After President Joe Biden's State of the Union address on Tuesday, it was generally agreed across the media that Joe from Scranton had won the evening by masterfully baiting Republicans into showing their asses. The second star of the night, however, was also indisputable: The brilliantly white wool coat with an alpaca fur trim that had the misfortune of being draped over the body of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

Look, it was a lovely coat, but its proximity to such a repulsive person created an unmistakable air of comic book supervillainy. It served as a stark reminder that, despite her classless and illiterate demeanor, Greene is actually a wealthy heiress who spent her pre-political life as a woman of leisure. She got compared to a Stephen King monster, a gangster's wife in a mob movie, and, of course, a campy Disney villain.

Alas, even though Greene made the unusual choice of wearing a coat inside, all too many folks assumed she must not know how she looked. "Why is she wearing a white fur coat to the State of the Union address?" Seth Meyers asked on his late night comedy show. He went on to compare her to "a Long Island dance mom about to get her final warning."

But, of course, it's wiser to assume that Greene knew exactly how she looked. Moreover, her ridiculously out-of-place outfit did exactly what it was meant to do: Get her photo on the front of every newspaper and website imaginable. Aso intentional: Drawing scorn from people like Meyers, which she can then repackage as "proof" that she's a victim of the "coastal elite," defined not by money, which she has plenty of, but the fact that they know the difference between the Nazi police and cold tomato soup. Above all else, she wanted to look the part of the villain. Far from being people who are unaware they're the baddies, the MAGA movement is about glorying in their own self-image as political scoundrels.

Greene is far from the only one. Despite their hatred of actual drag queens, the modern GOP has a robust interest in using costumes to create fantasy versions of themselves — and almost always, that fantasy is of someone who is a proud scalawag. The current trend of Republicans dressing like Batman villains can be traced back to dirty trickster and shameless Nixon fan Roger Stone. For instance, he dressed like the antagonist of a Charles Dickens novel for Donald Trump's inauguration.

Trump is more married to his badly fitting suits than he ever has been to one of his wives. However, the White House staff understood the value of sinister costuming choices and used the body of Melania Trump to often send a message of cackling evil.

Since then, the Bond villain method of self-expression has started to really spread through the GOP. Rep. George Santos of New York has a background as a drag queen, but the current fantasy he's serving is "malevolent prep school student in an 80s movie." (Are those even prescription glasses?) After successfully evading an FBI investigation for sex trafficking of minors, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida's hair only seemed to grow taller, turning him into a dead ringer for Cesar Romero's version of The Joker. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, whose fabricated background is drawing Santos comparisons, favors dramatic makeup paired with shiny menswear that looks very much like a cheap knockoff of Annie Lennox's dominatrix stylings in the "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" video.

If this was "RuPaul's Drag Race" and the category was "Sinister Visions," most of these folks would be strong competitors. But they are politicians in D.C., a town where a lot of people deliberately dress terribly so that the voters keep buying the humble-servant-of-the-people routine. For Republicans, especially, looking too stylish has always been a dangerous proposition. Vanity is associated with femininity, and "feminine" is the worst thing you can be in GOP land. Even the women tend to dress more like church ladies than people with real money (which they usually are), lest someone accuse them of having airs.

But MAGA is not interested in the traditional false humility of American politicians. It's a movement dedicated to the darkest desires of American right-wingers. It's about dispensing entirely with pretensions of morality and giving themselves permission to be proud villains. Trump, of course, started things by bragging about how good he is at getting away with crime, from sexual assault to tax fraud. He was backed by an online army of trolls with Pepe-the-frog avatars, who relished their newfound freedom to use politics as cover to harass and abuse people.

By the time the pandemic rolled around, Republicans were so caught up in their Trump-era self-image as vainglorious evildoers that they didn't even hesitate to reject masks, vaccines, or any measures to save human lives. Basic decency has been redefined as being "woke." People like Kyle Rittenhouse and Alex Jones are held up as heroes. One of their most popular pundits is a guy who calls himself "Cat Turd." More Republicans look the part of cartoon villains because that's what they've turned themselves into.

To a certain degree, I get it. Playing the part of the villain can be thrilling. I've long been a fan of goth and punk fashion, both of which get their glamour through transgression. The bad guys in movies are often way more fun than the heroes, from Ursula in "The Little Mermaid" to the characters in pretty much every Martin Scorcese film. The Satanic imagery in Sam Smith and Kim Petras's Grammys performance drew fake outrage from the right, but most people watching it had a good time with the playful blasphemies. Even a shiny good girl like Taylor Swift likes to play at being bad occasionally.

The problem with Republicans, of course, is they aren't actually playing. Their goals are straight evil, from forced childbirth to turning away political refugees to slashing the retirement benefits of seniors to decimating health care. What's shifted in the past few years is a willingness of GOP leaders to wink knowingly about the immorality of their own views. Sure, there's still plenty of effort put into pretending that they want to do heinous things for good reasons. So we still have to sit through disingenuous conservatives feigning "pro-life" reasons for abortion bans, for instance. But, led by shameless criminals like Trump, there's just a lot more trollish approach on the right, one that treats evil like it's just an impish good time. Once "triggering the liberals" became the main political goal, gleeful wickedness became inevitable. Of course, many of them want the costuming to match their self-congratulatory attitude about being the worst.

The political media fascination with Rep. George Santos, the New York Republican who appears to have faked approximately 95% of his life, is such that it was inevitable that it would draw a "savvy" backlash piece scolding the press about their priorities. The wannabe party pooper finally emerged last week at the Washington Post in an opinion column headlined, "Real people don't care about George Santos." In it, self-assigned buzzkill David Byler argued "America doesn't seem to care" about Santos, which he can tell based on Google search traffic.

Our nation was founded by puritans, so as soon as people had a laugh over Santos, inevitably someone would shake their finger disapprovingly. But there were some flaws in Byler's argument, starting with his assumption that Santos' own embarrassed constituents are not "real" people. There's also the fact that Google Trends isn't a very exacting measure of interest in a subject, as it only measures if people are searching out information. It doesn't capture people who read articles they saw on social media or directly on a news website. Traffic to stories about Santos is plenty healthy on that front.

But perhaps most importantly, this narrow-minded focus on search traffic ignores what a lot of the sneered-at political observers saw coming a mile away: The imminent George Santos makeover into MAGA's Next Top Superstar.

Santos may not matter to "average" Americans, but his story is being leveraged directly into the right-wing propaganda machine that currently controls the Republican Party. On Thursday night, for instance, Santos was sanctified into the echelon of MAGA saints by the Pope of neo-fascism himself, Tucker Carlson. In a typically dishonest segment on his wildly popular Fox News show, Carlson painted Santos as a hapless victim of the bigoted news media by pretending that the only thing Santos lied about was his volleyball career. (Which is one of the more minor fake careers and hobbies Santos has claimed on his resume.) Media Matters has a sample of the extremely silly diatribe:

It was a tissue of lies constructed to deceive the American people. There was no volleyball scholarship. There was not a single dollar of volleyball scholarship. George Santos made it all up out of whole cloth, out of thin air. George Santos is an ersatz volleyball player. A fraud, a ghoul. People voted for this man believing he had played collegiate volleyball on a scholarship and he hadn't.

And yet tonight ladies and gentlemen, this thief of volleyball glory strides the halls of the United States Congress unimpeded by law enforcement. It's like another insurrection.

Carlson doesn't really have arguments or evidence, but he does do a bang-up impression of someone sarcastically brushing aside nonsense. Except what he's brushing away is usually pretty serious stuff, such as fascist attacks on democracy, attempts to save lives during a pandemic, or, in this case, unbelievable amounts of fraud that look potentially criminal in many cases. With Santos, the number of lies Carlson is ignoring is truly staggering. Santos lied about his resume, his religion, his marriage, his family history, and claimed connections he doesn't have to the Holocaust, 9/11, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and an assassination attempt that appears fictional. It is really no exaggeration to say it's easier to list the things he hasn't lied about (his age and his birthplace in Queens).

But just as Catholic saints get their status through martyrdom, the saints of MAGAdom must get theirs through falsified tales of victimhood at the hands of "woke mobs" or the "fake news media."

People right-wingers hate are alarmed at Santos and his staggering trail of fraud. So if the "libs" have a negative reaction to Santos, in the troll-based logic that drives the modern GOP, that must mean he's their newest champion. And let's just state for the record that, while Byler may not see left-leaning news consumers as "real people," he probably wouldn't say the same about the millions of Trump voters whose entire worldview is shaped by the crap that Fox News pours into their heads every day.

Carlson didn't reach the conclusion that Santos is the latest MAGA idol all on his own. Practically from the moment that Santos's deceit was exposed by the New York Times, Steve Bannon, the Joseph Goebbels-wannabe who frequently sets the GOP agenda with his popular "War Room" podcast, was championing the pathological liar. Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have also rallied to Santos' side, claiming he's only a target because he's a "fighter." It's unclear who he has ever "fought" for besides himself, but then again, the same could be said of most MAGA figures, from Donald Trump on down.

It's not a mystery why these leaders think the right-wing audience is ready to accept Santos as the next MAGA savior. All that matters to the modern right is "owning the liberals," and who better to do that than someone who lies constantly for no apparent reason other than the sheer thrill of it?

Certainly, Santos seems to grasp that the move that will take him from a low-level con man to the ranks of the richest MAGA grifters is to lean into trolling. So he's been rolling out the standard issue liberal-owning stunts for weeks now: Flashing the white supremacist-aligned "OK" hand signal during a House vote. (He even knew how to do it so it was clear enough to photograph but so quick he could pretend later it wasn't intentional.) Wearing an assault rifle pin while playing dumb about why it offends people to celebrate the preferred weapons of mass shooters. Feeding the press donuts and acting like they had somehow become complicit in the evil by eating them. Getting into Twitter fights with drag queens, who are the favorite punching bag of the authoritarian right. (Santos seems to have a past as a drag queen, as well, but this is just part of a favorite right-wing trolling tactic, to recruit members of a hated minority to speak out against their own.) Dunking on former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for criticizing him by tweeting "cry about it."

Reports suggest Santos is delighted by all the negative attention he's getting in the press. An exceptionally short-lived aide recorded a conversation in which Santos was dressing him down, and right in the middle of it, Santos suddenly exclaims, "Don Lemon just texted me — I'm sorry, I'm listening to you — Don Lemon just texted me!" Getting his name on CNN, even during a story on how he is the worst, was just that thrilling to Santos.

Santos even hired former Steve Bannon employee and professional troll, Vish Burra, as a top aide. Burra's defense of Santos is cynical and self-congratulatory: The lying is a form of "shitposting," which is internet speak for saying outlandish things to draw outrage and attention. For the Trumpist right, aggressive trolling is what politics is all about.

Imagining that they're outraging the left is what the GOP audience gets out of this. (No one tell them that the left's reaction to Santos is more amusement than genuine fury.) But there's an even darker reason that Carlson, Bannon, Taylor Greene, etc. have decided to rally round Santos: He's very useful as a weapon in their larger war on truth.

As with Trump, it's overly simplistic to look at these people, with their non-stop disinformation, as mere liars. Liars are people who are sincerely trying to deceive people. In many cases, it's not at all evident that right-wing audiences actually believe the asinine B.S. that is rolled out by the likes of Carlson and Bannon. For instance, the "outrage" over M&M spokescandy shoe choices is less sincere anger than it is a collective bit of performance art. Both Carlson and his audience merely pretend to be mad as a way to keep ironic distance from their own weird sexual hang-ups. Similarly, conspiracy theories like Trump's Big Lie are often less about true belief and more about displaying fealty to their tribe.

There's a point to right-wingers constantly saying and "believing" things they know not to be true. It's about devaluing empirical reality. Fascists want "truth" to flow from what the right-wing authority figures say is "true," not from lived experience or verifiable facts. They are trying to construct a world where facts don't matter, and only power does. The first step is getting their tribal community to agree collectively to stop distinguishing between true and false and to only claim to believe what is convenient for their leaders or their cause.

For that goal, Santos is useful. He is living the fascist dream of a man whose entire existence seems unmoored from the power of facts. If the MAGA leaders can turn him into a hero, he'd be a living exemplar of their post-truth yearnings: "Truth" can be whatever you want it to be. After all, right-wingers already hate the way facts — Trump lost the election, COVID-19 is real, LGBTQ people exist — get in the way of their desires. They just need permission to let go of that last tendril of reality and start living purely in their authoritarian fantasy world. Santos shows the way. It's unlikely he will be going away any time soon.

It's been entertaining, in a dark sort of way, watching the mainstream media try to explain what is fueling the conflict between Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House Republicans' supposed leader, and the 20 or so members of his own caucus who are preventing him from becoming House speaker. The New York Times called the anti-McCarthy faction "ultraconservative" and the Washington Post noted that most are full-on election deniers. Not only are these euphemisms for what they actually are — a bunch of fascists — it also falsely implies that the disagreement is ideological. It's not. McCarthy is in full agreement with the anti-democratic views of this group. He was among the 147 House Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack. While McCarthy was initially cranky about the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, he has done everything in his power to shield the powerful conspirators who incited it, including Donald Trump himself, from any accountability.

There's no real daylight between the foaming-at-the-mouth fascists and McCarthy, much less other GOP leaders like Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, a shameless coup booster and reborn Trump loyalist, and Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who once described himself as "David Duke without the baggage." Recognizing this, some political observers have started describing the fight as "personal," as if the anti-Kevins just don't like the guy. But that's not plausible either, since the common factor uniting the 20 or 21 holdouts is not personality type but the fact that they come from safe seats in deep-red districts. These folks are far more worried about losing a primary to someone who runs on a more-fascist-than-thou platform than about losing to a Democrat.

After McCarthy failed to win the speakership three times on Tuesday, the punishment continued on Wednesday. Those whom Team McCarthy dubbed the "Taliban 20" aligned with Democrats on the "let Kevin suffer" platform, allowing the voting to resume. After three more tedious roll-call votes in which absolutely nothing changed — except that the renegades are now voting for Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, not Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio — the House adjourned again with no speaker, no assigned committees, no members actually sworn in. (Actually, it adjourned twice, after briefly reconvening on Wednesday night.) Presumably they'll try again on Thursday, and perhaps some kind of deal will be struck, although no one seems to have a viable theory of what that will be.

So if this godawful mess is not personal or ideological, then what is it? Ultimately, it's not about Kevin McCarthy at all. It's about the Republican Party's self-conception in its exciting new fascist iteration (which was forged under Donald Trump but doesn't really have much to do with him either). Fascism needs to be understood less as an ideological movement and more as a movement devoted to the worship of power for its own sake, and also a dramatic aesthetic of constant warfare and performative purification of an ever-narrower conception of the body politic.

Those are big words, and I apologize, but here's a simpler way to put it: Fascists are a bunch of trolls who are never satisfied. They must always prove their power by ganging up on someone who's been cast as an "outsider." As the Atlantic's Adam Serwer famously observed, "The cruelty is the point." Most of the time, the targets are racial and sexual minorities, liberals or immigrants. But sometimes, that restless need to constantly bully someone manifests in purification rituals, where a once-trusted or even beloved insider is deemed an outsider who must be ritually purged. It's just Kevin McCarthy's turn in the proverbial barrel, though he almost certainly hasn't helped his cause by constantly debasing himself before the hardliners. He's marked himself as a weenie, and that just makes his tormentors enjoy watching him suffer even more.

The Trump era has, understandably, led to a nonstop and frustrating debate over what exactly "fascism" is. I favor the famous 1995 essay by Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, who argued that fascism is a movement of "rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion," replete with contradictions and incoherencies, and yet that "emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations."

In other words, fascism is about vibes more than fleshed-out ideas. Very, very authoritarian vibes. One big reason we can identify Republicans as fascist now is because while their appetite for power knows no end, their willingness to govern — that is, to use power to achieve substantive ends — has diminished to nothing. It's all vibes and no ideas, beyond an inchoate loathing of anyone they deem too dark-skinned, too queer or too literate to be truly American.

In his "Ur-Fascism" essay, Eco laid out 14 features of fascism, which add up not to a coherent political philosophy so much as a series of antisocial impulses. It's worth reading in its entirety, but the McCarthy debacle illustrates some of Eco's most important observations: Fascism is deliberately irrational. Indeed, it makes a fetish of irrationality. It's a "cult of action for action's sake" that believes thinking before acting "is a form of emasculation." The fascist believes that "life is permanent warfare" and therefore there must always be an enemy to struggle against. That's why fascists love conspiracy theories. Their "followers must feel besieged," and since they have no real oppressors to rail against, they make up imaginary ones.

After Trump's coup failed and the red wave of the midterms didn't materialize, Republicans are turning on each other. Even healthy political parties tend to have periods of recrimination after suffering bitter defeats. For the dysfunctional Republicans, however, this anger is being refracted through their increasingly fascist worldview, which is paranoid, irrational and hostile to democracy. That's why the demands made by the anti-McCarthy faction are incomprehensible and seem to change by the hour. The mentality that "life is permanent warfare" leads to the party's desire to constantly purify itself of the enemy within, in this case the despised "RINOs." But as more and more RINOs get purged, the definition becomes more expansive and maintaining party purity becomes almost impossible. Eventually, craven sycophants like McCarthy are rechristened as RINOs and thrown overboard. There is no endpoint where the party has finally cleansed itself.

Watching Republicans tear each other apart like this isn't just entertaining, but also useful. Fascists are always itching for a fight. Under Trump, that energy was directed outwardly at their perceived enemies: Democrats, liberal "elites," immigrants, LGBTQ people and eventually democracy itself. But as this House leadership fight has shown, fascists will also turn on each other like a bunch of weasels in a sack. With any luck, they tear themselves apart before they can tear democracy down.

Nancy Pelosi may not be the House Democrats' leader anymore, but her party are responding to this clown show in a way that shows they retain the unity and clarity of purpose Pelosi typically brought to their caucus. They are resisting the centrist punditry that insists Democrats have a responsibility to swoop in and protect Republicans from their own worst elements, as if saving their most vicious opponents from their own mistakes were somehow the same thing as saving democracy. We saw this impulse most recently in the media reaction to Democratic campaign ads highlighting the MAGA bonafides of certain far-right candidates to GOP primary voters, believing those kinds of radicals would be easier to beat in a general election. Those media criticisms were based on the shaky assumption that fire-breathing fascists are a bigger threat to democracy than supposed "mainstream" Republicans like McCarthy, who share their anti-democratic views but can play moderate in front of the cameras.

