Trump and his entire crew are intentionally wrecking the government

[Hortensis]

69. You're one of a relative few who were aware and saw this coming.

The religious right's alliance with conservative business plutocrats scares me bad also, not least because people don't realize it's happening.

I was a young mother with tiny children during the Nixon scandal. It was ugly, sometimes fascinating, but I seldom did more than scan the headlines in the L.A. Times over breakfast. Aside from the usual worry about the "military-industrial complex," I was mostly clueless about more occult right-wing trends.

I only began to really see it with the end of the cold war. All of a sudden the kind of conservatives who were sure we had to destroy Russia before they got us had that taken away and badly needed a new threat to fear. Instead of a foreign enemy, though, they were helped to find it inside America and turned virulently on the left, the Democrats, the dirty radical liberals. New right wing media went after the Clintons with a hugely funded hateful, virulent dishonesty that was unprecedented. Email brought new vicious lies every week.

My husband belonged to a sportsmans club that had lots of conservatives, and as a group they turned hostile and aggressive when politics were discussed. Like if we tried to discuss the emails they chortled over. Our next-door, close friends of over two decades the same, so that we became estranged. We lost another pair of old friends in a flash when they attacked while we were playing cards. So it was then that I started reading and seriously looking for answers as to what was happening on the right.

Even then I believed enough of them, those who were good people in other aspects of their lives, would finally reach lines they wouldn't cross. I still thought/hoped for that in 2016. No longer.

Well, it's coming to a head now. Of course, I thought it was in 2016. But this time hopefully they feel the pain themselves and enough of them have the sense to back away from it.