To tweak (and perhaps burnish) Lord Acton: Almighty power corrupts absolutely. For several decades and counting, God’s Own Party (GOP) has had its cake and eaten the known universe.
If that sounds overblown, let’s look. As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Morris Dees (Hate on Trial, A Lawyer’s Journey) reveals, the once-proud “Party of Lincoln” now shares common, blood-soaked ground with the longtime Cross-flaunting, pro-GOP Ku Klux Klan- and with the underreported, un-American Aryan Nations.
Don’t look now, but the Proudly Boyish Republican clan now openly touts Adolf Hitler. And bust my buttons! As God is my witness, so does Trump chum Nick “I LOVE HITLER!” Fuentes. According to Mother Jones’s Kiera Butler’s firsthand account (“My Deeply Unsettling Return to the Moms for Liberty Conference,” 7/6/23), so has MFL co-founder Tiffany Justice. Not to mention the self-styled “Chosen One” Himself- who echoes, with evident impunity, the Fuhrer’s wails for “vengeance” on “vermin,” while effectively howling for a “bloodbath” that he suggests would culminate in President Biden’s execution.
Talk about conflicted. On one hand, rabid tuskers effectively (and often overtly) endorse such fascism-writ-large. On the other hand- never mind the Aryan Nations’, the Klan’s, und der Fuhrer’s animus toward Jews- the GOP styles itself, in effect, as the champion (if not the avatar) of Yahweh. (Go figure.)
Be it resolved: history repeats. In 1980, the KKK cheered Ronald ‘The Neshoba Firebrand’ Reagan. In 2016, it feted the parental pelf-made swell who’d been flagged by the DOJ (in 1973) for race-based housing discrimination.
As ever, what we don’t know can hurt us. Growing up, I had no clue that, in 1885, within screaming distance of the future site of my home (in Towson, Maryland), some Klannish thugs had imposed (you guessed it) trial by fire-and-rope. (Sweeping such stuff under the rug, while eternally idolizing Reagan- who, in 1971, smeared some African UN delegates as “monkeys”- what could possibly go wrong?)
Granted, our domestic terrorists have slain far more African American Christians than they have Jews. Still, last time I checked, neither the American Klan nor the German Reich was well-disposed to the latter. To memory-hole the former’s violent anti-Semitism (as Big News has done) can’t help but tend to normalize-and-enable the creeping, violent, America-scourging tyranny we now see around us.
Or to which we turn blind eyes.
Better late than never, Dems need to face the fact that, through time, the conventional wisdom has given the Gipper’s and then Big Blonder’s cult carte blanche to wage “holy war” (quoting Jerry Falwell) six ways to Sunday. All while battling, in a sense, from BOTH SIDES: that is, as purportedly pro-Jewry, while still (now far from subtly) pro-Nazi.
In other words, (re the latter), pro-snake. (For a motto, the GOP could aptly deploy Lady Macbeth’s advice to her seditious spouse: “Look like the innocent flower/ But be the serpent under it.”)
At bottom, for roughly 45 years, the so-called “liberal media” have fundamentally equated “the religious right” with religion, period. Predictably enough, not unlike the titular horror in the late Baltimorean Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” our body politic now hangs in the balance.
To stress what should be obvious: let NO person or party get off scot free while spouting pro-Nazi screed. Let those who foist such flagrant evil on our great country be smitten harshly at the polls- and, to the fullest extent of the law, face punishment (for God’s sake, amen).