American Psychosis: How The GOP lost it's mind & embraced mentally ill authoritarians like Trump, Gingrich, Gaetz, & MTG as it's party leaders

[basquebromance]

From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society to segregationists to the New Right to the religious right to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to the militia movement to Fox News to Sarah Palin to the Tea Party to Trumpism, the Republican Party has deliberately nurtured and exploited rightwing fear and loathing fueled by paranoia, grievance, and tribalism.

"American Psychosis" is the definitive historical account of how the GOP went batshit.

The new book from our DC bureau chief details seven decades of bigotry, paranoia, and conspiracy.

www.motherjones.com

 

[BluesLegend]

I have long suspected the OP is a die hard Republican. Maybe he forgot to add, but Democrats are corrupt sell out blithering idiots?

 

[basquebromance]

I have long suspected the OP is a die hard Republican. Maybe he forgot to add, but Democrats are corrupt sell out blithering idiots?

This is a response to the Fetterman mentally ill thread. i don't tolerate beating up on a weak man when he's down

 

[ThisIsMe]

From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society to segregationists to the New Right to the religious right to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to the militia movement to Fox News to Sarah Palin to the Tea Party to Trumpism, the Republican Party has deliberately nurtured and exploited rightwing fear and loathing fueled by paranoia, grievance, and tribalism.

"American Psychosis" is the definitive historical account of how the GOP went batshit.

The new book from our DC bureau chief details seven decades of bigotry, paranoia, and conspiracy.

www.motherjones.com

“Maga American are a threat to the country”

USMB: “anyone who voted for or supports trump is a maga American!”

…who’s peddling fear and hate?

 

[BluesLegend]

This is a response to the Fetterman mentally ill thread. i don't tolerate beating up on a weak man when he's down

Agree. The poor man had a stroke for crying out loud. My fellow true American conservatives, don't sink to the Dems level okay.

 

[progressive hunter]

This is a response to the Fetterman mentally ill thread. i don't tolerate beating up on a weak man when he's down

who beating him up?? we are just making fun of the people that voted fr him,,

 

[MarathonMike]

This is a response to the Fetterman mentally ill thread. i don't tolerate beating up on a weak man when he's down

The Democratic Party knew of his frail physical and mental state. They hid these facts so they could have another meat puppet like Joe Biden in government. He is unfit for office and never should have been put forward as a candidate.

 

[Cellblock2429]

From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society to segregationists to the New Right to the religious right to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to the militia movement to Fox News to Sarah Palin to the Tea Party to Trumpism, the Republican Party has deliberately nurtured and exploited rightwing fear and loathing fueled by paranoia, grievance, and tribalism.

"American Psychosis" is the definitive historical account of how the GOP went batshit.

The new book from our DC bureau chief details seven decades of bigotry, paranoia, and conspiracy.

www.motherjones.com

/----/ What a load of crap. Someone handed you a list of things to post about Republicans, and without knowing what any of them mean, just posted them. You're just an angry little child venting. BTW, democRATs were the segragatioists who wrote and enforced the Jim Crow laws. I know, I was there, living in the segregated South completely run by democRATs, you big dope.

 

[Death-Ninja]

From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society to segregationists to the New Right to the religious right to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to the militia movement to Fox News to Sarah Palin to the Tea Party to Trumpism, the Republican Party has deliberately nurtured and exploited rightwing fear and loathing fueled by paranoia, grievance, and tribalism.

"American Psychosis" is the definitive historical account of how the GOP went batshit.

The new book from our DC bureau chief details seven decades of bigotry, paranoia, and conspiracy.

www.motherjones.com

You folk, who insist upon joining in on above cretins threads, you are the problem, the above cretin spam posts(trolls)these threads by the gross, its not gonna solve a thing for you to enable this cretin to continue on doing so, stop participating in its trolling and it will soon whither upon the vine and die, this thread it has posted is a naked troll, and staff never ever boot them as they instantly do to good people who post real topics, topics that hit staff fascists right in their tiny little balls.

Don't feed the above troll, let it starve to death.....

