right extremists and conspiracists for the past 70 years. Trumpism is the continuation, not a new version, of Republican politics. (My emphasis.)
Corn discusses the vicious Joseph McCarthy and other Right-wing con artists, and then recounts the origins of the Republican embrace of racism.
The Southern Strategy
In 1968, Nixon had a problem, actually two: George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. Having lost the 1960 presidential race, Nixon was again trying to capture the White House. Nixon worried that Wallace, the segregationist and former Democratic governor of Alabama running as a third-party candidate, would be a magnet for conservative voters and deny him the electoral votes Goldwater had won in the South. Even more immediately, Nixon feared that Reagan, the onetime B-movie star who had won the California governorship in 1966 by exploiting white backlash to the civil rights movement and social unrest, might swipe the nomination from him.
This led him into the arms of white supremacists. At a May gathering of Southern Republican officials, Nixon pandered, saying he opposed forcing the pace of integration, especially busing to redress school segregation, and favored conservative Supreme Court justices (who would be skeptical of initiatives to advance the rights of Black Americans). He asked the group how to deal with the Wallace threat. You need Strom Thurmond, the arch-segregationist senator from South Carolina, he was told.
The next day, Nixon met with Thurmond and repeated his song-and-dance routine. Thurmond signed on. He would help Nixon campaign against Wallace and keep Southern delegates from stampeding toward Reagan at the GOP convention.
And racism was the basis of the rise of the so-called “Religious Right”. In an important article from 2014, Randall Balmer makes this crucial point: ROE V. WADE WAS NOT THE PRECIPITATING EVENT. THE DEFENSE OF SEGREGATION WAS.
In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.
On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”
The vile Paul Weyrich, who helped found The Heritage Foundation (Hello Project 2025!) jumped on this. Capitalizing on the racial resentment arising from the Green ruling, and using unease among certain Christian groups about abortion, Weyrich and other Right-wing religious figures decided that opposing abortion was a potent way of attacking the Democratic Party. This has evolved and intensified until…
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Trump repeated this hideous lie in the debate with VP Harris.
Folks, we are up against people who will…