Well, the strategy of sowing internal discord among Republicans is working pretty well so far. A lot of the GOP's most egregious nuts lost their elections. Those who made it across the finish line are currently in the process of blowing their party up. Democrats are wise to continue refusing to bail Republicans out of their own mess. Even though Kevin McCarthy is the fascist crowd's newest piñata, that doesn't mean it's good for Democrats or democracy if he secures the speaker's gavel. He has no interest in governing. The plan, if we want to call it that, was to ignore legislation and appoint lots of House committees to spread conspiracy theories about Joe Biden and other political foes. McCarthy was also expected to use threats about the debt ceiling and a possible government shutdown in a pointless and destructive effort to force cuts in Social Security and Medicare. By far the best thing for democracy is if the Republicans simply implode and their nefarious schemes never come to fruition.

Frankly, I think that's why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just did a friendly bipartisan event with Biden in Kentucky, highlighting the benefits of infrastructure spending. Not long ago, McConnell would have done everything in his power to keep a Democratic president from getting credit for a popular program. He may now be starting to see the downside to this nihilistic approach to politics, which threatens to consume his entire party.

It's more than likely, however, that the Kentucky event will only sow more intra-party discord, further enraging the burn-it-all-down types and turning them even more forcefully against GOP leadership. Republicans may control the House, but they can't control their own worst impulses. Meanwhile, Dark Brandon and the Democrats continue to flip the politics of fascist trolling back in the GOP's face. Democracy is still at risk, make no mistake. But it now seems possible that its enemies may tear their own house down before they get the chance to destroy ours.

Here are some snapshots of what the luminaries of the GOP, the cream of the Republican crop, have been up to since the predicted "red wave" of the 2022 midterms failed to materialize:

On Tuesday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Chaya Raichik, who runs the vicious anti-LGBTQ Twitter acccount Libs of TikTok. Despite Raichik's routine online pronouncements that she doesn't hate anyone, she revealed herself to be an unreconstructed bigot in the Anita Bryant vein. "The LGTBQ community has become this cult," she said, claiming that queer people are "just evil people, and they want to groom kids," and that the only reason people are gay or trans is because they've been brainwashed. Carlson's response to all this was simple: "Yeah."

The Republican-controlled Supreme Court, which struck down nearly every emergency measure to slow the spread of COVID, finally found a pandemic rule they like: One that kills people, rather than saving lives. This week, the court forced the Biden adminstration to keep enforcing Title 42, which uses the pandemic as a pretext to expel refugees seeking political asylum, even though health experts say it's not necessary to prevent viral transmission. This decision was in such obvious bad faith that even Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, took issue with it. Migrants who are turned away based on Title 42 are in danger of kidnapping, sex trafficking and murder.

On Christmas Eve, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, shipped a busload of migrants to Washington, D.C., dumping them outside Vice President Kamala Harris' official residence without winter clothes or shelter in subfreezing weather. Indeed, Abbott routinely uses the word "dumping" to describe his tactic of transporting migrants elsewhere, making it clear that he sees them as human trash. That was only the latest of these "dumping" stunts conducted by Republican governors, usually accompanied with rhetoric that sounds distressingly like that used on neo-Nazi websites.

Earlier this month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he would ask the state Supreme Court to investigate "any and all wrongdoing" related to the COVID vaccination campaign. During his press conference, DeSantis and his anti-vaccine quack surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, repeatedly suggested that drug manufacturers had lied about the safety of vaccines. Recent studies have demonstrated that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories have led to Republican voters dying at higher rates of than Democrats. "The Republican Party is unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of many of its own supporters," as Yasmin Tayag of the Atlantic concluded.

None of the central figures in these stories are obscure fringe characters. Carlson routinely has the most popular show on cable news, frequently drawing more 3 million viewers a night. Obviously, the justices on the Supreme Court and the governors of two of the biggest states in the country count as mainstream Republicans. DeSantis is enjoying a robust whisper campaign as a 2024 presidential candidate, and even leads Donald Trump in some polls of GOP voters.

Joe Biden and other Democrats were able to beat back a number of more colorful Republican candidates in the midterms by drawing a distinction between "MAGA Republicans" and the party's supposed mainstream. But, as these examples show, the bug-eyed malice that characterizes the MAGA movement has suffused the GOP from top to bottom, so much so that Republicans will gladly let their own voters die of a preventable virus to own the liberals.

There was a brief moment of hope that the GOP's poor results in the midterm elections might cause Republicans as a whole to "moderate," or at least pull away from noxious MAGA extremism. After all, data demonstrates that entirely accurate perceptions of the party's radicalism led independents — and even a small but crucial number of normally Republican voters — to break for the Democrats. But examples like these and countless others have made clear that the opposite is happening. Republicans aren't backing away from MAGA. They're doubling down. The cruelty that has come to define the party is only likely to intensify in the next year, resulting in more vicious attacks on LGBTQ people, more dehumanizing treatment of migrants, more deranged conspiracy theories, more pregnant people denied medical care with specious "pro-life" arguments, and more winking approval of political violence.

There are many possible explanations for why the GOP is going so dark, most of which revolve around the fact that the party's authoritarian base voters and its big-money donors have a lot more influence than potentially winnable independent voters do. But the unnecessary, gratuitous viciousness of so much of this stuff — seriously, no one asked Ron DeSantis to relitigate the pandemic! — makes that kind of bloodless explanation seem unsatisfying. It's time to ask a different question: Is it possible that GOP leadership is composed of the same unhinged sadists as their voting base?

In rational terms, it doesn't make a ton of sense for Republican leaders to lean even harder into MAGA nonsense. Both Abbott and DeSantis won re-election easily, but the overall trend-lines suggest that most voters are grossed out by overt cruelty. As David Graham at the Atlantic wrote last month, cumulative polling data suggests "the emergence of a big anti-MAGA coalition that started in the 2018 midterm."

That's exactly what is driving much of this GOP ugliness, I would argue. It's an angry reaction to the growing realization that most Americans think they're nuts. It's not rational at all — it's just vengeful. Since at least the days Ronald Reagan, Republicans have embraced the idea that they're the rightful rulers of the U.S., and that any Democratic win is a fluke or the result of some kind of cheating. (As Heather Digby Parton has repeatedly pointed out in Salon, Trump's Big Lie is just an expansion of the long Republican history of seeing any and all electoral defeats as proof of "voter fraud" conspiracy theories.) That sense of entitlement, however, is running headlong into a mountain of evidence that most Americans flat-out don't like Republicans and don't agree with their views.

America is a diverse nation, and also an increasingly liberal one in most important ways. Most Americans don't relate to the sexual conservatism, mandatory Christianity, white identity politics or regressive taxation fantasies that define the Republican Party in the 2020s. Rather than strategically adjusting to this changing reality, Republicans — meaning not just the base but also the leadership — just feel outraged. How dare the rest of Americans say "no thank you" to the policy preferences of the resentful, prudish white minority who think of themselves as the only "real" Americans?

I think often of the sputtering rage of Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing. Even though he lied through his teeth while denying that he tried to rape a girl at a high school party, I never doubted that Kavanaugh sincerely believed that a Supreme Court seat was his rightful due. His screaming, paranoid performance came straight out of the larger GOP mentality that the right kind of people deserve to be in charge, no matter what, and that any challenge to their domination is an insult not to be borne.

So it is across most of the GOP leadership. The ever-nastier behavior we saw after the 2022 midterms wasn't a show performed for the benefit of the Fox News-drunk base, or at least not entirely. That's just who these people are: privileged bullies who can't stand the idea of treating people different than themselves as equals. The more they come face to face with clear evidence that they're losing the battle for hearts and minds, the more they'll use the authority they still possess — which is a lot — to enforce ever more baroque punishments on the most vulnerable people in our society, out of their misbegotten desire for revenge.

One thing was dead certain within moments of the New York Times publishing its exposé on the many lies of George Santos: There was zero chance that this brand new Republican congressman-elect from New York would be shamed into giving up his seat. Perhaps that didn't seem obvious to everyone at first, especially those with lingering memories of the pre-Trump era, when we all pretended to believe that Republican voters cared about hypocrisy, lying, overt racism, sexual abuse or any of the other personal or professional scandals that used to take politicians down routinely. But I never doubted for a moment that Santos would move onward toward being seated and that the incoming Republican House majority would allow it.

On Dec. 19, the Times published its first article making clear that little or nothing on Santos' résumé was true. He had never worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. He did not run a pet charity. He hadn't graduated from Baruch College or, apparently, from any other college. His "business," the Devolder Organization, appears to be fraudulent. Nothing in that article convinced me that Santos wouldn't be sworn into Congress, and neither did the evidence that he is almost certainly not Jewish, as he had claimed to be, and that he had lied about his grandparents escaping the Holocaust. My faith that he will be seated on Jan. 3 remains unswerving, and has only been strengthened now that Democrats are calling on GOP leadership to expel Santos, which will only make Republicans dig in harder.

Now questions about Santos' possible criminality are beginning to emerge. According to the Times report, he pled guilty to check fraud in Brazil but apparently left the country without serving is sentence. Despite numerous signs that Santos' business career is mostly fictional, and evidence of significant personal debt in the recent past, he somehow lent his congressional campaign $700,000. Indeed, pretty much everything we know about his professional career (which isn't much) comes with a field of red flags.

Despite all this, the only way he doesn't join Congress as an esteemed member of the Republican caucus is if New York prosecutors can nail him for something first. I believe this in the way I believe that chocolate is delicious and cats are cute. After all, what is the modern GOP, if not a holding station for every two-bit criminal and grifter who wants the job security that can only come with exploiting the endlessly credulous Republican base? The party can no more start kicking out the fraudsters than it can stop trying to cut taxes for the rich. This is just who they are and what they do. George Santos is in no sense an anomaly. He is the Republican present and, even more to the point, the Republican future.

That much was made evident by the painfully predictable reactions of GOP voters in New York's 3rd district, where Santos beat Democrat Robert Zimmerman — who actually is Jewish — for the seat left open by Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi. In interviews with Politico, random Republican voters justified their continued support with an epic display of what-about-ism, mostly based on Fox News-derived fictions about Democrats.

"Truthfully, I don't trust the Democrats on anything they say. I see it on the TV and I turn it off," said one woman, in a typical example. Santos' voters didn't exactly defend him so much as argue, on no particular evidence, that whatever he did, the Democrats are worse.

This is what gets delicately described as "negative partisanship" in mainstream media and political science textbooks, and all too often treated as an equal problem on both sides. Of course it's true that both parties include some voters who are more motivated by dislike of the opposing party than by support for their own. But with Democrats, that at least has some basis in real-world concerns, given that Republicans are the party of abortion bans and the Jan. 6 insurrection. But on the other side, Republican voters mostly coast on hyperbolic vitriol about the evils of Democrats, which are at best vague insinuations of corruption, and at worst outright lies and QAnon-style conspiracy theories.

Convincing Republican voters to believe that Democrats are literally the worst people imaginable certainly helps Republicans win elections. But it's also destabilizing the party from within, because shady characters of all flavors now understand that no sin or crime is so great that it cannot be wiped away by running for office as a Republican. The result is a party full of cranks, chronic liars and petty criminals, a situation that gets worse every election cycle, as demonstrated by the Santos fiasco.

As usual, Donald Trump didn't invent this problem, but only distilled it to its essence. This all goes back well before him, as evidenced by the gold bugs and snake-oil peddlers who have long been the dominant advertisers in right-wing media. Trump probably decided to run as a Republican because he saw how vulnerable the party was to manipulators and con artists, but his 2016 election dramatically amplified the problem. Every charlatan in the country watched as Trump paid no political price whatever for a barrage of scandals involving corruption, malfeasance, gaslighting, lies and, eventually, actual sedition. To this point he's paid virtually no legal price, either. It may be fun to laugh at Trump for ranting about his "total immunity" on social media, but when you consider that Attorney General Merrick Garland has steadfastly refused to arrest Trump for any of his dozens of possible or likely federal crimes, you might be forced to conclude that Trump has a point.

We still don't know where George Santos got the money that allowed him to run and win a congressional election in a pivotal swing district. But he's still likely to be seated next week with no serious impediment, offering America's swindler class another reason to believe that going into Republican politics is like getting a license to commit fraud. There's no real chance of political backlash in a situation like this, with the GOP voter base heavily dosed up on Fox News hate. Worse yet, it seems increasingly clear that federal law enforcement is too afraid of looking "partisan" to prosecute Republican politicians over anything, so there are no serious legal consequences either. Sam Bankman-Fried may be kicking himself for getting into cryptocurrency instead of GOP politics, if what he wanted was the ability to defraud whoever you like with impunity.

Consider that just three days after Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas, Trump rolled out his "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT," which turned out to be a naked rip-off: A series of laughably terrible NFTs, priced at a whopping $99 a pop. They sold out almost immediately, despite having less intrinsic value than chewed-up bubble gum. Unsurprisingly, this enterprise may not have been entirely legal, due to some swiftly-documented copyright infringement issues. But nobody involved with this scam is worried about getting sued or facing prosecution, since "Teflon Don" has successfully conveyed the impression that the law can't touch him.

We'll see about that. There's a tendril of hope for justice after the criminal convictions delivered against the Trump Organization earlier this month. But we seem no closer to putting Trump in prison, and it's not even clear he will suffer financially from any of the charges and investigations he still faces. He'll just keep living like a billionaire, even if he's actually hundreds of millions in the red. Meanwhile, the Republican growth sector is visible in folks like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who treat the job as a social media grift and unabashedly side with far-right extremists and Jan. 6 insurrectionists, with no real fallout. When Santos is sworn in on Capitol Hill next week, it will send a Bat-signal across the land: Come hither, crooks and swindlers, con artists and hustlers all. You have a home with us, where you'll be free to cheat whoever you like and break any law. The base will forgive you pretty much anything, except being a Democrat.

It was too laughable not to share it: On his Twitter knockoff site Truth Social, Donald Trump posted on Wednesday about a "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT tomorrow," which included a video of him dressed as a superhero shooting lasers out of his eyes.

It's what the kids online call "cringe" — and oh man, it couldn't have been more perfect for the online churn of public mockery. I'm on a Twitter diet, but I totally sent this dumb image to my friends, so we could join in the hilarity. So many questions! Is Trump really so delusional about his physical form that he thinks he looks like Superman? How can his fans not perceive that he does not, in fact, look like that? The lasers-out-of-the-eyes thing is directly out of the "Dark Brandon" meme liberals use to celebrate Joe Biden's accomplishments. Does Trump not know how desperate he looks, trying to bite Dark Brandon's style? How dumb is he anyway?

Trump has not returned to Twitter, even though Elon Musk reinstated his account and publicly begged him to come back. But he managed to dominate Twitter on Wednesday anyway, as one liberal hater after another retweeted screenshots of the superhero meme, making sure that every Beltway journalist was well aware of Thursday's "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT." The silliness of it guaranteed much more coverage than if Trump had tweeted out a vaguely normal picture of himself.

Unsurprisingly, the actual announcement was not just underwhelming but an even higher degree of self-pantsing:

But here's the part we cannot ignore: Trump is going to sell a lot of those dopey digital trading cards. As viral marketing campaigns go, this one was a solid win. Not only did all that liberal dunking garner news coverage and dramatic social media spread, but he also conveyed an important message to his supporters: Those liberal elites are laughing at you. And the way to strike back, proving that you're in on the joke and making the liberals cry, is to buy this worthless crap and send Donald Trump more of your money.

Since my book "Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself" was published in 2018, its central thesis — that the modern right is motivated by an obsessive desire to troll the left — has become a lot more widely accepted. Just this week, Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent pointed out that Musk has gotten into the troll business because he understands that "for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself." By tweeting repulsive things and drawing liberal outrage and condemnation, Musk can get more engagement while sucking in more fans who love how angry he makes their perceived enemies.

But what is too often overlooked in these discussions is how much this empire of trolling relies on the right's inferiority complex. At the root of the trolling mindset is defensiveness. Conservatives perceive, not always incorrectly, that liberals are laughing at them for being a bunch of tasteless rubes with boring sex lives and expanding beer guts. This perception does not motivate a desire toward self-improvement, but instead a longing for revenge, mostly in the form of imposing their grossness on the supposedly more refined existence of those they despise.

This inferiority complex is why the term "elite" has become common currency on Fox News. They don't use it accurately — say, to describe those who hold excessive wealth and power, but as a swipe at the perceived progressive values of college-educate cultural tastemakers in coastal cities. It explains how Musk, who until very recently was ranked as the richest man in the world, can get away with styling himself as a populist hero. Childish as it may be, Musk and his fanboys are still agitated about their perceived rejection by the Cool Kids.

The slavish fandom that people like Musk and Trump attract is generally confusing to folks on the left, because those two guys are such embarrassing losers. Trump's superhero meme has its brother in Musk's recent bout of social media thirst:

It was already pathetic enough that Musk has been reduced to begging right-wing douchebags to like him. The items in that image make it worse, creating a virtual bingo card of terminal dweebness: Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. A painting of George Washington that was uncool when our grandparents were kids. A fake gun. In order to get the women of Tinder to swipe left faster, all you'd need would be a pet iguana and a decorative sword. (Arguably, the vajra on the table of a non-Buddhist counts for the latter.)

But it's a mistake to conclude that Musk's fans simply fail to understand how uncool the Tesla CEO has revealed himself to be. He's created a cult of dork solidarity around him, one committed to a "Revenge of the Nerds"-style fantasy of ruining Twitter for all those blue-checked people who make them feel bad about themselves. That doesn't just appeal to those who already identify as conservative, either. Musk's cult is part of a larger ecosystem that seeks to redirect angry young men toward fascist politics. Musk may be running Twitter into the ground financially, but as a right-wing political project, his takeover of the company is going great: He's adding 200,000 new followers a day.