 

[basquebromance]

"We promise no miracles, but we believe that the responsibility of our Republican party is to seek liberation of mind and body and spirit, and to call up the best America has to offer." - Liz Cheney

i'm sorry, that was actually a quote by Oregon Gov Frank Hatfield, from his 1964 keynote address at the GOP convention. had there been not so many kooks in the GOP, they would have nominated Rockefeller that year, and we wouldn't have had neither Reagan nor Trump, and the republic would not be under threat from right wing extremism

 

[Cellblock2429]

This is a response to the Fetterman mentally ill thread. i don't tolerate beating up on a weak man when he's down

/----/ Fetterman was a weak old man when he ran for office. Everyone knew it, but he had a D after his name, and that is all that matters. Where was your fake outrage last year?

 

[basquebromance]

the John Birch Society were paranoid of commies

the MAGA Trump society are paranoid of the deep state

 

[basquebromance]

You folk, who insist upon joining in on above cretins threads, you are the problem, the above cretin spam posts(trolls)these threads by the gross, its not gonna solve a thing for you to enable this cretin to continue on doing so, stop participating in its trolling and it will soon whither upon the vine and die, this thread it has posted is a naked troll, and staff never ever boot them as they instantly do to good people who post real topics, topics that hit staff fascists right in their tiny little balls.

Don't feed the above troll, let it starve to death.....

how dare i try to discuss politics on a political forum? indeed very deplorable of me!

 

[TheGreatSatan]

The right wing, by nature, is not authoritarian. The more "right" you become, the more freedom you desire. The more "left" you become, the more control you desire.

Democrats are welcome to try to explain to me how these right wingers try to control them.

 

[basquebromance]

Opinion | Trump's GOP is unwell. The 1964 Republican National Convention reveals a lot about why.

A line runs from the 1964 Republican National Convention to Trump’s Jan. 6 riot. It has zigged and zagged over the years. But there is a path.

www.nbcnews.com

excerpt from 2020: can you see the similarities?

About noon on Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump took the stage at a “Save America” rally on the Ellipse, south of the White House, and surveyed a crowd seething with rage and animated by paranoia. Trump had lost his bid for re-election to former Vice President Joe Biden two months earlier. Yet in the intervening weeks, he had insisted that the results were fraudulent and that he had been denied a second term by a nefarious plot with a global reach.

Trump had long been a purveyor of outlandish conspiracy theories, and, in defeat, he was not going to stop. His volatile presidency had been marked by his never-ending promotion — through tweets and other statements — of dark, misleading, and false claims: The Deep State was out to destroy him. The investigations of Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election were a plot to subvert his presidency. News outlets were an unrelenting enemy conniving to crush him. Trump had painted a Manichean picture of the world for his supporters, asserting an array of sinister forces was bent on sabotaging his presidency. The 2020 election was the latest chapter in this saga, and during this post-election period, Trump had fed the paranoid right and his fellow Republicans outlandishly bogus claims of a stolen election.

Millions of Americans believed him — including many far-right extremists: white supremacists, Christian nationalists (who thought the United States should be identified and organized as a Christian state), neo-Nazis, and adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Certainly, among the people gathered for this rally — which was organized by a bevy of right-wing outfits controlled by Trump backers working in close coordination with the White House — were Republicans and Trump supporters who did not identify with QAnoners, Nazis, Christian bigots, and racists. These outraged people simply bought Trump’s guff about a rigged election. But hate and paranoia — nurtured by Trump — pervaded the air. Members of self-styled right-wing militias had come to town ready for action, responding to Trump’s tweet of December 19: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” One of these groups, the Oath Keepers, stashed weaponry at a Comfort Inn outside Washington, should Trump call on them to take up arms. Wearing body armor, they were ready to move in and apprehend members of the Deep State on Trump’s signal. During a campaign debate the previous September, Trump had told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” — and the group saw that as a message from Trump: Wait for my call.

Many in the audience had been primed the previous day during pre-march rallies in different Washington locations. These events featured speakers deemed too extreme by the main rally organizers to share the stage with Trump. At one of these well-attended kick-off events on Capitol Hill, paranoia and conspiracy theory ran rampant. Ali Alexander, who had dubbed himself the leader of the so-called Stop the Steal movement, told the crowd, “We are here to stop a coup that’s going on in our country.” He shouted, “This is our country, one way or another.” He led the audience in chanting, “1776! 1776! 1776!”

