An American awakening? Midterm Republican disappointment will only come with an 'Ok,we are finally getting it now' awakening of the American voting public. That would be some well deserved justice served. The time will inevitably arrive. One day.
"Republicans chose to kneel before him. Will he now bring them to their knees? P - Thanks in large part to Trump, they’re stuck with Senate candidates — Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona — whose ineptness, inanity, immoderation or all three significantly diminish their chances in purple states at a propitious juncture. P - Thanks in even larger part to Trump, voters ranked threats to democracy as the most pressing problem facing the country in a recent NBC News poll. That intensifying concern is among the reasons that President Biden went so big and bold last week in his intensely debated speech about extremism in America. He was eyeing the midterms, and he was wagering that Republican leaders’ indulgence of Trump’s foul play and fairy tales might finally cost them. P - Trump is also a factor in Republicans’ vulnerability regarding abortion rights. For his own selfish political purposes, he made grand anti-abortion promises. He appointed decidedly anti-abortion judges, including three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. He as much as anyone fired up the anti-abortion movement to the point where Republicans may now get burned. "
If the Republican Taliban-scented overreach on abortion and the Trump inspired Taliban-type Senate candidates take away from previously expected Republican mid-term success it would only be justice well and truly deserved. And not before time.
If the criminality of Trump himself adds to Republican disappointment it would only be more justice served.
If false-facts-us-too manic Republicans suffer even more disappointment because of their allegiance to the guiding principles of false-fact-supremo-liar-extraordinaire Donald 'Jackass' Trump that would be even further justice served.
It's now up to the American people to even more undo the insidious influence of the 2nd deadly virus which has infected the country. The Orange-eh-tang
he captured during the Jan. 6 Capitol siege. You’ll hear “traitors to the guillotine” and “kill Mike Pence” bizarrely juxtaposed with “protect the Constitution” and “Christ is king.” At one point, protesters smash video equipment taken from news crews, pile it up and set it on fire. “There you go,” someone shouts, addressing journalists trying to report the event. “Now you can’t!”
But in “The Storm Is Here,” Mogelson, a contributing writer for The New Yorker who has covered wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, does indeed report the events on our battlefields at home. Going beyond the events of Jan. 6, he shows how such protesters often proudly bond in communities of imagined apocalypse. More broadly, he traces a disturbing link between mobilized extremists, the dominant faction of the Republican Party, and the big lie.
Zone by zone, Mogelson takes us to recent skirmishes — demonstrations against Covid shutdowns in Grand Rapids, Mich.; anti-Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis; Proud Boys gatherings in Portland, Ore. — all of which, he rightly argues, led up to Jan. 6. We listen in with him to fiery talk — in a barbershop, at rallies, in cafes — among the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Boogaloo Bois and other extremists, as if to war drums. A 68-year-old retiree compares a pandemic lockdown to a Nazi takeover, telling Mogelson that, now stripped of our freedoms, “we’re a trigger pull away” from mass violence. “We’re getting to the point where people have had enough.”
among the Boogaloo Bois and QAnon, already eager for burn-down-the-government mayhem, urge others to join them and target anyone who favors “moderate participation” — even those on their own side of the political spectrum. Mogelson compares some of the views of the Islamic State to those he discovers in QAnon: ISIS hates moderate Muslims, he observes, in the same way QAnon followers hate moderate Republicans.
Most important, Mogelson points to a bracing existential truth: “One emotional feature of contemporary conflict,” he muses, “is the ever-present, low-frequency dread of random catastrophe.” He relates “the missile tearing through the roof” in war to a rampage through the nation’s Capitol in peacetime: “When no place is immune from haphazard demolition, more abstract structures — the invisible schema that holds societies together — also become precarious. … I don’t think of this as a psychological phenomenon; I think that war reminds us how things are not as sound and solid as we believe.” This is the book’s wake-up call.
Powerful though it is, “The Storm Is Here” has a few flaws. At times I felt dizzy moving among continents, American states, extremist groups and animating issues (Ebola, Islam, masking, shutdowns, fallen statues, racist police departments, the 2020 election). For my taste, the author doesn’t take enough time — camera down, phone ringer off — to ask why this is happening.
From “loss” Trump has moved the emotional needle to “stolen.” The right to work and remain maskless during a pandemic, stolen. Story of heroic America, stolen. Statues, stolen. Culture, stolen. White power, stolen. Old-time manhood, stolen. Election, stolen. With “stolen,” as opposed to the more circumstantial “loss,” it’s much easier to assign blame. For the stolen election: the deep state, RINOs, Democrats. For stolen white livelihoods: China, immigrants, minorities. And one thing more, many MAGA enthusiasts say to themselves: Donald Trump will save us. The Democrats are preventing Trump from saving us. He is being stolen from us. And Trump has moved the needle from “stolen” to “steal me back.”
In this way, Trump broke with moderate Republicans to ally with far-right activists such as those we meet in this book, while painting Antifa as a far greater threat. Never mind that over the past 25 years, as Mogelson notes, right-wing extremists in the United States have killed 320 people, and those claiming an antifascist agenda have killed one. Since Trump’s inauguration, right-wing terrorists have carried out 140 violent attacks; left-wingers, a dozen.
But just who are these extremists? In a recent interview, a neo-Nazi co-organizer of the 2017 Charlottesville march, now struggling with repentance, told me: “My buddies were my family. We all drank too much, were angry fists looking for a fight, and I was ready to die a hero’s death.” Such men — and generally they are men — welcome violent protest as prime-time theater in which they can play heroic figures of high rank in some fearsome hierarchy of rage.
They are the extreme edge of a vaster red-state America that feels hidden beneath the sunnier narrative of a more prosperous blue-state America: Work hard and success will follow. “Most people outside Appalachia ignore us,” one man in his 40s in Pike County, Ky., told me. “But the rest blame us for our problems. We’re drawing government checks. We have drug problems. But they don’t see all the things we’ve lost — good jobs, closeness to family, community trust, a debt-free life, pride.”
Whether a grievance, or a promise, is based on fact can come to feel beside the point. A former coal miner in an Appalachian county where 80 percent voted for Trump in 2020 told me he had recently gotten back on his feet after losing his job and falling into drugs. “When Donald Trump came to town in 2016, he told us he was going to bring back coal,” he said. “I knew Trump was telling me a lie. But I felt like he saw who I was.” The storm is here, Mogelson’s important book warns us, in the threat of public violence and at the ballot box. It’s here because a loss has for too long gone unrecognized, and because a lie that ties itself to this loss can feel more compelling to some than a truth that ignores it.
Arlie Russell Hochschild is writing a follow-up to her book “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” a National Book Award finalist.
THE STORM IS HERE: An American Crucible | By Luke Mogelson | 360 pp. | Penguin Press | $29
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