In his recent book "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind," journalist Robert Draper explains that, in his many conversations with Trump voters, it became clear that they were not confused about the actual nature of Donald Trump's personality. In fact, he writes, "the MAGA faithful adored their emperor without clothes." As he told Salon, "everything that we would ordinarily view as a vice they found to be to be virtuous," often precisely because it pisses off liberals so much.

ou see this all the time on social media, when conservatives make jokes about how liberals hate the "bad orange man." In making that joke, they're indicating that they know Trump is a weird-looking guy who wears orange makeup every day and also that, by any reasonable standard, he sucks. But none of that detracts from his allure in the slightest. He's basically a human pile of dog poop they get to rub liberal noses in, an animated and endlessly whiny punishment they can inflict on those who make them feel insecure.

Shame is an odd emotion. It can sometimes motivate a person to slow down or stop behaviors that cause it. Just as often, however, it can backfire, creating a defensive reaction that causes the person to double down. Trump's dumb superhero meme is a good example of the latter tendency in action. Liberals have mocked conservatives for years for their hero worship of Trump. But rather backing down, they just go at it harder — admittedly, with a bit of ironic distance — by churning out cartoonish images that reimagine Trump as Superman or Elvis or Rocky or some other masculine icon.

Of course these folks are still suckers. They may think they're sticking it to the liberals, but as usual Trump is just squeezing them for cash. But as long as they keep nursing their grievance over real or imagined liberal mockery, Trump fans will never quite be able to see how much the bad orange man has been using them all along.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump effectively demanded the end of America's constitutional democracy. On his Twitter-substitute Truth Social, Trump called for "the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution," escalating his long-standing demands that the 2020 election be overturned in his favor. His call to terminate the constitution earned relatively little mainstream coverage. Trump's anti-democratic views are no longer surprising, plus there's no apparent mechanism for him to get his way on this, both of which likely contributed to the unwillingness to front-page his comments. But it also likely reflects an ongoing, shaky assumption in the Beltway press: That protecting democracy is too abstract of an issue for Americans to be invested.

During the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterms, mainstream election coverage appeared to be guided by the presumption that President Joe Biden's pleas to save democracy were largely being ignored by American voters, that high inflation and gas prices would instead drive them to punish the incumbent party at the polls and hand Republicans dramatic victories. This wasn't just conjecture, either. New York Times polling showed that, while voters did say democracy was under threat, they did not rate saving democracy as a voting priority.

The much-predicted "red wave" did not happen. Straightaway, there were early indicators that Americans would end up putting a higher value on democracy than they had told pollsters they would. Republican candidates who made a big show of supporting Trump's Big Lie, hinting they were open to interfering with the 2024 election, lost their elections at a much higher rate than almost anyone predicted. Aligning a Republican campaign with Trump meant performing an average of five points below non-Trumpy GOP candidates. Most importantly, Democrats won crucial races for governor and senator in states like Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania, shutting down Trump's likeliest path to interfering with the 2024 election.

There are strong signs the trend will continue in Georgia's runoff Senate election between incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and Trump-backed Republican challenger Herschel Walker. Georgia voters have been in long lines to vote, setting daily record turnouts, exceeding not only previous runoff elections but also any early voting day in the state's history. More than a quarter of Georgia voters have already shown up at the polls.

Part of that is due to Georgia Republicans passing a law to truncate the early voting calendar, which prominent Democrats like Stacy Abrams have criticized as voter suppression. People have fewer days to vote early now, concentrating early voters into longer lines and higher per-day averages.

Still, these numbers also suggest that the same democracy-protecting urge that shaped the midterm elections is likely in play. It's hard to argue that the runoff between Walker and Warnock will have much impact on those much-ballyhooed "kitchen table" issues. Democrats already have a 50-vote majority in the Senate. A Warnock win would help protect that, but it isn't likely to make a huge difference in the daily operations of the Senate. Democrats are still short one vote to overturn the filibuster. Plus, Republicans now control the House, which presents a significant roadblock for passing meaningful legislation with or without Warnock.

That said, voting in this election also has great symbolic value to many people, with Georgia's recently-passed sweeping voter restriction law compared by critics to Jim Crow-era voter suppression.

"Voter suppression is one of the surest cures for apathy," Charles Blow, a New York Times opinion writer who recently relocated to Georgia, wrote last week. "Nothing makes you value a thing like someone trying to steal it from you."

He describes the long lines to vote as "a poll tax paid in time," but notes that "voters are simply responding with defiance to the efforts to suppress."

This enthusiasm to show up for democracy may not have been evident in pre-election polls, but it's showing up in post-election data. On Monday, the progressive strategy group Way to Win released an exit polling report that shows, contrary to pre-election assumptions, protecting democracy was ranked a number two priority by voters, only behind the economy.

"Pundit predictions about what would move voters were wrong – the loss of abortion rights and other freedoms, including attacks on our democracy, drove a winning pro-freedom, anti-MAGA majority in the midterms," Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president of Way to Win, told Salon. "These issues helped us buck historic trends and avoid a red wave – and the same issues are particularly salient in Georgia."

Last week, research from Impact Research, a Democratic polling firm, showed similar trends. "Six in 10 voters cited protecting democracy as an extremely important reason that they decided to vote in November. This put the issue ahead of inflation (53%), abortion (47%) and crime (45%)," HuffPost reports. Not only did the issue motivate turnout, but it helped independent voters decide to back the Democrats.

To be clear, the high early turnout in Georgia doesn't mean that Warnock is guaranteed to win. As Blow notes, "all of the obstacles placed in voters' way" do cause a lot of voters to give up, even if it stiffens the spines of others. In addition, as a New York Times analysis from the weekend reminds us, "Georgia is still fundamentally a right-leaning state." Yes, it's hard to imagine Republican voters will be moved to stand in line to back someone as demonstrably unfit as Walker. Even Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican, confessed that, after waiting in line for an hour to vote, "I walked out of that ballot box showing up to vote but not voting for either one of them." But after a disappointing overall midterm election for Republicans, it is possible that many will show up to vote for Walker in hopes of carving out a victory.

Still, the high voter turnout plus this post-midterm polling shows that, despite warnings to the contrary, voters do put a premium on protecting democracy. As Brian Beutler of Crooked Media argued in a pre-midterm newsletter, Americans downplayed their concerns about democracy to pollsters and focus groups because of a "common human distaste for conflict." Most people "wish politics could be a kinder sport" and tend to react negatively to both the increasingly authoritarian rhetoric coming from Republican politicians and the dire warnings about fascism coming from Democrats. If Warnock wins in Georgia, it will be continuing evidence that, as uncomfortable as Americans may be with talking about these issues, they are still motivated to save the American experiment.

It has long been evident that Elon Musk is a moron, at least to those willing to see it. Well before the Tesla CEO overpaid for Twitter in the throes of a tantrum, there was a chorus of mostly-ignored people pointing out, repeatedly, that Musk's mental maturity appeared to have stagnated around the sixth grade. There was the time he rolled out a "ingenious" idea for tunnel-based transportation, only to have people point out that the subway has been around for over a century. Or the time he tried to push a useless and overly complicated plan to rescue a group of Thai children trapped in a cave. Or the time shortly after that when, still angry at being dismissed, he falsely accused the man who actually did save the children of being a pedophile. Or the time he acted like such an idiot on Joe Rogan's podcast that Tesla stock took a dive. Or the time he named his actual child X Æ A-12.

There are infinitely more examples. (His childish feud with rapper Azealia Banks is a personal favorite.) Yet somehow, no matter how often Musk has shown his ass in public, the damage to his reputation was fleeting. The business and tech press would be startled at his dumb behavior, but within 48 to 72 hours, it was all forgotten and Musk went back to being covered as if he were a genius, if perhaps an eccentric one.

Such is the power of the American mythology of the billionaire. The infatuation with our richest capitalists is related to, but in many ways goes even beyond, the illusion that the U.S. is a meritocracy. The notion that to be very rich must also mean you're brilliant permeates our society, justifying both ridiculously low taxes on the wealthiest Americans and the undue influence they exert over our political system. It's a social fiction that dates back to the Gilded Age and has covered up the intellectual deficits of many famous Americans. (Henry Ford comes to mind.) But it's gotten a lot more juice in the past few decades, as the new class of tech billionaires, starting with Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple, forged the image of the singular mastermind who, with little education and limited resources, remakes the world through the sheer power of their intelligence.

This presumption that wealth equals brains has so permeated our society that it's sometimes hard to see how pervasive it is. But the past couple of years — and indeed, just the past couple of months — have really done a number on the belief that having a fat bank account somehow inoculates one from being a dumbass. Watching Musk lay waste to Twitter, for no discernible reason beyond his desire to impress the biggest losers on the internet, has been a wake-up call. It's hard to imagine there will be the same mass forgetting of who Musk really is that we saw after all his previous public face-plants.

But it's not just Musk. The same process is unfolding for the single person who has benefited more than any other from the myth that money means you're smart: Donald Trump.

For those of us who always thought Trump was a dingleberry, it may not seem readily apparent how much he's really gotten a boost from the widespread assumption that wealth comes attached to inherent smarts. Trump coasted on this for decades. The entire premise of his reality show, "The Apprentice," was that he was some kind of business savant. As with Musk, Trump's gross and idiotic behavior — such as pushing the "birther" conspiracy theory about Barack Obama — was largely shrugged off as quirkiness instead of idiocy.

In 2016, a distressingly large number of people were able to tell themselves that it was OK to vote for Trump because his wealth must mean he's smarter than he seems. When I went to the Republican National Convention in 2016, one delegate after another insisted to me that there must be an ocean of intelligence under that dimwitted exterior, and pointed to his real estate empire as proof. Years later, it became clear that his wealth had been handed to him by others, and his principal accomplishment was to piss most of it away.

That was on top of a record of public tomfoolery that reached its zenith when he publicly suggested that doctors had overlooked the possibility that injecting bleach into the human body might cure COVID-19. In true Dunning-Kruger fashion, Trump then congratulated himself on knowing more than the entire medical establishment, due to this insight.

Trump lost the 2020 election for a number of reasons, but we can't overlook the strong possibility that four years of his outbursts disabused some number of his 2016 voters of the claims about his supposedly superior mental acumen. Yet the notion that Trump is a political sage underneath the braying boob exterior continues to have a remarkable hold on the GOP imagination. The expectation that the 2022 midterms would be a "red tsunami" was based in large part on the confidence that the gallery of QAnoners, snake oil salesmen and bumbleheads endorsed by Trump had also been anointed with some secret sauce that only he, in his infinite wisdom, could perceive or understand. Those candidates ended up losing by an average of about five percentage points more than other Republicans not cursed with Trump's blessing. Now the GOP establishment is struggling with the same doubts creeping into the tech press around Musk: Is it possible this guy's success was more about luck and privilege than savvy?

(To be clear, I don't think Trump's a total imbecile. He's a skillful criminal with a certain low cunning. He's just bad at all the things his defenders wanted to believe he was good at: Business, governance, literacy.)

Two examples, even as big as these, do not a trend make. But there's another big sign that the American faith in the galaxy-level intelligence of our wealthiest people is being rattled: the dawning realization that many people have exploited this mythology for the purposes of plain old fraud.

Just this past couple of weeks, we've seen both former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison and the total career implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In both cases, it should have been obvious that what they were selling to investors was pure nonsense. Holmes' alleged blood-test technology showed multiple signs of being a smoke-and-mirrors job, and numerous sensible people have been calling cryptocurrency a scam from the very beginning. However you slice it, a heavy dose of skepticism was warranted in both cases.

But both Holmes and Bankman-Fried managed to quash other people's doubts by leveraging the cult of the billionaire genius. Both expertly played to stereotypes to bamboozle investors. Holmes literally modeled her look and demeanor after Steve Jobs, which was such a weird thing to do that it only reinforced her image as a quirky brainiac. Bankman-Fried hyped himself as a relentless workaholic who slept at the office. Both images are meant to suggest a person too focused on changing the world to care about personal appearance. In reality, these personas were as carefully cultivated as Kim Kardashian's, and they were highly effective in convincing gullible people to part with their money.

Now that these two have been exposed, however, a lot more people are asking hard questions about whether the "grind culture" of Silicon Valley is a farce, akin to the illusion of Trump's business acuity built in the editing bay of "The Apprentice." Holmes and Bankman-Fried might have be written off as outliers a few years ago. But right now there's a growing sense that so much of self-congratulatory tech culture is just a digital version of the Wizard of Oz, especially as another crypto crash seems to happen every couple of weekw. Even Gates and Jobs, who were unquestionably brilliant at developing and marketing innovative computer technology, have lost a little of their luster. Jobs, of course, died of cancer after convincing himself that he knew better than doctors how to treat it. Gates, meanwhile, blew up his marriage by acting like a garden variety jackass. Even genuinely smart people can be stupid sometimes. More importantly, a bunch of people who have tricked everyone into thinking that they're geniuses are finally being revealed as the imposters they always were.

A couple of weeks out from a midterm election in which Republicans dramatically underperformed, one major theme has emerged in the post-mortems: Donald Trump is to blame. Turns out that voters do not like efforts to overthrow democracy, like Trump's attempted coup or the January 6 insurrection. As data analyst Nate Cohn at the New York Times demonstrated, Trump's "preferred primary candidates" — who usually won a Trump endorsement by backing his Big Lie — fell behind "other G.O.P. candidates by about five percentage points." The result is a number of state, local and congressional offices were lost that Republicans might otherwise have won.

Republican leaders are struggling with this information because dumping Trump is easier said than done so long as he has a substantial percentage of their voting base in his thrall. But, in truth, Republican problems run even deeper than that. It's not just Trump. The religious right has been the backbone of the party for decades, but this midterm election shows they might now be doing the GOP more harm than good at the ballot box.

As with Trump, Republicans are in a "can't win with them/can't win without them" relationship with the religious right. Fundamentalists remain a main source of organizing and fundraising for the GOP, as well a big chunk of their most reliable voters. They can't afford to alienate this group any more than they can afford to push away Trump. Doing so risks the loss of millions of loyal voters. But by continuing to pander to the religious right, Republicans are steadily turning off all other voters, a group that's rapidly growing in size as Americans turn their backs on conservative Christianity. That's doubly true when one looks at the youngest voters, the ones Republicans will need to stay viable as their currently aging voter base starts to die off.

New data from the progressive polling firm Navigator Research shows how dire the situation is for Republicans. On "culture war" issues like reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, the voters broke hard on the progressive side of things. Among Democratic voters this midterm, 48% said abortion was an important issue for them, showing strong pro-choice sentiment. But among Republicans, only 13% ranked abortion (and the banning of it) as a driving factor in their vote. When Democratic voters were asked their main reason for their voting choice this year, abortion rights was the most popular, cited by 49% of voters. But among Republican voters, only 24% cited support for abortion bans as a major factor.

Republican politicians may have been circumspect in talking about their anti-abortion views prior to Election Day, hoping to make the issue less salient to swing voters. But overall, the past two years have been heavily defined by Republicans catering to the religious right. It's not just that the GOP-controlled Supreme Court went out of its way to overturn Roe v. Wade this past June. Republican leadership in state governments rushed forward to ban abortion, to the point where the red states seemed to be competing over how draconian their abortion bans could be.

Nor were the attacks on reproductive health care limited to abortion. In July, the House of Representatives voted on a bill to codify contraception rights so state governments couldn't ban birth control. All but eight Republicans voted to allow contraception bans. Democratic fears about legal contraception are not misplaced, either. Last week, ProPublica leaked audio of a meeting between anti-choice activists and Republican legislators in Tennessee, where the assembled can be heard gaming out their next steps to ban female-controlled forms of contraception.

The situation was similarly dire on the LGBTQ front, as Republican politicians raced to oppress queer and trans people, especially kids. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis championed the "don't say gay" law that forces queer teachers and students into the closet. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott menaced parents who accept a child's trans identity by threatening to use Child Protective Services to break up their families. Republicans keep passing laws blocking trans people from receiving health care or playing on sports teams. In addition, there's been a dramatic rise in conservatives attempting to ban books featuring LGBTQ characters.

This rash of queerphobic policy has been accompanied by an escalation of bigoted rhetoric in right wing media, all aimed at painting LGBTQ people as perverts and child predators. From Fox News on down the entire conservative media ecosystem, it's become routine to accuse queer people of being "groomers," which is a not-especially-oblique way to call them child molesters. Groups like the Proud Boys routinely target drag shows with intimidating "protests," which are starting to get violent. Over the weekend, there was a gun massacre at a gay club in Colorado Springs. While the police are still not speaking publicly about the killer's motive, observers have pointed out that the murders happened mere hours before a drag brunch, the kind of event that conservative groups have been targeting for harassment.

All of this ugliness did not help Republicans in the midterms. On the contrary, it appears to have hurt them, especially with such high youth voter turnout. As a national youth poll run by Harvard shows, younger people reject the fundamentalism that animates the Republican party. Only 12% identify as "fundamentalist/evangelical," while 37% — by far the biggest group — say they have no religious preference at all. This comports with other polling that shows that Christian churches are becoming older and smaller all the time, as young people leave in droves. Overall, 71% of Americans support same-sex marriage. About two-thirds of Americans want abortion to remain legal.

Even among Republican voters, the religious right doesn't seem particularly popular. Along with the low enthusiasm for abortion bans, the Navigator poll shows that Republican voters weren't super interested in anti-LGBTQ policy positions. Only 20% of those voters cited anti-trans views as a motivator in voting this year, despite nearly two years of non-stop right wing propaganda on this subject. The top three issues that got GOP voter juices going were opposition to social welfare spending, demands that government be "tough on crime" and anger over immigration. In other words, they were all proxy issues for white grievances about a racially diverse society. The Republican party still appeals to racist voters, but even they've lost the enthusiasm for being the panty police.

Despite this hard, statistical evidence, religious right activists refuse to accept that their extremism is hurting the Republican party. As Rachel Cohen of Vox explained last week, anti-abortion leaders insist that banning abortion is a winning issue for Republicans. Instead, as Politico reported, they're claiming that it was Republicans who failed by supposedly "not running harder on abortion restrictions."

Whether these arguments are delusional or simply bad faith hardly matters. The desperation is palpable. Christian conservatives are used to the Republican party being dependent on them, and therefore bending over backward to please them. But this data shows that pandering to the religious right might be hurting the GOP more than helping. Fundamentalists are learning they're just as dependent on the Republican party as the GOP is on them. No wonder they're doubling down. As more and more people leave their pews, their only foothold in staying relevant is to maintain control over the Republican party. As with Trump, they will not leave quietly, but continue to hold the GOP hostage to their increasingly unpopular agenda.