The flood of paranoia continued to pour forth at this January 5 event. Joe Flynn, the brother of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, blasted the “cowards” in the GOP. “Are we going to let them cower to these communists?” he asked. Roger Stone, the longtime underhanded political operative and Trump-whisperer convicted of lying to Congress (whom Trump had recently pardoned), insisted that Democrats and the media were mounting a “psy-op” against America to convince people Biden had won. “This is,” he declared, “a fight for the future of Western civilization as we know it. ... It’s a fight between the godly and the godless.” Alan Hostetter, a leader of the Stop the Steal forces in California, proclaimed war was at hand: “We are at war tomorrow. ... They need to know we as a people, a hundred million strong, are coming for them. ... I will see you all tomorrow at the front lines.” That day, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and still an ardent Trump advocate, proclaimed on his website, “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It’s gonna be moving. It’s gonna be quick.”

It was within this highly charged atmosphere that Trump was addressing his supporters and feeding them a toxic brew of baseless charges and doomful suspicion, declaring the existence of the United States was threatened. He warned, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He gave his irate devotees marching orders: “We’re going to the Capitol, and we’re going to try and give ... them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” Trump was directing an armed mob toward Congress. His supporters shouted, “Take the Capitol!”


A line runs from the 1964 convention to Trump’s riot. It’s not a straight line. It has zigged and zagged over the years. But there is a path. For years, the Party of Lincoln had encouraged and cashed in on paranoia, bigotry, and conspiracy theory. Trump took this to a new level, but this was not a new strategy.

More than half a century earlier, Nelson Rockefeller had tried and failed to tame a crowd of Republicans and distance the party from the Birchers and their conspiratorial right-wing swill. Trump, preying on similar conspiratorial sentiments, weaponized the delusions held by his supporters that he had originated and advanced. He was using the hatred, ignorance, and irrationality that gripped millions of Americans to subvert democracy.

There was madness within the mob. These enraged Trumpers lived in a false reality. The election was not stolen. Trump was not battling a secret cabal of pedophiles and cannibals. What they believed was wrong — extremely wrong. Yet facts no longer mattered. They were guided by what Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway once called “alternative facts.” For many of the Capitol Hill assailants, Trump and his paranoia had become a theology. With his false assertions, Trump had engineered a distorted reality — as had all those Republicans who did not refute Trump’s baseless claims about the election. He — and they — had encouraged the spread of this American psychosis.

 

[basquebromance]

there are 2 Republican parties. maybe it should split in half? today it's pro-Trump and anti-Trump. in the post-slavery era, it was pro-wealthy and pro-poor

"Much like the Democrats, who had spoken with two distinct voices on the issue of racial segregation since the 1930s, Republicans were applying a similar response to the urban crisis. Senate Republicans could argue that they had salvaged urban poverty measures while not ignoring – at least rhetorically – the need to restore order to the cities. House Republicans, on the other hand, could justifiably claim that they had put a check on the big spending of Great Society liberalism and firmly advocated a restoration of order. While journalists often tried to tempt Republicans into denouncing these contrasting points of view, GOP politicians, mindful of the Eleventh Commandment, were careful to avoid any divisive comments.Footnote90 This was not to be a return to the internal dysfunction of the early 1960s, which had led journalist Theodore White to classify the Republicans as ‘fratricidal twins’

 

[basquebromance]

Andrew Johnson: mentally ill white supremacist Republican

This is a country for white men,and by god,as long as I am president, it shall be a gov by white men."~andrew johnson (D-TN) In his mindset African Americans were an inferior race and Not fit to govern themselves.This mindset has Never "Left".

 

[basquebromance]

The lives of these (Native) American savages are a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than the wild beasts. -Theodore Roosevelt

this racist impulse led to war. many GOP politicians adore TR still today, though he was a mentally ill white supremacist racist

 

[BrokeLoser]

This is a response to the Fetterman mentally ill thread. i don't tolerate beating up on a weak man when he's down

Translation-
“I like the nutless, pussified Republicans of old….the ones who were afraid to get in the trenches and throw blows.“

 

[basquebromance]

Translation-
“I like the nutless, pussified Republicans of old….the ones who were afraid to get in the trenches and throw blows.“

not pussified, dignified

that's also the name of my next jazz album