Banging My Head Against the Wall

I know I expected too much for Trump and his cult followers to accept the election results gracefully. But they are not. They still insist that it was rigged, and they are half right. Trump rigged it in his favor, which worked the first time, but not the second. And he is pissed because his underhanded tactics didn’t work for the 2020 election as they did for the 2016. And Trumpians were either too blind, too ignorant, too selfish, or too greedy to see otherwise. But since most of these voters are conservative Christians, they are taught with fear and guilt to obey, which they happily do.

Republican voters, in a general sense, and the GOP specifically, have historically cared only for their own personal needs and desires and cared little about anyone else. Until that specific issue affects them personally. Many conservative Christian Republicans are anti-vaxxers until they or a loved one becomes infected with Covid 19. Then they beg their family and friends to get vaccinated, forgetting that they didn’t listen to anyone, which is why they became sick. Right-wing conspiracy theorists take this all to a whole new level. And this is nothing new. All of this goes back to at least the 60s, if not further, starting with the communist’ red scare’ back in the early 1950s that gave us “in god we trust” on our dollar bills and “under god” in the pledge of allegiance. Trump embraced Russia, Communism, and Nazism; it’s ironic these days since all of his voters embraced him and agreed with anything and everything he said. These Trumplican right-wingers are just a newer version of the John Birch Society from the early 60s.

Trump also pushed the dominating, white-Nationalist, authoritarian type government, and still does. Americans who support him accept it but would have a fit if those same ideas came from Liberal Democrats.

His most vocal supporters are just that… extremely vocal—people like Tucker Carlson, Mike Lindell, and Majorie Taylor Greene. All they care about are their own TV ratings, product sales, and government control, not the people who watch their show, buy their product, or vote them into office.

“It displays a deranged right-wing vision of self-rule that sees competitive authoritarian methods as the route to securing ethno-nationalist ends; It’s the future they want.” According to Greg Sargent of the Washington Post.

“Republican members of the House, who this week voted to release a Republican memo suggesting the Russia investigation is a partisan plot against President Trump. As Eric Levitz summarizes in New York magazine, Trump supporters’ evolving conspiracy theory posits that “the entire investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government is a baseless sham orchestrated by Hillary Clinton and her deep-state allies,” including “a ‘secret society’ of Democratic operatives embedded within the FBI.”

Republicans see a conspiracy everywhere they look except within their ranks.

Mike Lindell pretty much has a total meltdown on CNN. I loved this description of Lindell from NationalMemo…

“MyPillow CEO and deranged election conspiracist Mike Lindell has been been on the warpath since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, spending millions of dollars to find “proof” that somehow, someway Trump won. But his proof is much like Lindell himself: “completely ridiculous.”

During an interview with CNN reporter Drew Griffin, Lindell claimed to have “one piece of 1.2 billion lines of data from the election, OK? Within that will be timestamps when it happened, there’ll be flips in there.”

CNN talked with nine top cybersecurity experts who said it was “completely ridiculous” and “proof of nothing,” as well as county election officials of both parties who confirmed that Lindell’s Chinese cyber-hacking conspiracy was literally impossible — because their voting systems aren’t linked to the Internet.

Lindell lost it: “He said that’s nothing, huh? Then you didn’t hire a cyber expert.”

I guess he thought since everyone on Fox news gush about how right he is, that everyone on CNN would as well. Lindell insisted that he wouldn’t change his mind until someone proved to him otherwise, saying “that he’s going to give $5 million to anyone who can prove him wrong.” It doesn’t matter that the proof is already there; he won’t see it anyway. I wonder if he is losing money on his “MyPillow”… I recently saw a TV commercial where he gleefully reduced the cost of one of his overpriced pillows down to $29.

Lindell yelled the loudest that Donald Trump would take back the White House on August 13th (today), and Lindell has since walked back that comment. But QAnon and other militant groups have promised another civil war, another insurrection.

For Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, that means getting out their gun collection and shooting anyone they wish. Taylor-Greene’s comment about “using their second amendment rights” echoes a similar comment made by Donald Trump. Both illustrate how neither one has actually read the Second Amendment of the constitution, or they would know that it says you have the right to bear arms (and that doesn’t mean AK-15’s), not walking down the street blowing away people you don’t like or who disagrees with anything you say.

“Yeah, well, what they don’t know is in the South we all love our Second Amendment rights, and we’re not really big on strangers showing up at our front door, are we? They might not like the welcome they get,” she said, getting cheers and applause from the crowd. The crowd, hearing Alabama was among the least vaccinated states, cheered.”

She is against education about Covid 19, wearing masks, getting vaccines, and anyone coming to your door uninvited. I wonder if that includes Jehovah Witnesses. And I wonder if she has tried the new Trumplican cure of horse paste???

It looks like more and more people who voted for Trump and the GOP are having second thoughts, much like they are about Covid 19, masks, and vaccinations.

“A new poll shows that a majority of Americans don’t want former President Donald Trump to run again for the third time in 2024. They think it would be bad for the country. Sixty percent of respondents thought another Trump campaign could tear the country apart. Thirty-two percent said it would be good.”

This is both surprising and unsurprising. As loud as Trump’s supporters and voters are, you have to wonder if they are just that… loud. And drowning out those others who are unhappy with the results they got from Trump. While Trump will overinflate his accomplishments and actually lie about most of them, tangible results are much harder to find.

The economy didn’t improve (reminder: the stock market is not the economy), the jobs report doesn’t show that many people are holding down two or three jobs to make ends meet. At the same time, there are still a lot of people unemployed due to the coronavirus. And now there are not enough people to fill all of the job openings available. What will happen when those businesses have to close down again to another wave of Covid, thanks to the many superspreader events happening now? And let’s not forget what happened with Trump’s infamous wall with Mexico, who didn’t pay for it like promised.