As the Republican Party takes on its unexpectedly slim majority in the House of Representatives for next year, one question lingers: Did they learn a damn thing from the midterm elections? Yes, they won the House by a handful of seats, but overall the election was a massive disappointment for Republicans, who had swaggered into the midterms expecting not only a sweep of both houses of Congress but a whole bunch of state and local races across the nation. Instead, Democrats won key gubernatorial races in swing states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. retained control of the Senate (and may end up gaining a seat) and if not for a redistricting fiasco in New York might well have held the House too.

It's no secret that this mostly happened because of Donald Trump and his MAGA nonsense. Indeed, an analysis by Nate Cohn of the New York Times tried to calculate exactly how much being a MAGA true believer cost Republican candidates: It was around five percentage points, Cohn says, easily enough to make the difference between winning and losing in many key races. This realization is kicking off a genuine civil war in the GOP. One side wants to cut Trump loose at last, stop touting the Big Lie about the 2020 election and scale back on the culture war antics. The other side, however, clings to MAGA dogma with religious fervor, believing that cannot fail but can only be failed by RINO phonies. All eyes are closely watching the newly minted House majority and their presumptive speaker, the ever-hapless Rep. Kevin McCarthy. Will they finally tone down the Dumpster fire a tiny bit, or can we expect the next two years to be nothing but bug-eyed conspiracy theories, frivolous "investigations" of Joe Biden's family and Cabinet members and threats to sabotage the world economy if Biden refuses to gut Social Security?

In the House, early indicators suggest that Team MAGA Forever is getting the upper hand. But for even more definitive evidence, it's useful to look beyond the Beltway and toward the normally sleepy state capital of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the state legislature there, Republicans have made it abundantly clear they have no intention of learning anything from the massive rebuke voters offered their party in the midterm elections.

Hours before it was announced that Democrats have won a majority in the state House for the first time in 17 years, the lame duck legislature in Pennsylvania made its last stand for MAGA by impeaching Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia. While understandably unknown to most people outside Pennsylvania, Krasner has become a favorite punching bag in right-wing media, for his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime. Republicans paint him as "soft on crime" and blame him for the rise in gun violence in Philadelphia, even though a likelier culprit is the lax statewide gun laws passed by Republicans.

Krasner, for his part, is painting the impeachment as a direct attack on the right of Philadelphians to choose their own leaders. "History will harshly judge this anti-democratic, authoritarian effort to erase Philly's votes — votes by Black, brown and broke people in Philadelphia," he said in statement.

This impeachment of Krasner sews together two of the biggest and most racist themes that fuel the MAGA movement: A belief that anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates, and a belief that voters in racially diverse urban areas are "frauds" who are "stealing" elections from white conservatives.

Philadelphia was one of the cities at the center of Trump's false allegation that Democrats had stolen the 2020 election from him. During his drawn-out coup attempt following that election, Trump sent several of his surrogates — most famously Rudy Giuliani during the "Four Seasons" debacle — to paint the citizens of Philadelphia as illegitimate voters and demand that the state legislature throw their ballots out. In targeting Philadelphia — along with other cities with large Black populations, such as Detroit and Milwaukee — Trump essentially implied that those cities are less deserving of democratic representation than whiter, more rural areas of their state. (Biden also won Pittsburgh, but Trump wasn't nearly as interested in demonizing that city, which is more than 60% white.)

Along with Chicago, New York and other racially diverse cities, Philadelphia has also become central to right-wing media efforts to blame crime on the Black Lives Matter movement. Even in his supposedly "serious" campaign announcement speech Tuesday, Trump made the grotesque claim that "The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crime." In reality, the spike in crime in the past couple of years seems largely attributable to the pandemic. Gun sales rose during the lockdown and schools were closed, meaning the streets saw an influx of weapons and bored young people, an almost perfect prescription for rising crime. As the pandemic has begun to recede, homicides have also started to decline.

As a progressive prosecutor in a racially diverse city, Krasner makes the perfect hate object for the MAGA movement. He easily beat a Democratic primary challenger and then won the general election. Impeaching him is a hapless symbolic gesture, but also an omen of what's likely to come when Republicans take over the House of Representatives in January. Joe Biden will be subjected to endless investigations and may well be impeached, for the same reason Krasner was: Right-wing outrage over losing an election to a racially diverse coalition.

Perhaps no other state illustrated the voter distaste for MAGA politics in the 2022 midterms more than Pennsylvania. In the two biggest statewide races, Republicans nominated candidates tightly aligned with Trump: Dr. Mehmet Oz was his hand-picked candidate for the open U.S. Senate seat, and state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the gubernatorial candidate, is a hardcore Trump loyalist who helped foment the Jan. 6 insurrection and has numerous links to Christian nationalist causes. They both got creamed, even though Oz was running against Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who suffered a serious stroke that provoked ugly media coverage suggesting that he was unfit to serve. (Although Fetterman has some difficulty with auditory processing, his mental capacity is fine.)

Pennsylvania is a classic swing state in terms of demographics and party registration, but its legislature is controlled by the GOP and packed with Trumpers — including Mastriano, who literally paid for charter buses to send MAGA loyalists to D.C. ahead of the Capitol insurrection. As Spotlight PA reported, "Dozens of GOP state lawmakers — including those in leadership — also attempted to stop or delay Biden's electoral votes from being counted."

You might have thought Republicans would respond to losing their 17-year grip on the state House by dialing back the MAGA madness. Absolutely not: They forged ahead with their plan to impeach Krasner, who has not been accused of any crimes. This follows on the heels of a Republican threat to impeach Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf for implementing public health measures during the pandemic, and various impeachment threats against Philadelphia election officials, based on Trump's false claims of fraud during the 2020 election.

"They just don't think Philly has a right to govern itself," Krasner has stated. He's right, and that's pretty much the through-line of all these Republican efforts. Rather than engaging in self-examination when they lose elections, they attack the right of other Americans — especially those who aren't white — to participate in the democratic process. Krasner's impeachment is just a symptom of this larger problem. We shouldn't expect any Republicans, anywhere, to respond to these midterm losses by actively trying to deradicalize their party. If only. They'll just double down on conspiracy theories and lies, in a last-ditch attempt to delegitimize the voters who keep rejecting them.

After the heavily predicted "red wave" in the 2022 midterm elections turned out to be an illusion, it was really no mystery why Republicans failed to capitalize on the political tailwinds that — according to conventional wisdom and political history — should have given them much bigger wins. Blame Donald Trump and Justice Samuel Alito, for the one-two punch of inciting an insurrection (which was wildly unpopular) and overturning the right to abortion (which was highly popular). Americans, it turns out, are protective of democracy and their basic human rights and turned out in huge numbers to vote for Democrats or, more precisely, to vote against Republicans, who are a threat to both. The smart thing for Republicans to do is clear enough: Stop stoking Trump's election lies and scale back the tsunami of racism, sexism and homophobia currently fueling their party.

But there's no chance that will happen, of course. Let's remember that Republicans also flirted with moderating their message after losing the 2012 election, only to go in precisely the opposite direction by nominating Donald Trump in 2016. Looking inward and engaging in self-reflection is the antithesis of everything the modern GOP stands for. So instead, the right is looking outward for someone besides themselves to blame, and they've landed on a favorite scapegoat: Single women. Worse, in blaming single women for their own political failure, conservatives are wallowing in a ludicrous conspiracy theory based on the premise that having an "F" on your driver's license renders you incapable of autonomous thought.

Yes, it's true: Republicans are big mad that single women voted for Democrats, and their explanation for this is that Democrats of brainwashing those hapless, unfortunate women who don't have husbands to make their decisions for them.

"Unmarried women in America are lost, miserable, addicted to SSRIs and alcohol, wracked with guilt from abortion, and wandering from partner to partner," wrote Joel Berry, managing editor of the popular right wing site Babylon Bee. "They are the Democrats' core base now, and the Democrats will do everything possible to manufacture more of them."

Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of The Federalist, was less colorful in her language, but nonetheless aired a similar claim about "the massive political incentive Democrats have to keep women unmarried."

"No one benefits more from the destruction of the American family than the Democratic Party," announced a headline at the right-wing Washington Examiner.

Andrew Torba, who runs the far-right social media site Gab, sent out a newsletter declaring that democracy is illegitimate because "the Godless unmarried whores of Babylon select your leaders so they can continue to slaughter their children."

Fox News host Jesse Watters, in the most viral example of this talking point, said that "Democrat policies are designed to keep women single" and implored male viewers to get the ladies under control: "Guys, go put a ring on it." How male Fox News viewers are supposed to talk these unruly Democratic-voting women into marrying them was left unexplained, although Watters has previously hinted at the usefulness of coercion when it comes to romance.

While Republican politicians have generally been a bit more circumspect in their language, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri tipped his hand on a not-that-subtle endorsement of this conspiracy theory, retweeting conservative sociologist Brad Wilcox — who prominently drew attention to single women's Democratic leanings — complaining that "fewer adults are opening their hearts, lives, and minds to marriage and children."

These accusations that Democrats are somehow preventing women from getting hitched are deliberately vague on the mechanics. Are Democrats crashing weddings and intervening when the officiant asks if anyone has cause to object? Are they rewriting dating-app software so liberal-leaning women only see video-game addicts who refuse to leave the house? Have they forced every eligible man to leave the country?

If you dig into the comments under these angry right-wing tweets, the outlines of the conspiracy theory these commentators are hinting at become a bit clearer. Reproductive rights, equal access to education and social welfare policies (which are always more generous in the right-wing imagination than in real life) are routinely blamed for somehow tricking women out of marriage. The idea is that Democrats use basic human rights to lure gullible young women away from their true destiny and most cherished desire, which is of course to be the doting helpmeet to a Republican dude. Democrats, the idea goes, get women hooked on a sinister cocktail of equality and freedom, and therefore hopelessly addicted to voting for Democrats.

In the real world, of course, what's going on is painfully simple. Single women are a constituency that benefits enormously from equal pay, equal education and reproductive rights. (Married women benefit from these things, too, but a lot of them are cross-pressured to keep the peace with Republican husbands, and/or are voting their resentments toward their single counterparts.) Understanding that they have a built-in advantage with single women, Democrats have constructed a platform designed to appeal to them.

But accepting that straightforward narrative means accepting the radical notion that women have minds of their own. That will clearly never do in the GOP universe. So a nefarious and unnecessarily complicated conspiracy theory must be created that reimagines basic constituent appeal as manipulation and brainwashing.

As with most accusations made by Republicans, the claims that Democrats somehow "control" women are pure psychological projection. It's pretty obvious that Republicans are the ones who want to control women, and when they start talking about "incentivizing" marriage, what they really mean is various forms of coercion. Stripping women of reproductive rights and economic equality is about trying to create a society where women feel they have to get married in order to survive, or at least to have any financial security. As a not-so-hidden bonus, a woman who is financially dependent on her husband is likely to feel even less room to disagree with him politically or vote her own conscience.

In fact, the theory that Democrats are brainwashing women into staying single is directly linked to the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, a white supremacist fiction proposing that liberal "elites" are somehow "importing" people of color to "replace" white conservatives. In both cases, the presumption that people who are not white men are lesser beings, incapable of independent thought.

As with the Big Lie, this is all about Republicans telling themselves that entire groups of Americans are not legitimate voters or citizens, and don't deserve a say in government. Conservatives' bitter retreat into this conspiracy theory after their disappointing midterm results strongly suggests that the Republican Party has no inclination to moderate anything about its policies or messaging. Instead, we can expect the right to double down on the fascistic assumption that people like them are the only real Americans, and nobody else gets to vote.

"He really is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect," a friend responded in a group text over the weekend. We had been sharing stories about the bouts of dumbassery on display, as Elon Musk starts his ill-advised reign of Twitter. And hoo boy, there was plenty to share. Did you see the one about Musk telling software engineers to print out 30 days of code, only to tell them to shred it when he likely realized this exposed how he doesn't know what he's doing? Or how he plans to take a bazooka to the content moderation team, even though doing so will likely send advertisers packing? Or how he thought carrying a sink around was a hilarious joke? Or how he tweeted an asinine conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack, only to delete it hours later?

None of this should be surprising. From day one, this entire saga has been a story of a man with far more money than brains. After all, this all started when Musk stupidly offered to buy Twitter at a price way over its valuation, for no other reason than a fit of trollish pique. It was only after he realized what a foolish idea it was to set $44 billion on fire that he started coming up with disingenuous excuses to escape the deal, only to discover that it was too late, legally, to back out.

Yet, somehow, much of this still feels surprising. The idea that Musk is "smart" has persisted through years of very public evidence to the contrary. Even now, many of his critics offer pre-emptive caveats that they don't think he's stupid, before explaining why the latest of his endless string of idiotic choices is a bad one. This notion of Musk's intelligence clings to the discourse around him for one simple reason: He is very, very rich.

The myth of the American meritocracy is a stubborn one. Americans can't help but believe that someone as rich as Musk must have something going on for him beyond dumb luck. To imagine otherwise is too unsettling. So many people block out what should be an obvious truth: You probably would have never heard of Elon Musk if he wasn't a white man from a wealthy family that literally owned an emerald mine in South Africa.

To be fair, it's entirely possible that, at one point, Musk wasn't a total birdbrain. His resume suggests there was a time when he was relatively competent at computer science, though there's no reason to think that such skills mean fluency in any other higher-functioning tasks. But regardless of what some IQ test from back in the day might have said about Musk, it's clear that in the past couple of decades, his brain has turned to total mush.

The irony is that the very wealth and privilege that tricks people into thinking he must be a genius likely contributed to the current state of affairs. Being surrounded by nothing but flattery makes it hard to distinguish between thoughts you have that are smart and useful and thoughts you have (such as right-wing conspiracy theories) that are idiotic. Either way, the people in your life — and for Musk, his legions of fanboys on Twitter — are swooning over what a super genius you are. The lack of meaningful feedback would damage most people's capacity for critical thinking. Musk's narcissism renders the diagnosis of his rational capacity terminal.

One can only hope the daily updates on Musk's antics will put some dent into the American myth of meritocracy. But then again, having to endure four years of a Donald Trump presidency didn't seem to make much difference, even as he shared moments of Trumpian wisdom like telling people to inject bleach into their lungs to cure COVID-19 and trying to "correct" a weather map drawn by actual meteorologists because he felt it would better serve his ego for a hurricane to make landfall in Alabama. Trump was elected in no small part because he had convinced large numbers of Americans that he was a successful businessman and therefore smart. In reality, he was a historically terrible businessman whose wealth exists because other rich white guys spent decades bailing him out of his self-inflicted financial woes.

The insidious nature of the meritocratic myth is on full display this week, as the Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit over affirmative action at Harvard University. Unfortunately, polling shows that 63% of Americans oppose universities considering race in their admissions process, naively believing that ending affirmative action means some objective measure of "merit" will be used instead. In reality, the opposite is true: Far from being meritocratic institutions, Ivy League schools are largely devoted to elevating rich white kids at the expense of people who have more talent. As Mark Joseph Stern at Slate explains, "Harvard has a preference for four specific groups of applicants known as ALDC: athletes, legacies, those on the dean's list (frequently because of family donations), and the children of faculty." He continues:

In theory, ALDC preferences are colorblind. In practice, they operate as a massive affirmative action program for white applicants. Over a recent six-year period, 2,200 out of 4,993 admitted white students were ALDC—a figure significantly higher than the overall number of admitted students who are Black (1,392) and Hispanic (1,283). White ALDC students are not overrepresented because they happen to be more qualified; to the contrary, about three-fourths of them would have been rejected without the ALDC boost.

The existing race-based affirmative action program is mostly an attempt to make up for the diversity that is lost giving such a massive advantage to white applicants. And yet, somehow, you hear no complaints from most conservatives about the ALDC preferences. That's because they don't actually want a meritocracy. They want a system where white people can get twice as far while being half as talented. Or where the richest man in the world keeps getting called a genius, even as we can all see — if we're willing to look — that he's just another privilege-addled idiot who lost his capacity for critical thinking many billions of dollars ago.

The ballot referendum on abortion rights in Kansas wasn't just a test of public attitudes about reproductive rights — it was a test of democracy.

The Republican organizers behind the bill were no doubt aware of the robust polling that shows that strong majorities of Americans support abortion rights, and thus did everything in their power to make sure the general public did not turn out to vote on the question of banning abortion in the state. So they scheduled the ballot initiative during an August primary election, when few Democrats turn out to vote, even though other ballot initiatives are scheduled for November's election. They made the language of the ballot initiative confusing, so pro-choice people might accidentally vote for the ban. And they blanketed the airwaves with misleading ads meant to trick pro-choice voters into voting for the ban.

None of it worked.

Pro-choice activists in the state worked tirelessly to register and turn out voters, as well as educate them on how to vote down the abortion ban, despite the confusing wording. Indeed, the vote wasn't even close, with nearly 60% of voters giving the abortion ban a thumbs down. A huge chunk of voters were independents who didn't even vote in the primary races, only showing up to weigh in on the ballot referendum.

But rather than accept this democratic outcome, conservatives are hardening even more against democracy.

What began with Republicans hand-waving away the election as somehow not a true reflection of voter desires, soon became conservatives reskinning Donald Trump's Big Lie, that the 2020 election was "rigged" against him, to argue that something fishy must have happened in order for Kansas result to occur. They forced a recount of the abortion vote. Recounts, which are expensive and time-consuming, tend to occur only when an election is close. The abortion ban, however, lost by an 18-point margin, so there was zero chance that a recount would change things. Still, as the Kansas City Star reports, the recount was authorized at the request of Melissa Leavitt, a Big Lie advocate who pushed Trump's conspiracy theories to the Kansas state legislature in 2020. Along with Mark Gietzen, a hardline opponent of reproductive rights, they raised nearly $120,000 for the recount. Unsurprisingly, it did nothing to change the outcome. Yet Leavitt and Gietzen are using the recount effort as the foundation for what appears to be a larger push to harass anyone who dared vote against the abortion ban in the state.

