The crazy uncle: Trump puts right-wing extremism on the ballot
The crazy uncle: Trump puts right-wing extremism on the ballot
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-crazy-uncle-trump-puts-right-wing-extremism-on-the-ballot/2020/10/18/55988d8c-0fe2-11eb-8074-0e943a91bf08_story.html
What if the United States is not as divided and unhinged as it has seemed these past four years? What if the result of the 2016 election was primarily the product of a flawed electoral-college system, the mistaken assumption of too many voters and pundits that Donald Trump couldn’t win, and a last-minute intervention by an FBI director?
snip//
What’s often missed about Trump, Trumpism and the transformation of the Republican Party is that much of what is going on now harks back to the 1960s — but the other 1960s that most people don’t think about. Not the civil rights and antiwar movements or the New Left, but the far right that was at least as important at the time: the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, the White Citizens’ Councils and comparable groups. This wacky right wing has gained more traction in our time than it did then because of right-wing media and an Internet that did not exist 60 years ago.
Trump is both a product and an instigator of this radicalization. He sees far, far-right conspiracists as an important part of his political base. Thus, when NBC’s Savannah Guthrie asked Trump about the QAnon conspiracy theory holding that, as she put it, “Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior,” Trump insisted that he knew “nothing” about its supporters except that “I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard.”
That’s a bit like saying, “I don’t know much about the Ku Klux Klan, but I know they honor the American flag and fight very hard for it.”
snip//
