While polls show nearly 6 in 10 Americans think Trump should be prosecuted, fewer than 1 in 5 Republicans agree (see story here).
During the pandemic, Republicans fiercely resisted life-saving measures like vaccines and masks, instead opting for ineffective quack cures. They’re not only climate deniers, or hostile to education and knowledge; they brag about being anti-science, and revel in going after teachers and professors. They believe Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim, and many embrace QAnon conspiracy theories.
And, of course, a very large percentage of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by massive fraud, despite a complete absence of evidence to support those claims, and strong evidence of their falsity. And their most prominent members of Congress are the kooks like Marjorie Taylor Green.
Interviews with Republican voters in Nevada last week revealed a group of people who are simply nuts:
“Republican voters in Nevada were aware Tuesday that the Jan. 6 committee was building a public case that Donald Trump knew the election wasn’t stolen. They saw some of the committee’s new video footage of violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. ‘Reprehensible,’ said one voter. ‘Disgusting,’ said a second. ‘It has everybody angry,’ said a third.
“It wasn’t the noose hanging outside the Capitol that upset them, the chants of ‘hang Mike Pence’ or the testimony of the president’s former attorney general. Instead, it was ‘Washington politicians’ and ‘the media establishment,’ … who they saw as trying to stack the deck against the former president. ‘It might as well be impeachment No. 3 for Donald Trump … this is their big push to get Donald Trump off the ballot.'”
Read story here.
That’s one dysfunctional bunch of people. In April 2021, a little over 3 months after the Capitol riot, Esquire magazine ran an article titled, “The Republican Party Has A Deep Crazy Problem” (read it here). Even back in 2016, Huffington Post ran a book review titled, “Why Are the Republicans Acting So Crazy — and Will They Ever Be Sane Again?” (Read that article here.)
But however crazy their are, and whatever motivates the craziness, there’s one thing they’re coldly logical about: They’re ready to ditch democracy. (Read article here.) And that changes everything.
We don’t need to know why they’re crazy, or how they got that way. All we need to know is they’re dangerous. And how to stop them.