"The next step is to check the registrations of the people who they say voted," Gietzen told the Star.

He promised he'll "be visiting homes" of said voters. The pretext is "to see if anyone lives there," but of course, the real purpose is clearly intimidation. This isn't just conjecture. Gietzen is a long-time practitioner of the politics of personalized intimidation. He's spent years parking himself outside of abortion clinics, approaching patients trying to enter, writing down information about them, and repeatedly filing nuisance police reports to waste the time of clinic workers.

The adoption of Trump's Big Lie rhetoric by anti-choice activists is likely only to get worse from here. As political data analyst Tom Bonier noted last week, the overturn of Roe v. Wade is causing an unprecedented spike in registrations of female voters.

Abortion politics in Kansas have been particularly salient, due to a state constitution that protects abortion rights, which is what the ballot initiative was meant to repeal.

The gender gap is why President Joe Biden won in 2020, as Biden performed 12 points better with women than men. If it was only up to male voters, Trump would have won handily, as 53% of men voted for Trump while 57% of women voted for Biden. The gender gap in new registrations is only likely to make the gap grow. With his conspiracy theories about "rigged" elections, Trump has handed anti-choice activists a pretense to undermine democratic efforts to protect abortion rights.

Opposition to abortion was already the root of a great deal of domestic terrorism. Shootings and bombings at clinics in the past few decades have resulted in 11 deaths of clinic workers and patients. In the wake of January 6 and Trump's continued implicit promotion of political violence, however, the use of terroristic tactics has expanded beyond clinics. Gietzen's hint that he'll be dropping by to "investigate" pro-choice voters, for instance, is not isolated. As Kathryn Joyce reported for Salon, in the wake of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, pro-choice activists were subjected to violence at the hands of police and civilians. While Fox News ran misleading stories accusing pro-choicers of violence, in reality, pro-choice activists were punched, beaten, and in at least one case, run over by a car.

The Proud Boys, who were deeply involved in the January 6 insurrection, have taken up the cause of silencing and intimidating supporters of reproductive rights. Anti-choice activists have started to invite Proud Boys to join as "security," using trumped-up claims of supposed threats from pro-choicers as a justification for violent posturing. As the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) recently documented, "Abortion-related events involving far-right militias and militant social movements like the Proud Boys increased by 150% in 2021 relative to 2020, and 2022 has already seen a 90% rise compared to 2021." Demonstrations where people show up armed tripled from 2020 to 2021. Researchers found that when guns are on scene, demonstrations turn "violent or destructive 40% of the time," compared to .2% of the time when there are no guns.

Since January 6, anti-democratic organizing has only grown more intense and effective.

Proponents of the Big Lie are winning Republican primaries on campaigns built around promises to void any election results that go against the preferences of Republican voters. Under the banner of Big Lie-style conspiracy theories, right-wing sheriffs across the country are organizing campaigns to intimidate people from voting in 2024. As the Kansas recount shows, even a blowout election does little to put a damper on conspiracy theories about "rigged" elections. That's evidence that these conspiracy theories aren't really about a sincere belief that elections are being stolen, but merely a pretext to undermine free and fair elections.

For Trump, January 6 and his subsequently unsubtle incitements to violence are largely about his ego. But while his following has a very cult-like quality to it, ultimately the reason his supporters embrace his anti-democratic attitude isn't just about making one man feel good about himself. It comes back to the fact that Republican views and policies are unpopular with the general public. They can't win at the ballot box, so increasing numbers of Republicans are looking for ways to impose their will outside of democratic means. Legal abortion is perhaps the most crystal clear test of this, as Republicans seem determined to ban it no matter what the voters say.

Donald Trump is not happy about the shape of the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania. His fame and celebrity thirst led him to endorse TV star Dr. Mehmet Oz, an accomplished surgeon who gave it all up for the easy cash of peddling snake oil. But now it looks like Oz may lose his primary, dealing an embarrassing blow to Trump's fragile ego.

Worse, Oz may not even lose to the generic Republican candidate, David McCormick, a walking MAGA-hat whose bland white guy looks can pass as "normal" to low-info swing voters. (I like to call this "pulling a Glenn Youngkin.") No, the surging candidate is Kathy Barnette, a hard-right commentator and crank in the style of Christine O'Donnell or Todd Akin — in other words, weird enough to pull in national attention, but with extreme views that could sink her in a general election race.

"Kathy Barnette will never be able to win the General Election against the Radical Left Democrats," Trump ranted in a statement released Thursday. He complained that she "has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted," and argued that "Oz is the only one who will be able to easily defeat the Crazed, Lunatic Democrat in Pennsylvania."

Politico describes Barnette's poll surge as "somewhat puzzling." It's not, however, if one has been carefully following how much the backlash to the #MeToo movement and rising anger at feminism has been fueling Trumpism. Trump won in 2016 thanks to a widespread sexist tantrum over a woman, Hillary Clinton, winning the Democratic nomination for president. Trump reinforced the misogyny message throughout his campaign, starting with mocking a female journalist for menstruating and ending with an absurdly insincere apology for the "Access Hollywood" tape in which he can be heard boasting about sexual assault.

Barnette's entry into the Misogyny Olympics is outrageous even by MAGA's low standards. She's been circulating a video and a story about how her mother was raped at 11 years old in 1971. While the subsequent birth of Barnette is treated like a beautiful sacrifice on her mother's part, it is worth noting that she didn't exactly have many choices as a Black child in Alabama before Roe v. Wade.

As feminist writer Jessica Valenti noted in a recent newsletter, "people talk about abortion as if something is ending," but in reality, access to abortion secures opportunities for women. Citing how her abortion made possible her marriage, daughter and career, Valenti wrote, "Anti-choicers like to pose hypotheticals about the remarkable baby a woman could have if she just didn't get an abortion: What if they cured cancer? None ask if that woman herself might change the world." When we're talking about rape victims who are literal children, it's even more stark; their entire futures can depend on having access to abortion.

Barnette calls the rape "horrible" in the video, but — by the anti-choice logic she's appealing to with her messaging — if forced childbirth is a beautiful thing because it results in "life," wouldn't that make forced impregnation beautiful as well? Indeed, MAGA circles went nuts last week over an event at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, where one speaker declared, "Not your body, your choice. Your body is mine and you're having my baby." It's why the anti-choice movement also opposes birth control. People who are compelled by the idea that a person wouldn't be here if a woman had ended a pregnancy will likely find other potential roadblocks to giving birth, including preventing pregnancy via contraception or a woman's right to refuse sex, suspicious as well.

Barnette's appeal to the MAGA base isn't exactly mysterious. The anti-choice crowd has always romanticized stories of women submitting to extreme levels of oppression. It puts an ennobling gloss on what is actually a deeply sadistic attitude towards women.

As much as he may loathe admitting it, Trump's objections to Barnette echo concerns that have already been expressed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In April, McConnell gave a speech noting that Republicans are in a good position for the midterms unless they "screw this up" by running "unacceptable" candidates. As Russell Berman noted in the Atlantic later that month, McConnell is likely thinking of "the GOP's missed chances in 2010 and 2012," where lunatic candidates lost races they could have otherwise won. In at least two cases, it was because of "defending their opposition to abortion even in cases of rape."

Well, Barnette isn't just opposed to abortion rights for rape victims. She's built her entire campaign around it. Anti-choicers like to leverage stories by people who claim they are products of rape because they know it shuts down some arguments. That doesn't mean those stories win people over, though. "Being forced to give birth to a rapist's baby in junior high is good, actually" is a bad campaign slogan, no matter how many personal testimonies you put behind it. Republican strategists desperately want the campaign to be about anything but forced childbirth, but Barnette may make that impossible in Pennsylvania.

Plus, that's just one of her many truly fringe positions. Reporters haven't even really started digging and the research on her bigoted statements has started to pour out in volumes, documented at length on her own radio program. She compared being Muslim to "Hitler's Nazi Germany view of the world." She compared same-sex marriage to marriage between "one older man and a 12-year-old child." (Which is notably similar to the configuration that led to the forced childbirth she celebrates.) "Two men sleeping together, two men holding hands, two men caressing, that is not normal," she claimed. She bemoaned LGBTQ rights as a "barrage to normalize sexual perversion."

It's a race that's expected to get a lot of national attention because Pennsylvania is a swing state. Barnette sticks out from a crowded field of MAGA-heads because of her race and gender, but also because, as Trump suggests, there's a great deal not known about her yet. That opens the door to investigations into her background. Clearly, the GOP powers-that-be are worried about Barnette, because they're placing opposition research about her in the right-wing press not unlike the ongoing campaign to destroy Madison Cawthorn, the extremist MAGA congressman from North Carolina. Unlike states where the local media has been thoroughly destroyed, Pennsylvania still has some popular local newspapers like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Philadelphia Inquirer, which make it harder for shady politicians to avoid press scrutiny.

It's a tough year for Democrats, who are taking the blame for inflation and general American malaise, but the public is starting to get quite angry about issues like the upcoming overturn of Roe v. Wade. All this makes her a very bad candidate for the GOP in this race.

But if Barnette is a bridge too far, as Trump fears, he only has himself to blame. His electoral success in 2016 — even though he never once won the popular vote — emboldened the GOP base to believe they could win elections by running any troll they want. Trump hasn't exactly done much work to discourage this idea. He's backed Herschel Walker in Georgia, who lied about graduating college and is accused of threatening to kill his ex-wife. He's backed a Nebraska gubernatorial candidate with eight sexual assault allegations. Prior to endorsing Oz, Trump's man in the Pennsylvania senate race was Sean Parnell, whose wife accused him of beating her and punching a door into a child's face. Trump has no discernible objection to candidates with ugly attitudes about violence towards women. His cold feet around Barnette might change a few minds. But in a GOP primary system that is mostly a race to the bottom, it's not a surprise someone like her is pulling ahead.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins still wants voters to believe she is pro-choice. During the hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Collins defended her decision to vote for the Federalist Society-linked judge by claiming to believe his assurances to her that he had no plan to overturn Roe v. Wade. In the three and a half years since, there's been a raging debate over whether she said that because she's stupid, or just a liar that knows she can't win in Maine without maintaining the illusion that she's a moderate Republican.

So she continues to insist on Kavanaugh's pro-Roe credentials, even after he cast an anti-Roe vote in 2020 with the minority of the court. Facing down a genuinely pro-choice Democratic challenger in 2020, Collins voted against confirming Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Observers noted, however, that she could get away with it because Barrett had enough votes to get confirmed anyway. Then after a draft opinion from the Supreme Court was leaked, showing that her beloved Kavanaugh was once again voting to overturn Roe, Collins insisted that it was "completely inconsistent" with what Kavanaugh told her in meetings prior to his confirmation.

I've always believed Collins isn't that big an idiot but is simply that big a liar.

Kavanaugh, after all, repeatedly lied under oath — in comically obvious ways — during his confirmation hearing. Collins rewarded him with a vote to confirm and then was rewarded handsomely for her vote with donations from the Federalist Society, money which likely helped push her over the top in her 2020 campaign. On Wednesday, she and other fake moderate Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted against the Women's Health Protection Act, which codifies Roe and recognizes abortion as a right. By taking this vote, Collins and Murkowski reveal beyond any reasonable doubt that they are not, in fact, pro-choice, even as they continue to insist otherwise on TV.

Sure, Collins is still pretending that she's pro-choice despite repeatedly standing in the way of abortion rights. She put out a statement defending her vote by accusing the Democrats of designing the bill to fail. She claimed that the bill eliminates "basic conscience protections that are relied upon by health care providers who have religious objections to performing abortions."

This, like the claim to believe Kavanaugh wouldn't overturn Roe, is flat-out false. The bill only protects the right of doctors to perform abortions. It certainly doesn't require any doctor to do so. Even the most robust pro-choice activists don't want, say, an optometrist in the business of providing abortions just because patients ask. And while it would be nice if there weren't any misogynist gynecologists using religion as a cover to deny women abortions, it's also for the best that such bigots aren't in the business of dealing with patients who need compassionate and safe care.

Collins also claims she plans "to continue working with my colleagues on legislation to maintain" abortion rights, citing an alternative bill she and Murkowski have written that supposedly protects abortion rights. In fact, the bill allows states to pass serious restrictions that make it hard, if not impossible, for providers to operate. If any bill is "designed to fail," it's this one Collins wrote that she knows full well will never come up for a vote.

Just a few years ago, both Murkowski and Collins were willing to be moderates in deed as well as word, voting against Donald Trump's 2017 effort to repeal Obamacare. Now they won't even stand up for a right that is supported by a strong majority of Americans. This reflects a larger shift to the right in the GOP. Those who aren't willing to go along with it face the danger of being purged. Much of the purge is centered around loyalty to Trump's Big Lie, but it's also clear that Republican politicians increasingly feel that they must toe the MAGA line in all ways — even on abortion rights — or else face losing to primary challengers that are even more far-right than they are.

Republicans used to write anti-abortion bills that had exceptions for health or for victims of rape or incest, but this new crop of abortion bans are absolutist. Republicans used to be more circumspect about their hostility to contraception access, but now are speaking more openly about plans to repeal the right to use birth control, as well. Justice Samuel Alito's leaked draft opinion really underscores how shameless the misogyny has become, as he quite literally cites a pro-rape witch-burner from the 13th century as an authority on whether women have legal rights. (He was not for the idea!) In this environment, it's no surprise that Murkowski and Collins feel their careers would be in real danger if they stood against the rabidly misogynist GOP base on the issue of abortion rights.

The whole situation is a perfect illustration of the greatest conundrum of current American politics: undemocratic election systems and high rates of voter complacency allow Republicans to be wildly overrepresented in federal power.

On the first front, the problem is simple enough. More Americans vote for Democrats, but because electoral maps favor rural and suburban areas over urban ones, Republicans win disproportionate numbers of seats. On the latter front, the issue is a little more complicated. Primary voters tend to be both more ideological than general election voters. So Republicans keep sending far-right radicals to the ballot. They then win mainly because a huge chunk of voters don't pay much attention to politics, and have no idea that they're voting for foaming-at-the-mouth MAGA radicals.

The election of Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia is the most recent example of the latter phenomenon. The man is a Trumpster through and through. However, he managed to tamp down on the most rabidly fascist behaviors in public, giving Democratic Virginians an excuse to skip voting and allowing some swing voters to feel okay backing him. And sure enough, now Virginia voters are feeling betrayed by how far-right Youngkin turned out to be. Of course, this was entirely predictable if they had just paid a modicum of attention.

Collins, in particular, seems like she's trying to thread the needle by not taking actions that could alienate the MAGA base while putting on an empty pro-choice act for moderate voters. It goes a long way to explain her comically over-the-top reaction to a group of pro-choicers writing a demand that she vote for abortion rights in chalk on her sidewalk. The cops were called to deal with what Collins described as "the defacement of public property in front of our home." After having the cops called on them for "defacement" that will disappear the next time it rains, the chalkers returned to write messages reminding Collins that they also have a right to free speech.

Collins obviously does not like any kind of message that might remind her moderate voters that she is not actually pro-choice. But her reaction of trying to get the chalkers arrested speaks volumes about why she's gone full MAGA, instead of quietly retiring like so many of her more moderate Republican friends have done. Her entitled reaction echoes the same MAGA petulance that led Trump to call for shooting Black Lives Matter protesters and pushed Trump supporters to storm the Capitol rather than accept a lost election. Collins is all aboard with the power-at-any-price mentality, especially since it's other women who will have to suffer the consequences of forced childbirth.

Despite the fact that forced childbirth has been a major goal and central organizing strategy of the GOP for approximately four decades, Republican political strategists don't exactly seem stoked about a leaked draft opinion indicating that the GOP-controlled Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade outright. Turns out that abortion rights are very popular, likely due to people's well-documented enthusiasm for fornication without procreation. With the midterms just a few months away and Democrats signaling that they intend to make this a major issue, Republicans are scrambling for a political strategy to make their mandatory childbirth policy seem not as bad of an idea as it obviously is.

On Tuesday, Axios leaked a three-page talking points memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). The strategy that the Republican campaign strategy group suggests is to lie. A lot. Lie every chance you get. Lie about everything, all the time. Lie so often that the media stops bothering to fact-check you and your opponents grow exhausted trying to disprove your lies. It's a tried-and-true trick for the GOP.

The document is remarkable as a snapshot into not just the ease with which Republicans lie, but also their total dependence on keeping voters in the dark about their true beliefs and intentions. Most of the claims on this document are flat-out lies, and even when they aren't — such as the fact that Democrats oppose "even limiting abortion to the first trimester" — they are attempts to distract voters from the true view of Republicans, which is a ban on all abortions in any trimester. The entire GOP political strategy is geared around pulling the wool over voters' eyes.

True to form, this short document is so packed full of lies that it's impossible to debunk all of them. But just the section titled "FORCEFULLY REFUTE DEMOCRAT LIES REGARDING GOP POSITIONS ON ABORTION AND WOMEN'S HEALTH CARE" is a marvel in protesting-too-much. Nearly everything they label as a "lie" would, in the common parlance, be better described as the truth.

"Republicans DO NOT want to throw doctors and women in jail. Mothers should be held harmless under the law," reads the document.

Of course, this is a lie.

Lousiana is already drafting a bill that would imprison both doctors and patients for abortion under homicide laws. Twenty-six states have or are expected to pass abortion bans, and nearly all come with criminal penalties. In Texas, a woman was already arrested for abortion, and the charges were only dropped when negative national attention fell on the state. But sustained media outrage will fade when such arrests are common, which is what Republicans are clearly counting on.

"Republicans DO NOT want to take away contraception," reads another bullet point.

Of course, this is the Republican Party that, under President Barack Obama, repeatedly threatened to shut down the government in an attempt to take away contraception services. This is the party that has waged an all-out war on public clinics that provide contraception services. This is the party that had a total meltdown when the Obama administration passed a rule requiring insurance plans to cover birth control. Their most popular pundit at the time accused women who use birth control of being sex workers. Republicans took the anti-insurance fight to the Supreme Court, where the anti-abortion justices signed onto a plan to cut off birth control coverage that women had already paid for. This is the party that, under Donald Trump, cut off funding for birth control services and appointed an HHS secretary who believed employers should be able to fire women for using birth control. This is the party that, under George W. Bush, backed a massive program to teach every public school student that condoms don't work and birth control pills make you unlovable. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who is the head of NRSC, personally signed a bill as Florida governor to take birth control services away. Plus, more Republicans all the time are admitting they want to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, the decision that legalized contraception.

