It’s Not A Coup If It’s A Republican Coup
MAGAland consists of 74 million lunatics, conmen, and aspiring terrorists. But don't worry, they're Republicans.
Image by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
by Justin Rosario
One hundred years from now, assuming Donald Trump’s Great Grandson, Emperor Donald the IV, hasn’t reduced the planet to a radioactive wasteland after reading an unflattering tweet about himself, historians are going to write about the rise of fascism in the United States and wonder how people could be that cynical and/or breathtakingly stupid.
Case in point: There are increasingly loud calls from the right to overthrow the country in a violent coup (aka “engaging in insurrection”) by invoking, I kid you not, the Insurrection Act of 1807.
An 1807 law invoked only in the most violent circumstances is now a rallying cry for the MAGA-ites most committed to the fantasy that Donald Trump will never leave office.
The law, the Insurrection Act, allows the president to deploy troops to suppress domestic uprisings — not to overturn elections.
But that hasn’t stopped the act from becoming a buzzword and cure-all for prominent MAGA figures like Sydney Powell and Lin Wood, two prominent pro-Trump attorneys leading efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and even one North Carolina state lawmaker. Others like Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who was recently pardoned for lying to the FBI, have made adjacent calls for Trump to impose martial law. The ideas have circulated in pro-Trump outlets and were being discussed over the weekend among the thousands of MAGA protesters who descended on state capitols and the Supreme Court to falsely claim Trump had won the election.
This is all perfectly normal in crazy land because the American right wing is composed of conmen, lunatics, and aspiring terrorists.
Cynical Feeds The Crazy
Let’s be 100% clear on what is happening here: Republicans are feeding this on purpose. Sydney Powell and Lin Wood are probably (emphasis on “probably”) not as crazy as they appear. Dan Crenshaw certainly isn’t. Nor is Ron Johnson, Lindsay Graham, or the literally hundreds of Republicans who have been relentlessly pushing the “stop the steal” narrative.
They all know it’s a lie. None of them care.
Just like with the Tea Party, QAnon and the “stolen election” myth is a useful tool to attack Democrats. But this is even more effective since it doesn’t need the mainstream media to go along with it at all. The Tea Party required the press to give it constant attention and they got it. Ten yahoos in stupid costumes showed up to protest and you could guarantee it would be on the evening news.
Tea Party 2.Derp is different in that the more real journalists debunk their claims, the more “true” it becomes for the MAGA lunatics. The right has now fully detached itself from the real world which is exactly what Fox News, AM Hate Radio, right wing hate sites, and the GOP have been working towards for decades.
Millions of voters now fully believe, or at least act like it so there is no functional difference, that Democrats steal elections and can never legitimately govern. That has a short term and long term benefit for Republicans, neither of which can be overstated.
The short term benefit is that the right has become a grifter’s paradise. It’s been sixty years since the right figured out how to monetize fear and anger and now Republicans are raising hundreds of millions off of people they’ve reduced to a stew of mindless rage and paranoia. This is the Golden Age of grifting and the cynical are making bank.
The long term benefit is that Republicans can do pretty much whatever they want and they are guaranteed to have the base support them. They can give away trillions to the rich, pour poison into the water, take away Social Security and Medicare, openly betray the country to our enemies and none of it will matter. Just say “Socialism!” or “white genocide!” and 74 million Americans will crawl over broken glass to vote against a Democrat.
There’s a reason Republicans are looking at the 2020 election and deciding that everything is just fine. Sure, they lost the White House but the future's looking awesome for them! And if some of their number are assassinated by overzealous MAGAs? Eh, it’s worth it to keep the money coming in while dismantling the country.
It’s not like the base is sane enough to notice.
Crazy Gets Crazier
It’s been a long time since anyone accused the average Republican voter of being well-informed or sane but their ability to do anything but incoherently screech buzzwords seems to have evaporated. Even a decade ago, I was able to have actual debates with Republicans. They weren’t particularly honest debates and Republicans have always had a tenuous connection to the facts but at least they were relatively rational and in something resembling English.
Increasingly, my conversations look more like this:
If I put in some effort to push their jolly, candylike buttons, the conversation becomes even less coherent:
This is what happens when you spend all of your time in the right wing echo chamber voluntarily bingeing on a diet of hate and lies. You start to speak a different language from the rest of the world.
