I Am Freaking Out

 

A plane loaded with thugs in black uniforms flew to our capital to attack the Republican National Convention! A crazed mob attacked Sen. Rand Paul when he left the White House following the Convention, and would have killed him if the police had not intervened! People you haven’t heard of are controlling the streets! Joe Biden is a puppet of the radical left!

The Trump supporter killed last month in Portland was the victim of a drill by left-wing hit squads, who are being trained all over this country! Biden’s supporters among scientists in the government are meeting in sweat pants in coffee shops, plotting how to take Trump down! They do not want America to get well, until after Joe Biden is president! But Biden won’t be elected President. The only way he can win is if the election is a fraud!

Even though the election is rigged by the left and the fake news media will lie about the results, these hit squads are preparing for armed insurrection after the election! At Trump’s inauguration, the shooting will begin! Better get your ammo now!

I know better than to believe some anonymous Q about the deep state of pedophiles and child molesters. These revelations come from the top. Our President says so!

My country, my American way of life is in danger! I’M FREAKING OUT!

Well, at least that last sentence is true. But the rest doesn’t come from InfoWars or Breitbart News. The President and his appointees at the top of the executive branch are telling stories about the planning of a violent coup. Trump said in August in Wisconsin and last week in Nevada that the only way he could lose the election is if it’s rigged. The Republican National Convention made an armed couple who threatened peaceful demonstrators in St. Louis into heroes. Trump praised Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenage murderer of unarmed protesters in Kenosha. Tucker Carlson said that Rittenhouse “had to keep order”, when “no one else would”.

Neither Joe McCarthy nor the John Birch Society predicted a leftist overthrow of the government within months. Richard Nixon, Trump’s law-and-order predecessor, never encouraged armed vigilantes to take to the streets. The man who would be King, backed by the Republican Party and Republican elected officials, is predicting and encouraging civil war.

That’s what freaks me out.

Republican scare tactics are nothing new. The Willie Horton election ad in 1988 was designed to frighten white voters. Trump announced his candidacy by denouncing Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He encouraged supporters at his rallies to beat up protesters. But we have never heard wilder threats than what came from the mouths of Republican Convention speakers last month. Patricia and Mark McCloskey got four minutes on opening night to say, “No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.” The planeloads of thugs and hit squads have taken Republican fear-mongering to an unprecedented level.

I’ve been voting since 1970. I have been studying and teaching European history and the Holocaust for nearly 50 years. I know how democratic governments have been captured by autocrats exploiting popular sentiment. I have read the American historians who persuasively explain how much more partisan hatred animated our politics during our history. I wrote about national politics every week for my local central Illinois newspaper for 9 years. I know that Trump is not Hitler or Mussolini, neither Vladimir Putin nor Viktor Orbán. I don’t worry about conspiratorial lies made up to win an election.

But I do worry about people who believe every bit of nonsense out of Trump’s mouth. Even people as unhitched to reality as the QAnon crazies should be able to see by November 2 that Trump will lose the next day. They and the militias and the white supremacists will know that their dreams for an America of their fantasies are about to be dashed by the radical socialist anti-God police-hating anarchists they have been warned about on FOX News for years.

I’m going to be an election judge again in my hometown, a long day from 5 AM to 7 PM, helping my neighbors cast the votes they have decided on. Someone asked me if I’m worried that I might catch the COVID virus from seeing hundreds of people that day. I said, no, I’m worried about what those people listening to the Republican demagogues about the end of their lives will do on November 3.

The Republicans have given up entirely on protecting public safety. They encourage their craziest, most heavily armed admirers to come out shooting.

Trump’s dishonest idiocies might merely be a source of amusement for late-night television, if millions of people did not hang on his every word. If billions of dollars from the richest Americans and the biggest corporations did not flow into his campaign, his ludicrous threats would not be broadcast across the country. If entire networks on television and radio were not devoted to promulgating an alternate reality in which he is doing something useful, fewer Americans might believe his lies. If virtually the entire mob of elected Republicans in Washington did not prop him up with their enthusiasm or silence, I would have nothing to worry about.

But the self-interested cowards, liars, and crackpots who represent conservative America are driving our country toward political catastrophe. Shouldn’t you be freaking out, too?

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville, IL

September 22, 2020