The document goes on to lie about the science, which is standard operating for the party of vaccine and climate denialists. It repeatedly calls Democrats "extremists," even though Democratic views are in line with the strong majority of Americans that want Roe upheld. It recommends that Republicans talk about "late-term" abortions, eliding the fact that red states define "late" as two weeks after the first missed period, before most pregnant people experience symptoms.

It's hard to flag what is the most egregious lie in this, but the most telling may be the insistence that "If Roe v. Wade is overturned, state and local officials closest to the people will make laws that reflect the will of their states." That may be true in the short term, but only because Joe Biden is president and will veto any abortion ban that Congress passes. But should Donald Trump, as planned, steals — or heaven forbid, actually wins — the 2024 election, Republicans will almost certainly pass a national ban on abortion.

This isn't just speculation. Congressional Republicans are already drafting the bill, likely with an eye toward passing it on January 21, 2025. In the meantime, however, the plan is to make sure that blue states are not, in fact, free to keep abortion safe and legal. As Mark Joseph Stern of Slate reports, Republicans are exploring "new laws that prevent people from crossing state lines to terminate a pregnancy." They are also building out a legal framework where red states can legally persecute abortion providers in blue states. For instance, a red state court could rule in favor of the family of a rapist who sues a blue state provider for aborting the victim's pregnancy. The anti-Roe Supreme Court is likely to rule that such judgments must be upheld. As battles ranging from those over slavery in the 19th century to those over same-sex marriage in the 21st show, systems where human rights exist in some states but not others tend to collapse under the contradictions.

Republican lies are laughably easy to punch through, but it's not surprising that Scott and the NRSC think they can get away with this. The problem is that conflict-averse Democrats avoid calling Republicans out for this nonsense. As Rebecca Traister wrote in New York this week, Democratic leadership reacted to the Roe leak with "words that ultimately felt bloodless." Most leaders won't even say the word "abortion," much less explain why Republicans are lying about their intentions.

The NRSC document paints a hysterical picture of Republicans under siege from "angry" and "strident" Democrats. If only! Then perhaps the voters Democrats are trying to woo over would actually start to understand that things are serious and human rights are very much in peril. But, as it is, Republicans have an opportunity to lie their heads off about their radical forced childbirth plans, and they have every intention of exploiting it.

The conservative government was alarmed at the rise in the numbers of young people espousing LGBTQ identities. So leaders decided it was time for a crackdown. Claiming that it was all about "protecting" the children from supposedly sexually predatory adults, a "don't say gay" law was passed that barred "promoting non-traditional relations to minors." Defenders of the law insisted that LGBTQ people were "not being discriminated against in any way." However, as human rights advocates pointed out, the law was so vaguely worded as to bar any open expression of queer or trans identities. Simply being out of the closet became reason enough to be accused of "gay propaganda," since, after all, one could read that as a signal to minors that being gay is okay.

This is Florida now— but it was Russia first.

Florida in the year 2022 is where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law that threatens financial ruin for any speech that could be construed as "instructing" kids about LGBTQ identities. But nine years ago, the same controversy was centered in Russia, where President Vladimir Putin signed a federal "don't say gay" law. The only difference is Putin could apply it to the whole nation, whereas DeSantis can only exert power on public schools in his state. In both cases, however, the same baseless justification was used: kids were being "groomed" by adults with nefarious intent so speech needed to be restricted to protect kids. In both cases, however, the actual reason for the law is to force people to live in the closet and punish anyone speaking out on behalf of equal rights.

Though it's not being talked about much, if at all, in the mainstream media, the 2013 ban on "gay propaganda" in Russia and the current Florida law barring any "instruction" on "sexual orientation or gender identity" are incredibly close to each other. So close, in fact, that's it's impossible to imagine that DeSantis and his allies didn't draw inspiration from the same Russian dictator who is currently waging a genocidal war on Ukraine.

As NPR reports, "don't say gay" bills are spreading as Republicans in over a dozen states have introduced copycat legislation meant to ban books and shove teachers and students back into the closet. There's good reason to think Putin inspired this current raft of "don't say gay" bills beyond just the similarity in how the bills are worded and the same "groomer" lies being used as justification. The American religious right has long and deep ties to Putin and the authoritarian government in Russia. Indeed, they've spent years specifically advocating for and supporting the "don't say gay" law in Russia.

As Right Wing Watch reported in 2014, "several American Religious Right leaders have spoken loudly in favor of Putin's crackdowns on gay people." Worse, "American anti-gay activists quietly provided intellectual backing and international support that directly and indirectly fueled the resurgent anti-gay movement in Russia." In a 2017 report, the site noted, "The Kremlin, through financing and conferences, has also built up ties with America's Religious Right."

In other words, the religious right has long been aware of Putin's "don't say gay" law and the lies his government used to defend it. It's not a coincidence that the same ideas and rhetoric are being deployed by Republicans here. Indeed, at the same time Russia passed its "don't say gay" law in 2013, they also passed an "anti-blasphemy" law that recommended jail sentences up to three years for "offending religious feelings." If that sounds familiar, it should. The same kind of language is being used in the Republican war on what they call "critical race theory." For instance, the "Stop WOKE" bill DeSantis is also pushing bans any materials that discuss racism that white people claim causes them "discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress." The anti-"critical race theory" movement in the U.S. has been used to ban books teaching that slavery or the civil rights movement happened, just as Russia's "anti-blasphemy" law is used to punish any criticism of the Christian right.

Despite Putin's claims to the contrary, human rights advocates were right about the impact of his "don't say gay" law: The Russian "don't say gay" law has been used as an all-purpose excuse to crack down on LGBTQ rights, all under bad faith claims of "protecting" children. Public materials that portray same-sex couples have been censored. Gay rights activists have been arrested. People were fired for being out of the closet. Pride parades were banned. Right now, the Russian government is trying to shut down one of the nation's biggest LGBTQ rights groups. Ukrainian citizens worry that the campaign of terror against queer people will be extended to their country if Russia succeeds in its invasion. WNBA star Brittney Griner is being held hostage in Russia right now, and while the official excuse is drug-related, gay rights activists are accusing the government of holding her in no small part because she's an out lesbian. And while the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the "don't say gay" law in 2017, unsurprisingly that's done little to stop the human rights abuses in Russia.

Due to Russia's horrific invasion of Ukraine and the seemingly unending war crimes being committed there, most Republicans have become shy about the pro-Putin sentiment that's been churning through their party for years and was only amplified by Donald Trump's robust admiration for the Russian dictator. But it is hard to ignore that this explosion of "don't say gay" and "critical race theory" bills look like they were directly inspired by Russia's "gay propaganda" and "anti-blasphemy" laws. Even the justifications — wild accusations of "grooming" and whining about the dominant class's hurt feelings — sound identical. The American right's affinity for Putin's Russia is still going strong, even if some of them are being a little quieter about it these days.

As Salon's Kathryn Joyce reported on Friday, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who fashions himself "the new master strategist of the right," is not a man afraid of the spotlight. On the contrary, he's surprisingly candid for a man whose policy ambitions, such as destroying public education as we know it, are deeply unpopular. He loves to brag, on social media and into any microphone you'll put in front of him, of how he cynically concocts baseless moral panics with repeated false claims about everything from "critical race theory" to conspiracy theories about Disney "grooming" children for pedophilia.

But there's one thing that Rufo is surprisingly mum about: Religious faith.

Rufo's agenda is obviously being set by the religious right. He works closely with Hillsdale College, a fundamentalist school that functions as the Christian right's war room. His goals are aligned directly with long-term religious right targets. Searching his Twitter account, however, one swiftly finds that he never talks about his religious beliefs. There's no real mention of God or Jesus or the Bible. When he does speak about Christianity, it's only in the context of pushing conspiracy theories about how white Christians are victims of ethnic oppression by "woke" forces. His conspiracy theories are clearly designed to get Christian conservatives in particular riled up. For instance, he heavily hyped ridiculous claims that children are being taught to pray to Aztec gods in public schools — but he carefully avoids getting theological with it.

It wasn't always this way with the religious right. During the George W. Bush years, Republicans tended to wear their Bible on their sleeves. The God talk was frequent and explicit. Bush himself spoke of being "born again," and frequently did evangelical events thick with fundamentalist jargon that was impenetrable to outsiders. The public school fights weren't over "critical race theory" and false claims that kids were being taught sex acts in kindergarten. Instead, it was over whether schools should replace science with creationism and replace sex ed with abstinence-only texts that had been written by religious organizations. This public piety from Republicans was more muted during the Barack Obama administration, but only slightly. Throughout those years, the difference between a church service and a Republican fundraiser was often undetectable.

Then Donald Trump became president. On paper, Trump appeared to be as much of a supplicant to the relentless Jesus talk on the right as every other Republican. He hit up the same evangelical schools for speeches, waved Bibles around in public, and even did photo-ops where a bunch of grifty ministers prayed over him. But, as far as I can tell, almost no one was actually fooled by this. Trump's ignorance of Christianity was absolute. He wasn't even aware that the central tenet of his supposed faith was a focus on penance and forgiveness. He called Christians "fools" and "schmucks" behind their backs. But no matter how often Trump's evangelical base was reminded that he is not one of them, they stuck by his side. They believed, correctly, that he could deliver them the policy outcomes they desired: A rollback of reproductive and LGBTQ rights, the destruction of public education, and an end to the separation of church and state.

Turns out that Trump is the most powerful religious right leader of all, precisely because he so obviously isn't a believer. He created a "secular" cover that allowed the Christian right to hide in plain sight. Now he's out of office, but the lesson was learned well: The best way to impose theocracy on Americans is to dress it up as a secular movement.

Nowadays, the main public discourse on the right about Christianity is focused on identity, not theology. Fox News pundits like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity talk about Christianity mainly in demographic terms, as part of a larger conception of what it means to be a "real" American. It's less about what you believe, and more about what tribe you belong to. Across the country, Republicans are passing laws that are clearly designed to advance the Christian right agenda, from abortion bans to the "don't say gay" law in Florida. But the Jesus talk has taken a backseat to QAnon-inflected fantasies about pedophilia and litter boxes in schools.

That the QAnon-style conspiracy theories would work better than lots of public praying seems weird at first blush. But it works for one simple reason: The Christian right has terrible branding.

Church ladies waving crosses around are nobody's idea of a good time. A lot of Americans, even Republican-voting Americans, don't go to church very often, if at all. What Trump understood, and the GOP, in general, has glommed onto, is that people want to have fun or at least create the illusion of being fun people. Packaging misogyny and homophobia as religious faith may give it a moral justification, but it's also a drag. Putting those ideas into the mouth of someone like Joe Rogan or Carlson in his current "naughty boy" persona, however, makes it feel transgressive, cool, and exciting.

Trump gave the right permission to stop trying to dress up their ugly views in Christian piety. He pushed calorie-free bigotry. You get the pleasures of being a bully, but you don't have to pay the price of doing boring crap like going to church. Of course, it sells well.

The confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett is a perfect illustration of this shift. Barrett has a long history of public piety in the Bush mold. It's why Trump chose her so that the religious right would feel absolutely secure that she will be the vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But during her confirmation hearing, when Democrats tried to make hay over Barrett's lengthy record of super public religiosity, Republicans cried foul, pretending that Barrett's beliefs were an entirely private matter that had no impact on her jurisprudence. This bad faith was aided by the fact that Barrett happily stood by Trump's side in public, apparently indifferent to his long history of adultery and repeated divorce. That willingness to be in the same room with Trump, perversely, only helped bolster her image as a "reasonable" person who had no intention of forcing her fundamentalism on the American public. But, of course, that's exactly what she was hired to do.

Right now, the nation is being swept by a tidal wave of theocratic legislation, and the situation only looks like it's getting worse. So far, however, the public mostly doesn't seem to take much notice. The various abortion bans barely make a ripple in the public discourse and the threats to hard-won LGBTQ rights aren't really raising many alarms either. Part of that is due to Democratic complacency after President Joe Biden's 2020 win, of course. But part of it is that people respond, especially in our short-attention-span era, to aesthetics more than substance. The Christian right has stopped looking like the Christian right and instead embraced the secular-seeming vibe that Trump, because he's godless, embodies effortlessly. It's hard to convince the public that fundamentalists are coming for them when the fundamentalists have gotten so good at pretending to be someone else.

In remarks scheduled the day before the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, Attorney General Merrick Garland swore that his agency would not let power and privilege shield those responsible for the assault on our democracy.

"The Justice Department," he promised, "remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law." Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers, he said, would "follow the facts wherever they lead."

It's now been nearly three months since those remarks, and unfortunately, it's starting to look very much like the elite Republicans who were part of a conspiracy to overthrow democracy are, in fact, too swaddled by status and wealth to be held accountable under the law. Every day, the extent of the conspiracy and the number of high-level GOP officials and activists involved with Donald Trump's attempted coup becomes more clear. Yet the DOJ appears to be doing little, if anything, to charge them with crimes. It's gotten to the point where the members of the January 6 committee are publicly begging Garland to do something.

"Attorney General Garland," Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va said Monday evening, "do your job so we can do ours." Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., concurred by noting that "there is no oversight, and without oversight, no accountability."

If Garland's hesitation comes from a belief that prosecuting coup-related crimes is too "political" to be handled by the DOJ, well, then he needs to be a better student of history. It's not just that dealing with people like Trump and his co-conspirators has always been a part of the DOJ's mission, it's that stopping racist and anti-democratic criminal conspiracies like Trump's attempted coup is quite literally what the DOJ was founded to do.

Quick history lesson: The modern DOJ — which was originally called the U.S. Department of Justice and Civil Rights Enforcement — was founded in 1870 under President Ulysses Grant. Its most important mission, as Bryan Greene at the Smithsonian Magazine explained in a 2020 article, "was the protection of black voting rights from the systematic violence of the Ku Klux Klan." In 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which empowered the DOJ to break up the white supremacist criminal conspiracies that had risen up throughout the former Confederacy to intimidate Black citizens from voting.

It's not a coincidence that this 1871 law is now being used by civil rights groups, Capitol law enforcement, and some Democratic members of Congress to sue Trump and his alleged co-conspirators for inciting violence on January 6. It's also being leveraged by civil rights groups and Democratic officials to sue Trump supporters engaged in campaign and voter intimidation across the country. That's because the January 6 insurrection and these voter intimidation efforts are very much the historical descendants of the KKK and similar white supremacist groups the DOJ was explicitly founded to quash.

Trump wasn't exactly subtle in his false claims of "voter fraud" aimed at cities like Philadelphia and Detroit. Everything that followed from the Big Lie, from the attempts to decertify the election to the Capitol riot, flowed from the same impulse that shaped the KKK: A belief that white Americans are the only legitimate Americans and that a president elected by a racially diverse coalition is illegitimate. Like the KKK, Trump and anyone else involved in the attempted coup would rather destroy democracy than accept sharing power with people who don't look like them.

The DOJ's failure to act, meanwhile, can't be chalked up to a lack of facts or possible charges, either.

The House of Representatives referred Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on contempt of Congress charges three and a half months ago, and so far, Meadows has not been arrested. Instead, more stories have come out about how he and his wife likely committed voter fraud, aka more crimes they will likely be too rich and powerful to have to answer for. The committee's public call for Garland to act this week came after they referred two more Trump officials — Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro — to the DOJ for refusing subpoenas.

In just the past week and a half, the amount of evidence of the high-level conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election has been frankly overwhelming. Trump fought to keep White House call logs from January 6, 2021 hidden for months. They have finally been turned over to the January 6 committee — and sure enough, seven hours are missing, despite a mountain of witness testimony showing that Trump was glued to his phone throughout this period. Former national security advisor John Bolton has confirmed that Trump liked to talk about using "burner phones," which is exactly the sort of evidence that establishes criminal intent in trials against people who actually face charges because they aren't high-ranking Republicans. A federal judge in California also just ruled "it more likely than not that President Trump" conspired with his lawyer, John Eastman, to commit crimes — and the evidence of that is being entered into the public record.

There's also this big-time story about how Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was part of a larger circle of people plotting ways for Trump to steal the 2020 election. According to new reporting from the Washington Post, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., was also heavily involved, fleshing out schemes to block Joe Biden's electoral win certification. While it's unclear if either of them can be charged with crimes, what is clear is that there was an extensive, high-level conspiracy to deny Americans the right to choose their own leaders, one that was fueled by white supremacist intent. Which is exactly the sort of thing the DOJ was founded to stop.

The good news is that there are whispers that the DOJ is planning to hire more lawyers to handle the January 6 investigations, which many DOJ watchers took as a sign that Garland is finally — almost 16 months after the Capitol riot — starting to take seriously his duty to do something about the conspiracy to end democracy. Unfortunately, this may just be more wish-casting. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco did recently reiterate the promise of holding perpetrators accountable "no matter at what level." Still, she mostly talked about how, "We are going to continue to do those cases." So far, "those cases" have strictly involved the low-level idiots who actually stormed the Capitol, as well as some fringe leaders of neo-fascist street gangs. While these folks are known to be in communication with Trump's inner circle, the actual inner circle people — as well as Trump himself — remain untouched.

Perhaps that will change. If so, Garland is nearly out of time.

The midterm elections are a mere seven months away, and if Republicans retake the House of Representatives, as most polling shows they likely will, one thing is certain: They will do anything and everything in their power to destroy any meaningful DOJ investigation into high-ranking coup conspirators. As they are the people who control the budget to hire all those lawyers the DOJ is finally asking for, this could get ugly fast. So the clock is ticking. If Garland has some secret desire to do his job, the time to get it done is nearly out.

Even against an overwhelming backdrop of relentless GOP book banning and censorship attempts of recent months, Florida's "don't say gay" bill stands out from the crowd.