In the real world, “Pelosi Biden Swallwel Feinstein Clinton's Obama Bloomberg CNN Hollywood NBA'' doesn't mean anything. In MAGAland, these words are shorthand for a vast conspiracy against America that you don’t have to explain. Or have evidence for. Or even, really, understand. You just have to repeat the invocation and it’s true.
With all need for critical thinking outsourced to Carslon, Limbaugh, Breitbart, and the rest of the massive right wing propaganda machine, the Republican base is ill-equipped to understand how badly Republicans are destroying their future. Which, of course, is the entire point.
Once upon a time, racist white people understood they were trading a better future for the chance to screw over minorities. Now, they really think melting the ice caps will be good for the planet, and also that it’s not really happening at the same time. They think Obamacare is evil socialism and that no one better touch their Medicare, at the same time. They want to use the Insurrection Act to launch the largest act of insurrection since the Civil War.
None of it makes any sense but the Republican base is lost in a haze of fear, paranoia, and rage. The last thing they care about is making sense.
Which is precisely what aspiring terrorists need. (cont. below)
Now out for Banter Members:
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When you've lost Pat Robertson, it's good sign the coup isn't going to work, says Ben Cohen
How To Recruit Your Terrorist
Our good friends, the white nationalist terrorists, love the idea of a military coup. Or Martial Law. Or just a good ol’ second civil war. Or, really, anything that lets them start with killing the people they hate.
For that to happen, you need a country as destabilized as possible and, to them, the current Republican Party is a godsend. They’ve delivered all the proper ingredients: Economic collapse, racial strife, international threats, a weakened federal government that turns a blind eye to right wing extremism, and a right wing propaganda machine making sure millions of Americans have absolutely no idea who is to blame for all of their woes while keeping them really angry and afraid all the time.
If there’s a better breeding ground for white nationalist terrorism, you’d be hard-pressed to imagine it.
Unsurprisingly, recruitment has been a breeze for extremists these last several years. White men are extremely susceptible to radicalization as they watch their political, social, and economic power become diluted by women and other marginalized communities demanding a seat at the table. The very notion of having to compete on an equal playing field is horrific to people who insist they have no privilege whatsoever.
Instead of blaming their failure to thrive on their own mediocrity and a system they built to benefit the rich and only the rich, white men would prefer to blame Jews or feminism or Antifa or BLM or a secret Communist cannibal cabal. Because taking responsibility is hard. Blaming everyone else is much easier.
Once you have people convinced America is under attack by nefarious shadowy conspiracies, you can convince them that any action is justified, including mass murder.
There’s an awful lot of people who think mass murder is “patriotic” these days.
It’s Not A Coup If It’s A Republican Coup
The most dangerous aspect of the Republican descent into fascism is the belief of millions of otherwise normal people that anything Republicans do is not just legal and justified, but moral. If Donald Trump had Joe Biden and Kamala Harris dragged out into the Rose Garden tomorrow morning and executed, 74 million Americans would go to their grave insisting it had to be done.
They’ve already convinced themselves that concentration camps are good and necessary and that torturing children is vital to the safety of America. In 2016, they could claim ignorance about who Trump was. In 2020, they knew exactly who he was and 11,000,000 more people voted for him, anyway.
For the last month, Republicans have been attempting to stage a coup with the full support of their base. The fact that it is the most ridiculous and poorly planned coup in history is irrelevant. It’s happening. It’s still ongoing. The calls for violence are escalating. The belief that it is legal, justified, and moral are absolute. If Republicans are doing it, it cannot be wrong. And when it fails, what comes after will also be legal, justified, and moral.
No matter how many people die.
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When you've lost Pat Robertson, it's good sign the coup isn't going to work, says Ben Cohen
You cannot engage in a battle of wits with people who are unarmed.
Let the loser fuckers try and overthrow the results. Seven million more voters told them and their Dear Leader to fuck right off with their bullshit. And everytime they tried to change things, they got squashed like the bugs they are. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will not tolerate this kind of hate, and neither will decent thinking Americans, who are in the majority. Their "funtime" is over!