The Wall Street Journal has an article that doesn’t bode well for our democracy:
Many Republicans refuse to acknowledge Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, saying they have lost faith in the electoral system. They also have doubts that 2024 will deliver a legitimate winner, while Democrats worry that Republicans will contest an outcome that doesn’t go their way.
Close to 70% of Republicans believe that President Biden didn’t legitimately win the election, several polls show, despite multiple federal and state investigations, as well as court decisions, finding no evidence of fraud extensive enough to have changed the result.
I think there are two reasons for this. First is the steady stream of lies coming from right-wing media, including Fox News, not to mention from Republican politicians. As Oliver Darcy on CNN points out:
Talk of imprisoning Democratic politicians — and even their families — in acts of revenge is par for the course. Even floating the outright execution of Biden, as Charlie Kirk recently did, is accepted in the warped world of MAGA Media, where the audience has been programmed through years of conditioning to welcome such vile rhetoric into their homes.
None of this is an exaggeration. It is the reality of what is being broadcast in millions of homes across the country.
But the other reason is even worse. Right-wing MAGA lovers like the idea of having a “strongman” as their president, who incites insurrection, creates fake presidential electors, and disenfranchises voters they don’t like. In order to accept this, they have to believe that the Democrats are even worse, and would do the same things. They believe the election will be stolen, because they themselves would be happy to steal it.
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I read a lot of different news sources, and always find the comment sections to be most enlightening. While a news outlet like FOX won’t come right out and advocate for violence, they also don’t prevent their respondents from doing it. Going through those comments, seeing the dog whistles and outspoken calls for violence, are very alarming.
I used to think that our leaders would come to their senses when these extremists actually carried out their threats, and that we’d have a rebalancing of the narrative. Sadly, that hasn’t happened, and instead the right wing leaders in Congress have advanced these anti-American views.
What the “Republicans” are so upset about is that even with the Southern Strategy & the Christofascist vote, it just is not enough these days to legitimately win the presidency, and they are beginning to see the handwriting on the wall about their dark future regarding local elections.
Since 2013 with a family tragedy, I read and have read Holocaust survival books. Maybe 40 or more books by now. I see how Hitler did it. And how he got his followers to follow him in their sadistic ways. From then on I can see it happening all over again, in this country. Of course, what I love: The Ukranians were so cruel to the Jews, and now they have a Jewish leader.
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