There are good reasons why the proposed legislation, which passed the Florida Senate on Tuesday, is drawing national attention and condemnation. The bill doesn't just ban teachers from allowing any acknowledgment of LGBTQ people in the classroom, it uses the novel "bounty hunter" system Texas used to ban abortion to allow parents to sue schools if, say, a teacher allows a kid with same-sex parents to talk about it in class. Even Kate McKinnon of "Saturday Night Live" jokingly weighed in on a recent "Weekend Update."

"So, like, one kid can say, 'I live with my parents,' but another one has to say, 'I live in a house with two adult men who bought me when I was young?'"

Despite all the public pressure, Florida Republicans pushed this bill through the legislature and sent it to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' desk on Tuesday morning. To make it even worse, Republicans, in their eagerness to get the "don't say gay" bill across the finish line, revived a repulsive, homophobic myth: That queer people are pedophiles who recruit children.

"The bill that liberals inaccurately call 'Don't Say Gay' would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill," Christina Pushaw, DeSantis' longtime press secretary, wrote over the weekend on Twitter. She followed up by saying that anyone who opposes the bill is "probably a groomer." The term "groomer," of course, is just another word for "child molester," as actual pedophiles are known to "groom" their victims before assaulting them. But (I can't believe this needs to be said in the year 2022) there is no evidence that LGBTQ people molest children at a higher rate than straight-identified people.

What Pushaw is doing here, of course, is dog-whistling to QAnon and their conspiracy theories accusing pretty much every Democrat around of being pedophiles and cannibals. She's harkening back to a "gays recruit" myth that is so old that many Americans haven't even heard it, or at least thought it died out long ago. The myth comes straight out of the 1970s.

In 1977, religious right icon Anita Bryant and her husband Bob Greene spearheaded a nasty campaign against a proposed Miami ordinance prohibiting job and housing discrimination based on sexual orientation. As the Washington Post at the time reported, the two argued that "passage of the law will enable homosexuals to 'recruit' youths." This myth allowed conservatives to deny that same-sex attraction — and later trans identities — are intrinsic with a side dose of implying that queer people are dangerous sexual predators.

Decades of LGBTQ people telling their coming-out stories have done a great deal to destroy this myth, allowing the larger public to hear about how most queer people's identities come from inside. Indeed, most queer people's experience was massive pressure from others to be straight or cis, and having to overcome all the pressure to live as their authentic selves. And yet, as we're finding out from Florida Republicans, a lot of conservatives are still clinging to this idea that everyone is inherently straight and cis, and that the only reason people are queer is because they're "recruited."

DeSantis himself invoked the "gays recruit" myth on Friday, insisting that the bill just bans "sexual instruction" and "telling kids they may be able to pick genders." No one actually believes, of course, that kids are being given how-to lessons in sexual technique at any level of public school. This is just a dressed-up version of his press secretary's grotesque argument that merely acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people is somehow sexual predation and "recruitment."

At the risk of feeding the troll, it's worth remembering that no one equates acknowledgment of straight people with "recruitment" kids into that lifestyle. If a children's book has a picture of a heterosexual couple getting married, this is not viewed as "sexual instruction." But, to hear DeSantis tell it, that same picture of a same-sex couple getting married is perverse, pornographic, and somehow "recruitment."

The bill's sponsor, Republican state Senator Dennis Baxley, also defended the censorship effort by invoking the "gays recruit" myth. During debate over the bill, he argued that LGBTQ kids are "just trying on different kinds of things they hear about." He went on to say coming out is like "maybe they're in this club or that club," and accusing kids of just being confused about who they are.

"All of a sudden overnight, they're a celebrity when they felt like they were nobody," he said, trying to explain why kids might feel they are LGBTQ. Notably, he did not consider the possibility that straightness is also something kids might try on and decide they don't like. The underlying assumption, always, is that straight identities are always authentic, and only queer identities are questionable. Which is an inverse of reality, where many queer people are coerced into pretending to be straight for years, or even decades, due to social pressure.

The same "queers recruit" myth is underlying the new orders from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas for state agencies to investigate parents of trans children. By signing this order, Abbott is implying that trans kids are being pushed into their identities by overbearing parents, presumably for the same motivations — attention, accolades, woke points, whatever — Baxley assigned queer kids who come out in school. In reality, the vast majority, if not all, of these families follow the same path: The kid themselves starts asserting a trans identity, and the parents are affirming and supporting the child. In many cases, the parents are actually being pushed far out of their comfort zone in doing so, but love for their child is overcoming their doubts and confusion.

It is worth, also, noting that the people being targeted for state "investigation" (read: abuse) are only following the standard care recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. These parents are consulting with medical professionals and experts before moving forward with the plan to affirm a gender identity in a child who doesn't agree to the one they were assigned at birth. And in doing so, most parents are giving up a lot, often including the name they gave their child. That's an act of love and acceptance, not "abuse" or "recruitment."

But it almost feels pointless to argue these points.

Most of the Republicans reviving the "queers recruit" myth know full well it's a lie. What they want is not to protect children, but to harm children. This bill is intended to force teachers to shame and marginalize kids who are either LGBTQ, have family members who are, or, in some cases just don't want to conform to rigid gender roles by being boys who like pink or girls who play sports. In other words, Republicans want to bring back the closet. And they want to coerce teachers, on pain of being sued or fired, to play the role of right-wing gender police.

On the surface, it seems like Republicans can't decide how they feel about Russian President Vladimir Putin invading the sovereign country of Ukraine. On one hand, the more old guard GOP leadership is formally denouncing Putin and trying to score their political points against Joe Biden by claiming that this is evidence that the U.S. president is "weak." But both their de facto leader, Donald Trump, and their de facto party agenda-setter, Tucker Carlson, have been out there making their love and support of Putin known. As with every internal conflict in the GOP, the smart bet is the Trumpian wing will win over the traditional conservatives, even though it once again means that Republicans will be siding against America and democracy in favor of the forces of authoritarianism.

It's tempting to write this off, as so many in the mainstream media like to do, as evidence that the Republican party is "afraid" of Trump as if they were setting aside good intentions out of fear of crossing the orange mob boss who runs their party. The darker truth, however, is that this is part of a larger turn in the GOP towards anti-democratic, even fascist politics. As journalist Stephen Marche told Salon's Chauncey DeVega, "a huge number of Americans want such a dictatorship," and it's important to ask why, even though the answers don't "feel good."

One important document that points to the answer was released this week by Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott, a pamphlet titled, "An 11 Point Plan To Rescue America." Needless to say, the title is misleading, as this pamphlet is very much about destroying America — by dismantling basic freedoms and democracy itself — under the guise of "saving" it.

Despite the heavy declarations of patriotism, the document presents a depressing and dystopian vision of America that is at total odds with the values of freedom, equality, and democracy that are supposed to define this country. Through rhetoric heavy on euphemism and doublespeak, Scott's plans are not hard to suss out: Replacing fact-based education with nationalistic propaganda, destroying voting rights, ending all efforts to ameliorate racial inequalities, and forcing rigid and sexist gender roles on all Americans. Scott justifies the latter by declaring it's "God's design for humanity," which of course, violates the very first amendment to the constitution that protects freedom of religion.

It's not just, as Paul Waldman of the Washington Post wrote this weekend, that Republicans want "a return to the 1950s, a dramatic rollback of social progress to a supposedly simpler time, with traditional hierarchies restored." As Ed Kilgore wrote in New York, this document is "batshit crazy," full of ideas like ending Medicare and Social Security, as well as dismantling federal agencies like the Department of Education and the IRS. As Aaron Rupar noted in his newsletter, "It's not that Republicans don't stand for anything. It's that they stand for things that are unpopular and divisive." For instance, Scott's plan to replace real education with book bannings and nationalistic propaganda? Polling shows a whopping 83% of Americans oppose the idea.

Scott ostensibly opposes Putin and his war on Ukraine. This document, however, shows why that stance is increasingly incoherent for Republicans — and therefore opposed by their true leaders, i.e. Fox News hosts and Trump. Like Putin, American Republicans support a far-right social agenda that simply cannot withstand democratic debate and fair election systems. That's why Republicans are rallying behind Trump and his Big Lie. Democracy itself is their enemy, and they are siding with a transnational anti-democratic movement against the U.S. and its values.

The Trumpian wing of the party often doesn't even really bother to hide their goals. On a recent episode of his popular podcast "War Room," former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, as his wont, got vivid and violent with his fantasies of imposing one-party rule on the U.S.

This kind of rhetoric has become so normal on the right that it's easy to get inured to it, but it's important to remember what exactly Bannon is saying here. The Democratic Party represents a strong majority of Americans, a fact which is already disturbingly hidden by election systems that favor right-wing minorities. Since 1992, the Democrat won the popular vote in every presidential election but one. Bannon's "war" is very plainly about destroying the ability of the majority of voters to express their preferences in elections.

A slightly slicker but similarly disturbing message is evident in a recent campaign ad by Peter Thiel-backed GOP candidate for Arizona's Senate seat, Blake Masters.

Don't be fooled by the faux-innocuous assertions of cultural history or the glib tokenism of mentioning Chuck Berry. By declaring that America is a "people" and not an "idea," Masters gestures towards this white nationalistic, anti-democratic argument. This is a strike against the very foundational premise of the country, which is that this a constitutional democracy defined by its laws and ideals, one that is flexible and can evolve alongside its population. Instead, he clearly wishes to replace that vision with a white nationalist one, where "America" is about "its people," a group that will inevitably be defined along exclusionary lines of race and ethnicity.

As Roy Edroso, a writer focused on chronicling the right, noted on Twitter Wednesday, a focal point for the softly pro-Putin voices in the GOP is that "Russia is right because it persecutes gay and trans people, and America wrong because it doesn't."

It is a particularly salient example of why Republicans are growing increasingly anti-democratic, because their vicious bigotries on this front simply cannot withstand the rigors of the ballot box. We see this in Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued a vile executive order instructing CPS to strip parental rights off anyone who supports their trans child's gender identity. The bill was proposed in the Texas legislature, but it's so gruesome that it couldn't pass, despite firm Republican control of the state. So Abbott is simply going around the democratic system in a bid to destroy families in the name of his rigid gender ideology.

Like Putin, Republicans know that their views cannot win in a free, fair democratic debate. The tension between claiming to be for democracy in Ukraine while opposing democracy in the U.S. is causing way too much cognitive dissonance on the right. It's why Trump is going with a simpler message of blatantly rooting for Putin. Trumpism has always been part of this transnational war on democracy. Bannon in particular loves to trumpet this fact. With this invasion of Ukraine, this alliance between Trumpists at home and authoritarians worldwide is only going to strengthen — and strengthen Trump's hold on the Republican Party.

In the weeks after the January 6 insurrection, the Washington Post published a disturbing piece that hinted at how everyday Republicans had come to embrace the politics of terrorism. In Oklahoma City, the Post noted, the memory of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing has become a flashpoint, as both Republican politicians and ordinary citizens bully anyone who tries to draw a line between Timothy McVeigh's crime and Donald Trump-incited storming of the Capitol. The link is obvious, however. Both crimes were committed by white nationalists who refuse to accept a multiracial democracy — but woe on those who say as much in Oklahoma. When Oklahoma's Department of Education shared information from the bombing memorial linking McVeigh's attack with the domestic terror attack on the Capitol, their Facebook page was flooded with vitriol.

"How in the world is this even remotely the same as the Oklahoma bombing??!!!" one teacher wrote. Another derided the education department as the "Oklahoma Dept of Socialist Indoctrination." An angry dad clashed with other parents who argued that McVeigh's radicalism and the anti-government rhetoric at the Capitol were "the very definition of the same context."

One angry Oklahoman even shared the right-wing slogan about the "tree of liberty" needing to be "refreshed" with "blood" in the comments, seemingly unaware that the same phrase was on the T-shirt that McVeigh wore the day he murdered 168 people.

This incoherent insistence on treating McVeigh's insurrectionist violence as somehow different than the Capitol rioters illustrates an ugly shift that's happened in Republican politics since 1995. Back then, most Republicans rejected the view that a white nationalist is entitled to commit violence to protest democratic outcomes he doesn't like. Now, McVeigh's ideology is the mainstream view in GOP politics. Sure, they rarely come right out and say it. But this insistence on minimizing the Capitol riot and continuing support for the man who instigated it — Donald Trump — speaks loudly enough. And ugliness in Oklahoma City in the days after the 2021 insurrection demonstrated that this pro-insurrection view was fixed on the right within days, if not hours, of the event itself.

We see this, as well, in the celebratory attitude that right-wing media — especially Fox News — is taking towards the Ottawa trucker blockade.

As Zack Beauchamp of Vox notes, the uprising that brought that part of the Canada-U.S. border to a standstill and has terrorized the city of Ottawa "is on the fringe, including among Canadian truckers — some 90 percent of whom are vaccinated." It's a group of right-wingers who "are angry because they have lost" and are trying to gain by force what they cannot through democratic means. And yet, it's become a cause célèbre on Fox News, causing comically overwrought claims like it's "the single most successful human rights protest in a generation."

Fox News doesn't like the blockade despite its widespread unpopularity — they support it because it's unpopular.

As with the January 6 insurrection, the trucker tantrum is viewed by right-wing media as a model for how the embittered white conservative majority can impose its will without getting public support. Both the insurrection and the trucker tantrum are a far-right minority expressing a belief that they entitled to rule, no matter what. And while the Ottawa demonstration has so far not been as violent as the January 6 insurrection, it is still about using force — by taking the economy hostage and intimidating the residents with the threat of violence — to obtain what conservatives cannot gain fairly.

This shift from being anti- to pro-terrorism among Republicans can really be traced back to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's 2014 standoff with the Bureau of Land Management(BLM) and his sons' subsequent 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. That's when a group of far-right extremists, led by brothers Ryan and Ammon Bundy, seized control of a visitor's center at an Oregon national wildlife refuge, spouting a bunch of incoherent demands that amounted to a belief that a democratically elected government had no right to pass laws restricting the right of white men to wreak as much environmental damage as they damn well pleased. The fight quite literally started because the occupiers didn't believe the government had a right to convict two men who had set fire to federal lands to protest not being allowed to graze their cattle there.

The occupiers were domestic terrorists, trying to obtain through violence what they couldn't through fair engagement in politics. But while Republicans formally condemned the violence, they were also tripping over each other to validate the asinine complaints of the occupiers. Multiple GOP congressmen even drew on arguments that came from fringe authoritarian writers who believe in things like turning the U.S. into a Christian theocracy. Even more troublingly, the occupiers were found "not guilty" at their trial, suggesting that by October of 2016, enough Republicans were pro-terrorism enough to make it impossible to put together a jury to convict in a case that should have been a slam dunk. So that Trump was able to cobble together enough votes the next month to win the electoral college should not, in retrospect, have been a surprise.

The Department of Justice under Barack Obama had been slow and cautious in its response to the occupation, fearing another debacle like the Branch Davidian fire in Waco, TX in 1993. Instead of storming in, they let the occupiers feel safe enough to actually leave the property for a media event, where they were then easily captured on an open highway. It was a decision heavily criticized at the time, with lots of people rightfully pointing out that people of color who commit acts of terrorism don't get the kid glove treatment. Others, including myself, defended the feds, arguing that the fact that only one person died in the process justified the strategy. Now I'm beginning to doubt that view.

It may be that Democrats just need to get stiffer spines when dealing with right-wing bullies and terrorists, even when doing so means the right will react with violence. As Brian Beutler of Crooked Media argued in his newsletter last week, it's reasonable to worry that the utter failure of the Department of Justice to arrest Trump or his allies for their many crimes "is driven by fear" of a violent backlash. Certainly, Trump has been using intimidation recently, promising pardons for people who commit violence for him and demanding ugly reactions from his followers if he does face a consequence.

But this failure of nerve on the part of Democratic leadership is going to screw us all over in the long run. As Beutler argues, the system "can't function if one side gets a hostage-taker's veto over the rules of fair play," and without imposing real consequences for crime and violence, "he public will just grow desensitized to right-wing tactics or, worse," even start to sympathize with the hostage-takers and violent terrorists.

We see this in the shift in GOP circles from 1995, when McVeigh's villainy was indisputable, to our modern time, when people who share McVeigh's views and stormed the Capitol are described by the Republican National Committee as merely engaging in "legitimate political discourse." The RNC did walk that lie back a little bit, but notably only for the people who got arrested. That only underscores the validity of Beutler's argument: Consequences matter when it comes to public opinion.

The ongoing failure of Democrats to bring the hammer down on the ringleaders of the coup signals strongly to the public that the coup was no big deal — and indeed, opens the door to arguing that the coup was justified. Republicans are walking right through that door right now.

Two stories straight out of Alabama this week really encapsulate how the panic over "critical race theory," the war on schools and the war on democracy itself are all a piece of a singular racist right wing movement. Last week, AL.com reported that school officials across the state say parents are freaking out over the very existence of Black History Month, accusing schools of promoting "critical race theory" by mentioning it or honoring it in any way. And on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act in response to a plainly racist gerrymander in Alabama, on the grounds that doing so would interfere with the state's control of their elections systems. Yes, even though federal oversight of state election systems is literally what the Voting Rights Act was designed to do.

It's been 13 months since Donald Trump incited an insurrection on the Capitol, one that was clearly driven by white supremacy and the belief that the votes of Black Americans simply shouldn't count as much as those of white people. There continues to be a struggle between various factions of the GOP over how to portray the violent insurrection itself — to call it a glorious MAGA revolution or pretend it was a random event unconnected to the larger party — but these two stories show the sentiment that drove it has now taken root in every corner of the GOP. From the school board to the Supreme Court, Republicans are determined to stomp out anything that stands in the way of white supremacy, from history to the law to democracy itself.

The Supreme Court's Monday decision is rife with confusing legalese, and will likely be mostly overlooked by both the media and the public because of it. But it's important. As with the court's recent approach to the Texas abortion ban, it showcases how the three Trump appointees to the court have transformed SCOTUS into an authoritarian body that will throw out the rule of law to enforce a far-right agenda.

In a 5-4 decision, the conservative justices stayed a lower court's ruling that a new Alabama gerrymander disenfranchised Black voters, in a clear violation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In his defense of the decision, Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh didn't even bother to argue that the gerrymander was legal, but instead insisted that enforcing federal election law nine months out from an election would "lead to disruption" and that it was "unanticipated and unfair" to expect Alabama to obey a law passed 57 years ago.

