Republicans Invariably Hate Extremism Except for Their Own
Though I voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 before switching to Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic primary I was nevertheless convinced that if Sanders had won the Democratic presidential nomination we would then be learn just how much Americans hate Jews and Socialists and Socialist Jews.
I have no doubt that if Sanders were the Democratic nominee in 2016 or 2020 it would unleash a tidal wave of anti-Semitism and anti-Socialist rhetoric the same way Obama’s presidency reminded us all just how racist our country remains and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run served as an ugly reminder that a sizable portion of our country despises women with a white-hot fury.
In that respect four of Joe Biden’s huge advantages in the 2020 presidential race entailed not being Jewish, not being a woman, not being black and not being a Socialist.
Since Biden is a straight, white, Christian centrist Democrat Republicans could not attack him for being a woman, or black, or Jewish, or a Socialist. So they cynically decided to attack him on the spurious logic that while Biden might appear to be a straight white heterosexual man with ideas very much in the political mainstream he was actually nothing more than a puppet for the Jews, African-Americans, women and radical Socialists who actually call the shots.
Trump continually promoted the laughable fiction that “Sleepy Joe” was a passive, weak-willed ventriloquist’s dummy controlled by AOC, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
When polled, Americans have historically expressed overwhelming support for Liberal ideas but that has not kept Conservatives from arguing that Democrats are inherently dangerous extremists with radical views that will destroy capitalism and undermine the fabric of our society if implemented.
It’s not just AOC and Bernie Sanders that Conservatives have relentlessly branded as dangerous extremists: it’s everybody in the Democratic Party, including Joe Biden.
The thinking goes that Democrats are all really tax and spend, tree-hugging Liberals and Liberals are, in fact, nothing but Socialists unwilling to admit to themselves and the world that they’re secretly intent on destroying capitalism. Socialists, of course, are in fact Communists but also, confusingly, Nazis.
Consequently every Democrat is by extension also a Liberal, a Socialist and a Communist.
No, he didn’t!
Even after his humiliating defeat in 2020, the Republican Party still takes its cues from Donald Trump, a terrifying creature of the Alt-Right who can’t refer to a Democrat without specifying helpfully that they’re part of the “Radical left”, extremists, socialists and puppets of various Conservative bogeymen and women, including AOC, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Antifa and the Chinese government.
Words matter. Democrats are not Communists. Though they may be on the same side of the political spectrum there is a world of difference separating a centrist Democrat like Joe Biden from a proud Bolshevik. For that matter, there’s a world of different separating Biden from a Democratic Socialist like AOC or Bernie Sanders. Yet Republicans like to pretend that everyone left of Donald Trump is an unapologetic Marxist because it’s an effective scare tactic and also because it allows Conservatives to act as if Democrats are the extremist party with wild ideas that must be publicly renounced, as opposed to the sizable contingent of Republicans who think Tom Hanks rapes the babies he eats in his Satanic rituals and that Donald Trump was sent by Jesus to take down a cabal of Luciferian Democratic pedophile monsters.
Trump Republicans are all about projection. So the most radical, extreme members of the party are the ones hollering the loudest about the need to confront the dangerous extremism of Democrats.
Laurie Boebert brings a fucking Glock to Congress because she thinks Antifa terrorists are going to ambush her on her way to work. Q-believing lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene terrorized David Hogg on video because he became a gun-control activist after seventeen of his classmates were brutally murdered because she thought she was striking a principled blow against anti-gun extremism. Stalking a teenager who had suffered unimaginable trauma made sense to Greene because she saw his views as radical and extreme and something that must be fought as ferociously as possible, by any means necessary.
Think of it this way: a lot of the Qanon cultists and Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol with an eye towards stopping the certification of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States undoubtedly did so because they thought they were taking a stand against extremism.
The insurrectionists did not realize that they, in fact, were the dangerous, un-American extremists because they had been socialized by Trump and his cult to see themselves as patriots doing whatever they had to do keep Socialism from infecting our country rather than radicals whose ideas are dangerous as well as extreme.
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