Yesterday, we looked at the Crazy Tour JD Vance is on with crackpot religioinist nut Lance Wallnau. Molly Olmstead, writing for Slate about Wallnau last week, noted that he’s “a major leader in a coalition of Christians who believe that Trump is prophesied to play a critical role in the nation’s spiritual reformation— that the former president is destined to be a catalyst for the next Great Awakening, even. These Christians see Trump as a modern-day Cyrus the Great, the powerful empire builder and nonbeliever who is credited in the Old Testament with returning the Jews to the Holy Land. They believe that under Trump’s protection, American Christians will rise up, defeat their demonic enemies, and take their rightful place of power in the country.”
Wallnau’s followers are seriously— and in some cases, dangerously— delusional, even psychotic. And they certainly do not see Trump or the Republican Party the way most DWT readers do. Former Republican (and a bit of a religionist fanatic himself), Peter Wehner has us covered: The Republican Freak Show. Wehner was a speechwriter for Reagan and both Bushes and wrote 3 books— Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era and The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump. He was an early and hardcore NeverTrumper
“Like the man who leads it, he wrote the GOP is not just incidentally grotesque. It is grotesque at its core.” In 2016, seeing his party slip away, he wrote in the NY Times, “[I]t is fair to say that there existed in the Republican Party repulsive elements, people who were attracted to racial and ethnic politics and moved by resentment and intolerance rather than a vision of the good. This group was larger than I ever imagined, and at important moments the Republican Party either overlooked them or played to them. Some may have been hoping to appeal to these elements while also containing and moderating them, to sand off the rough edges, to keep them within the coalition but not allow them to become dominant. But the opposite happened. The party guests took over the party.”
This weekend, he’s gone a little further down that path: “The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party.” It’s worth noting that in North Carolina, where Trump and Kamala are basically tied, most voters want nothing to do with Robinson. The freaky fringe still loves him and it looks like he’s still going to get 36% of the vote. Even today, 27% of North Carolina voters have a favorable opinion of him. Can you imagine— over a quarter of the state’s voters! Yep, that insane!
Wehner wrote that he bills himself as “a ‘devout Christian.’ But a recent CNN story reported that several years ago, he was a porn-site user who enjoyed watching transgender pornography (despite a history of an anti-transgender rhetoric), referred to himself as a ‘Black Nazi,’ and supported the return of slavery. According to CNN, commenters on the website discussed whether to believe the story of a woman who said she was raped by her taxi driver while intoxicated. Robinson wrote in response, ‘And the moral of this story… Don’t fuck a white bitch!’ Politico reports that Robinson’s email address was also registered on Ashley Madison, a website for married people seeking affairs... Regarding the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, in 2011, 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.’ In 2017, Robinson wrote, ‘There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the “6 million Jews” they murdered.’ He has used demeaning language against Jews and gay people. He has cruelly mocked school-shooting survivors (“media prosti-tots”). And he supported a total ban on abortion, without exceptions for rape or incest, even though he admitted that he’s paid for an abortion in the past.
Much of this was known before he ran for governor. No matter. Republicans in North Carolina nominated him anyway, and Donald Trump has lavished praise on the man he calls his “friend,” offering Robinson his “full and total endorsement” and dubbing him “one of the hottest politicians” in the country.
Some Republicans are distancing themselves from Robinson partly because they are worried he’ll be defeated, but also because they’re even more concerned that he will drag down other Republicans, including Trump. But the truth is that Robinson is a perfect addition to the Republican ensemble.
The GOP vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, has been relentlessly promoting the lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets. In 2021, he said that the United States was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
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 san 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.”
The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey reported that Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, who is under House investigation for having sex with an underage girl, “used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend,” according to a source Godfrey spoke with.
This is not normal.
The GOP is home to a Republican governor, Kristi Noem, who describes in her book shooting her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit, as well as killing an unnamed goat. A Republican senator, Ron Johnson, claimed that COVID was “pre-planned” by a secret group of “elites” even while he promoted disinformation claiming that Ivermectin, which is commonly used to deworm livestock, was an effective treatment for COVID. (Because people were hospitalized for taking the drug, the FDA tweeted, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow.”)
Earlier this month, Trump attended a 9/11 memorial event in New York City. He took as his guest a right-wing conspiracy theorist, Laura Loomer, who has claimed that 9/11 was an inside job, referred to Kamala Harris as a “drug using prostitute,” and said that Democrats should be tried for treason and executed. (Trump has called Loomer a “woman with courage” and a “free spirit.”) [He missed one: Loomer also claimed that Haitians don’t only eat people’s pets but eat people as well; she tweeted that from Trump’s plane.]
Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, floated the idea of having Trump declare martial law so that he could “rerun” the 2020 election. He suggested that the president should seize voting machines. He predicted that a governor will soon declare war. He has also warned about the dangers of a “new world order” in which people such as Bill Gates, George Soros, and World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab “have an intent to track every single one of us, and they use it under the skin. They use a means by which it’s under the skin.”
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.”)
Carlson, one of the most influential figures on the American right, has also peddled the claim that the violence on January 6, 2021, was a “false flag” operation involving the FBI and used to discredit Trump supporters; alleged that former Attorney General Bill Barr covered up the murder of Jeffrey Epstein; and promoted testicle tanning.
…The Republican Party today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic. Since 2016, they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.
None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.
They know.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in an essay titled “As Breathing and Consciousness Return,” warned that no one who “voluntarily runs with the hounds of falsehood” will be able to justify himself to the living, or to posterity, or to his friends, or to his children. Don’t surrender to corruption, the great Russian writer and dissident said; strive for the liberation of our souls by not participating in the lie. Don’t consent to the lies. The challenges facing Solzhenitsyn were quite different, and certainly far more difficult, than anything we face, but his fundamental point still holds.
The Trump movement is built on layers of lies. It’s late, but it’s never too late to liberate yourself from them. One word of truth outweighs the world.
And please let's not forget every Republican who has run for Congress in Florida in the past decade. You name one sane one, even a half sane one... just one; go ahead and try.