"It is hard to overstate how lawless the Supreme Court's order is," wrote Mark Joseph Stern, who covers courts and law for Slate, on Twitter. "The five ultraconservative justices broke the court's own rules to intervene with an unreasoned shadow docket decision that effectively nullifies a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. It's profoundly alarming."

The refusal of the court to enforce the plain letter text of the law is so egregious that even Chief Justice John Roberts — a man who has made it his life's work to gut the Voting Rights Act — voted with the liberal justices. Roberts may share the racist goals of the other conservative judges, but even he clearly feels uneasy with the court simply rejecting the duty to enforce the law simply because they disagree with its aims.

By issuing this decision, the conservative judges are throwing their lot in with Trump and the Capitol insurrectionists — if the law will not uphold white supremacy, the law itself is invalid.

It's the same impulse underpinning the panic over "critical race theory," a cover story for white conservatives trying to stomp out acknowledgment of the country's racist history and contributions made by Black Americans. Republicans spent months gaslighting the public about this, insisting the attacks on school boards and bans on "critical race theory" were about stopping supposedly "divisive" teachings and "anti-white" racism. But their actions speak otherwise, from these complaints about Black History Month to efforts to ban books about Martin Luther King Jr. The goal is erasing history, literature and even facts that conflict with a white supremacist ideology.

What was remarkable about the Capitol insurrection is that it was both an assault on rule of law and on reality itself. The rioters rejected the basic fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. They also rejected the basic law that asserts that the winner of the election has the right to take power. The belief that they and people like them — white conservatives — have a "right" to rule overrules everything else.

The insurrection clearly didn't end on January 6, just because the rioters failed to overturn the election and enshrine the Big Lie. On the contrary, the insurrection has mutated and metastasized within the GOP. It has infused the whole party, from the ordinary voters freaking out at school boards to the highest court in the land. There might be a few Republican holdouts — like Roberts or former vice president Mike Pence — who still think things like "rule of law" and "basic facts" matter. But they have clearly lost the battle with the rest of the party, as this 5-4 Supreme Court decision shows. There is no law or fact Republicans feel bound to respect. Anything that stands in the way of the white conservative will to power is expected to give way.

The "Defeat the Mandates" rally on Sunday in Washington D.C. was not exactly the blockbuster event, size-wise, organizers had hoped to turn out. The event's planners had predicted 20,000 people, but more reasonable estimates suggested it was fewer than half that who actually showed. But despite the paltry turnout, the event was deeply troubling to experts who monitor the far-right.

The tone and tenor of the occasion were so hyperbolic and self-aggrandizing, creating exactly the sort of conditions that will further radicalize ordinary Republicans and stoke more right-wing violence. Disgustingly, one of the main speakers was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the Democratic scion who was assassinated in 1968. Kennedy has spent the past few years becoming an increasingly unhinged anti-vaccine activist — but his presence on Sunday was even more alarming considering the role that the Kennedy family plays in the imaginations of the QAnon cult.

Many QAnoners believe that JFK and JFK Jr. — Kennedy's deceased uncle and first cousin, respectively — are still alive and secretly supporting Donald Trump. Simply by showing up, Kennedy validated these kinds of fringe beliefs. The situation got much worse when he actually spoke and told the crowd that anti-vaxxers have it worse than Jews did during the Holocaust.

"Even in Hitler Germany (sic), you could, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did," Kennedy said. "I visited, in 1962, East Germany with my father and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped, so it was possible. Many died, true, but it was possible."

Kennedy's analogy is incoherent for obvious reasons — does he think East Germany was a Nazi state or not know that Frank died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp? — and was widely criticized for being offensive. The Auschwitz Memorial responded with a tweet describing Kennedy's speech as "a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay."

But the speech wasn't just offensive — it's also dangerous.

It doesn't matter that Kennedy didn't come right out and call on people to commit violence. It's inciting to tell anti-vaxxers they are victims of oppression worse than what the Jews faced under the Nazis. It justifies violence as a form of self-defense. This is why experts on far-right organizing and violence were alarmed. Ben Collins, an NBC reporter who has been covering the rise of American fascism, was especially concerned.

Kennedy was just one of many who made the comparison Sunday, both onstage and in the crowd. There was also a lot of comparing the plight of anti-vaxxers to that of Black Americans living under segregation. Meanwhile, rally organizers pretended theirs was a message of diversity and tolerance. Prominent anti-vaccine activist and rally speaker Del Bigtree insisted this "is a movement of unity," and "if you have any problems with race, or religion, or sexual preference then I don't think you're truly representing this movement."

In reality, however, as Will Carless of USA Today wrote, hate groups and far-right activists are using the anti-vaccine movement to recruit, both online and off. Brian Hughes of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University explained to Carless that the far-right sees "anti-vaccine sentiment and COVID denialism as a market that they can exploit for views, for clicks and for merchandise sales." Indeed, these kinds of groups were heavily represented in the crowd at the rally. As Salon alum and current Daily Beast reporter Zachary Petrizzo noted, "Far-right fanatics were out in full force, from the extremist members of the hate group Proud Boy to rank-and-file supporters who consume everything that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones utters."

But it was also true that more ordinary Republicans also showed up. There were even people claiming to be disillusioned Democrats, although this is a common enough lie on the right and should always be taken with a grain of salt. Either way, what is crucial to understand is that the far-right and hate groups are plugging into the anti-vaccine discourse to lure conservatives into becoming even more fascistic and more supportive of the violent rejection of democracy. (Similarly, fascists have also been using anti-abortion demonstrations to recruit.)

For the past year, being anti-vaccine has been an easy — if often deadly — way for ordinary Republicans to express their hatred of President Joe Biden and to spite Democrats. Fox News and GOP leaders have encouraged their followers to reject the vaccine as a way to show solidarity on the right and make life harder for those who voted against Trump. It's ugly and dangerous behavior — but it has been effective at meeting the liberal-triggering goals.

Biden's approval ratings have been dropping as a result of the prolonged pandemic. Democratic voters, who are more likely to make personal sacrifices like mask-wearing or social distancing to curb the pandemic, have been made to suffer the indignities stemming from a prolonged pandemic, even if their vaccinated status has largely prevented them from being the ones filling up hospitals. Republicans are three times as likely to be unvaccinated as Democrats. That's why anti-vaccine ideology makes a perfect recruiting ground for fascists.

There are a lot of Republican voters whose hatred and desire to spite Democrats has led them to gamble with their own lives by refusing vaccines. It's not much of a leap to believe such folks are open to taking things to the next level, to reject democracy and embrace an authoritarian ideology for the same vindictive reasons. The anti-vaccine discourse is a perfect space to blur the lines between being a petty partisan who is mad about losing an election and being an outright fascist who no longer believes in holding free and fair elections.

When Kyrsten Sinema first ran to be the Democratic senator from Arizona, her support from Emily's List seemed to be a no-brainer. The political action committee (PAC) is one of the biggest in politics, and historically is one of the major reasons for the remarkable influx of female leaders in the Democratic Party in the past few decades. The main criteria for supporting candidates — that they be female, pro-choice and Democratic — appeared, at the time, to fit Sinema beautifully. She claimed to believe "a woman, her family, and her doctor should decide what's best for her health" and that she stands for "health clinics like Planned Parenthood and opposes efforts to let employers deny workers coverage for basic health care like birth control." Emily's List was the biggest source of funds for Sinema's 2018 campaign, raising nearly twice as much money for her as her second largest supporting PAC. It is unlikely she would have won by her razor-thin margin without their support.

But, as it turns out, Sinema's claims to feminist values were all nonsense.

Sure, unlike Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, her fellow corrupt conspirator in shutting down the Democratic agenda in the Senate, Sinema continues to claim to be pro-choice. She has even voted the right way on the issue in those rare instances that votes even happen in the Senate, all while Manchin continues to vote for right-wing interference with reproductive decision-making. But when it comes to taking actions that would actually protect not just reproductive rights, but the equality of women generally, Sinema has become a major obstacle, with her stubborn insistence on supporting the filibuster, which Republicans use to shut down pretty much all meaningful legislation from the Democratic majority — including bills to protect abortion rights and enshrine gender equality into the constitution.

On Wednesday night, Sinema — as she's dramatically promised to do — is expected to side with the Republican minority against a bill meant to shore up democracy and protect voting rights against a coordinated GOP effort to dismantle fair and free election systems. Sinema claims, quite falsely, to support the voting rights bill, but insists on letting the Republicans have veto power over it, putting an arcane and anti-democratic Senate rule ahead of democracy itself.

In response, Emily's List and NARAL promised to pull their support from Sinema. Emily's List president Laphonza Butler released a statement explaining the decision by saying, "Electing Democratic pro-choice women is not possible without free and fair elections. Protecting the right to choose is not possible without access to the ballot box." NARAL president Mini Timmaraju concurred, stating, "Without ensuring that voters have the freedom to participate in safe and accessible elections, a minority with a regressive agenda and a hostility to reproductive freedom will continue to block the will of the majority of Americans."

Butler and Timmaraju are dead right. It's not just about reproductive rights, either. Without a healthy democracy, women's rights and gender equality in general are imperiled. There's a reason 19th century feminists focused their efforts on women's suffrage, a century-long fight that few, if any, of those who started it lived to see succeed. The fight for gender equality and fight for democracy are inextricably intertwined. The fight for one is a fight for the other.

It's also not a coincidence that authoritarians like Donald Trump also happen to be giant misogynists. From the beginning, the rising fascist movement in America has been fueled not just by racism, but by toxic masculinity and male anger at women's growing equality. Trump's 2016 campaign was built on a foundation of misogynist rage — not just at Hillary Clinton for daring to think a woman can be president, but at women generally for asserting their right to be treated as equals in the home and workplace. His popularity with the GOP base was cemented when he mocked a Fox News host Megyn Kelly with menstruation insults. He secured the religious right's support for promising to ban abortion.

But the election of 2016 also illustrated how democracy can protect women's rights. After all, Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes and with a 2 point margin over Trump. It was only because of the anti-democratic electoral college system — an ongoing and retrograde leftover from the era when women and people of color weren't allowed to vote — that Trump even had a chance. And there can be no doubt that, if 2016 had been a truly democratic election, both the country and women's rights would be in much better shape right now. At bare minimum, the Supreme Court wouldn't have three Trump appointees on it, and Roe v. Wade would not be slated for a near-certain overturn in June.

Authoritarian misogyny is hardly just an American phenomenon, either.

Throughout history and in our current day, there's been a strong link between hostility to women's rights and anti-democratic attitudes. The Nazis were notoriously sexist, insisting a woman's place was in the home and strengthening bans on abortion. Romania's communist dictatorship banned abortion and contraception. China's authoritarian government has forever been opposed to reproductive rights, first by banning the right to have more than one child and now, due to low population growth, by announcing plans to restrict abortion access.

To be certain, fighting for women's equality in a healthy democracy is hardly a breeze. There's literally millennia of patriarchal oppression that needs to be overturned, and lots of ingrained sexist attitudes held by the majority of Americans. (About 7 in 10 married women, for instance, still take their husband's name, including, however reluctantly, Hillary Clinton.) As noted, suffrage for women was a long and miserable fight that took literally a century. The Equal Rights Amendment, which was almost passed in the 70s, died after anti-feminists activists successfully lobbied against it.

Still, what democracy offers feminism is the chance to make the case: To argue for gender equality, to appeal to voters, and to build — sometimes painfully slowly — public understanding of why women's rights are so important. And, as miserable as that process can be, history shows it's better than the alternatives. Polls show strong majorities of Americans support abortion rights and even more believe contraception is acceptable. Stigmas against divorce, single motherhood, and sex outside of marriage have collapsed in the public eye after decades of feminist agitation for the right of women to be treated a full adults, instead of male property. Support for LGBTQ rights also rose, as a direct result from larger feminist discussions about the evils of gendered oppression. And a woman even won the popular vote in a presidential election — and if this was a truly democratic system, she would be president.

Sinema's support for the filibuster exposes how paper-thin her claims to support feminist values always were. Biden won because of women. He got 57% of the female vote, while Trump won 53% of men. The Biden agenda that Sinema is blocking is what female voters sent not just Biden, but Sinema to Washington to accomplish. And not just on voting rights, either. By supporting the bipartisan infrastructure bill but not the Build Back Better plan, Sinema helped ensure that 90% of new job creation will go to men, instead of the more diverse pool that Biden's larger agenda would have supported.

Voting rights is the issue that gave birth to the American feminist movement. By refusing to support voting rights, Sinema isn't just turning her back on her country and her party, but on the very feminist movement that permitted someone like her, a female senator, to even exist. Sinema may play-act the fun-loving feminist, with her kitschy dresses and loud wigs that stand out from the drab masculinist attire that rules the Senate. But as long as she stands with Republicans against democracy, she is a traitor to feminism and should be regarded as such.

No one should ever accuse Ted Cruz of being held back by a basic sense of dignity.

Last week, the Texas Republican got into hot water with Donald Trump loyalists, who will brook no criticism of the fascist insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol last year. Cruz, who has otherwise been an advocate of Trump's Big Lie as one of eight senators who voted to throw out the results of the 2020 election so that Trump could illegally remain in power, dared to suggest that the people who used violence for that same goal had engaged in a "terrorist attack."

Calling those Trump loyalists anything but peaceful patriots who have never done a bad thing in their entire lives is forbidden in Trumpist circles, of course. For his trespass, Cruz was taken to task by Tucker Carlson and other fascistic leaders in right-wing media far more beloved by the GOP base than the likes of Cruz. And as is his wont, Cruz has been crawling on his belly ever since, begging for forgiveness and making it clear he'll say or do anything to get back in the good graces of the worst people in the country.

Cruz's been on Fox News repeatedly since his momentary lapse in lying, hyping a conspiracy theory/apologia for the fascist insurrection that's long been favored by Carlson: The FBI compelled Trump fans to storm the Capitol. Worse, Cruz has been abusing taxpayer funds in order to push this conspiracy theory. On Tuesday, Cruz spent his time during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing going off about this idiotic claim that it was the FBI who caused the Capitol riot, not unhinged Trump supporters acting on Trump's obvious and well-communicated wishes.

Like most right-wing conspiracy theories, this one is both incoherent and easily debunked. (A quick Google search for "Ray Epps" leads to some good explanations as to why.) But, crucially, this narrative isn't supposed to make sense. On the contrary, the nonsensical nature of it is very much by design. The whole point of these incoherent conspiracy theories is to create a cloud of bewildering disinformation so thick that the actual truth gets lost in a maze of lies, hand-waving and fart noises.

Even more crucially, Cruz's performance yesterday worked exactly as intended, providing ample video footage that could be cut up and re-edited into clips to be disseminated across right-wing land as "proof" that the FBI is hiding something. Misleading clips spread rapidly on social media with breathless text like "the FBI stonewalled and refused to answer" and "The American people deserve answers."

No one sharing these videos wants "answers," however. They just want to make a bunch of noise to distract from the fact that there's no mystery regarding what happened on January 6. It was an insurrection, instigated by Trump, for the purpose of overthrowing an election so he could be installed as an illegitimate president.

Unfortunately, Cruz's sleazy behavior Tuesday is not an anomaly, but part of a larger right-wing derangement feedback loop.

Far-right conspiracy theories first bubble up from the swamps of Infowars and various online Trump-loving forums. Republicans in Congress, desperate for both attention and donations, then use congressional hearings to float these conspiracy theories, knowing they'll be cut into videos that get widely shared on social media and shown on Fox News. Those well-produced videos, in turn, legitimize the lies and embolden the people in the fever dream swamps to keep generating conspiracy theories. The whole thing has an addictive quality to it, with both Republican politicians and their audiences needing ever-nuttier conspiracy theories, in order to keep getting the same derangement high.

Cruz wasn't even the only Republican in the Senate employing this tactic on Tuesday.

During another Senate hearing, this one held by the Health and Education Committee, both Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Roger Marshall of Kansas used the presence of Dr. Anthony Fauci — Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a favorite hate object on the right — to generate more propaganda footage. Both men floated elaborate and deliberately obtuse conspiracy theories about Dr. Fauci that simultaneously imply that he somehow created the coronavirus and also that COVID-19 is a socialist hoax.

Yes, these ideas contradict each other. No, the people who claim to believe these theories don't care about that contradiction. As usual, the point is not to make sense, but to grind rational discourse into dust.

As an added bonus, Marshall kept making false accusations that Dr. Fauci is hiding his financial position, with an obvious intent to imply that Dr. Fauci is somehow secretly profiting off of the pandemic. The same pandemic that right-wing conspiracy theories paint as somehow both a bioweapon but also not an actual threat. Dr. Fauci got fed up with all this and called Marshall a "moron" into a hot mic. Sadly, Marshall is not actually a moron. He's a cynical opportunist who is deliberately generating misinformation in order to increase his name recognition with the GOP base and rake in more money. Marshall, frankly, seems thrilled that Dr. Fauci called him a "moron." He's hyping the story, banking off the GOP base's well-known hatred of Dr. Fauci. There is no better way in GOP fundraising circles to get attention and make money than to cast yourself as a primo liberal-triggerer.

So right-wing politics should be understood as a topsy-turvy version of pro wrestling, where real-life heroes like Dr. Fauci are recast as the heel and real-life villains like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz get to play the role of the face. By hijacking congressional hearings in order to put on these wrestling matches, Republicans aren't just wasting taxpayer money and destroying the ostensible purpose of hearings to gather and expose the truth, they're using the prestige of Congress in order to disseminate their conspiracy theories more widely. It's a derangement loop that's driving the GOP base further away from reality and deeper into a fascist ideology.

We only need to look at last summer's hearing of the January 6 committee, where Congress heard testimony from law enforcement that was there during the insurrection, to see what happens when bad faith Republicans are barred from the microphones. That hearing generated real information, unmarred by the grandstanding and conspiracy theories of Republicans competing to see who can act the most maniacal for their base.

While there may be no legal way for Democrats, who technically control the gavels, to put a lid on the misuse of hearings this way, it's time to explore the possibility of shutting Republicans up, or at least minimizing how much they can abuse the hearing process. Turning congressional hearings into little more than Infowars taping sessions isn't just embarrassing for Congress, it's undermining our democracy.