(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . When you watch the debate, here's what they won't talk about: How the GOP went crazy [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-27 There’s something seriously wrong here. When did America get to the point where one of the two major parties we allow ourselves would see fit to nominate someone like Donald Trump for president? When did that become ‘normal’ — and why only for one party? (IOKIYAR is now the law of the land.) What our news media seems unable to process is that the Republican Party is no longer a legitimate participant in the normal workings of our political process or our government. The party’s candidate for president is a twice-impeached, convicted felon, a tax cheat, a business fraud, a sexual predator, a leader more beloved by our adversaries than our allies. He is still facing serious charges for inciting mob violence, voter fraud, and stealing national secrets. A million Americans died from his incompetence during the pandemic; many more became sick. Everything he says is a lie. The media barely acknowledges it — and are completely unable to connect the dots about what that says about a political party that has no problems with any of that. Let Biden slur a word or stumble though, and they are all over that. WTF is wrong with the press and more importantly the GOP that brought us to this point? David Corn can tell you. The Republican Party has been headed towards this moment since the Eisenhower years. Corn has documented how the GOP lost its mind with his 2022 book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy (Updated paperback edition.) At a recent Zoom conference with subscribers to his Our Land newsletter, I asked him about it: During our recent Our Land Zoom get-together, the kind-of-monthly gathering of premium subscribers to this newsletter—during which we commiserate, share stories, and kvetch about politics, the world, and other matters—one participant noted that he had recently re-read the introduction to my book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, which charts the long history of the Republican Party’s cozy relationship with right-wing extremism. He said he found it useful for understanding the 2024 campaign and asked if I could post that portion of the book so it could be widely shared. I am flattered that he thought these words of mine might be influential in the final months of a crucial election. I’m not sure the publisher would grant permission for such a giveaway. But there is a second-best course of action. When the book came out, Mother Jones published an essay adapted from the book that covered many of the ideas included in the introduction. That article remains available for reading and sharing here. And the updated paperback edition is still highly relevant and available wherever you find your books. emphasis added From Mother Jones in 2022: The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism. An excerpt: ...Both Pelosi and Biden have bolstered the notion that the current GOP, with its cultlike embrace of Trump and his Big Lie, and its acceptance of the fringiest players, is a break from the past. But was the GOP’s complete surrender to Trumpism an aberration? Or was the party long sliding toward this point? About a year ago, I set out to explore the history of the Republican Party, with this question in mind. What I found was not an exception, but a pattern. Since the 1950s, the GOP has repeatedly mined fear, resentment, prejudice, and grievance and played to extremist forces so the party could win elections. Trump assembling white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, QAnoners, and others who formed a violent terrorist mob on January 6 is only the most flagrant manifestation of the tried-and-true GOP tactic to court kooks and bigots. It’s an ugly and shameful history that has led the Party of Lincoln, founded in 1854 to oppose the extension of slavery, to the Party of Trump, which capitalizes on racism and assaults democracy. You might think the media has had plenty of time to realize how unhinged the Republican Party has become — they haven’t been hiding it. In his latest issue of Our Land, Corn recalls how crazy the 2016 Convention that nominated Trump was: When I covered the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, I filed several dispatches focusing on what should have been a central theme of that election year: The party had gone nuts. It was not just that a failed-casino-operator-turned-phony-reality-TV-celebrity had captured the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. The GOP had become dominated by far-right extremists pushing tribalistic grievances and irrational paranoia. During convention week, defeated presidential candidate Ben Carson compared Hillary Clinton to Lucifer. A prominent Trump supporter named Al Baldasaro declared on a radio show that Clinton deserved to “be put in the firing line and shot for treason.” A variety of delegates told me that Hillary and her husband, Bill, had achieved power by committing numerous murders (and covering up the assassination of White House aide Vince Foster). As I wrote at the time, “This is what you need to know about Donald Trump’s GOP. At the convention in Cleveland, Alex Jones, a prominent peddler of conspiracy theories, was in the hall as a special guest.” Of course, there were chants of “Lock her up!” during the official proceedings and at other events. This gathering was a clear sign that extremists motivated by assorted resentments and enthralled with political hatred were aiming to seize power. Eight years later, with the latest GOP convention due to open in Milwaukee in three weeks, the Republican Party has become even more Trumpified and crazier. That’s obvious from its embrace of Trump’s Big Lie and its fervent support of a felon who tried to overturn the 2020 election and who incited an insurrectionist assault on the US Capitol. And in recent days, we’ve seen the extremism virus continue to spread unimpeded throughout the Republican Party. emphasis added The only reason Trump will be able to take the stage tonight is because of the inability — if not outright refusal — of the media and too many of our fellow citizens to see what is happening right before our eyes. And before anyone jumps in to say Democrats should be talking about this loud and clear, keep in mind several things. Some of them are, but... Republicans have spent decades portraying the Democratic Party as the one that is extreme, corrupt, and out of control. They have an extensive media apparatus of their own catapulting the propaganda 24/7 — and Democrats don’t. They’ve spent decades ‘working the refs’ with their accusations of “liberal media bias” to the point where the media dares not call them out on their crazy. Remember when Biden tried to talk about just how extreme the GOP has become — and how the media dismissed it as too divisive, too over the top? How so many people dismissed it as an empty ‘both-sides’ thing? Republicans have spent years moving the Overton Window ever more to the right. It takes an examination of the long term as Corn has done in American Psychosis to be able to appreciate how long the frog has been boiling, to use an analogy. The question is, have we finally reached the point where what the Republican Party has become is too obvious to ignore? The Dobbs decision from the Republican Supreme Court got some attention; the latest ruling allowing anyone to buy a bumpstock so they can turn firearms into machine guns will be another wakeup call the next time someone uses one in a mass shooting. The extreme anti-abortion laws, anti LGBTQ Trans laws, the bans on talking about climate change, synthetic meat, and attacks on wind turbines and electric cars — the flood of crazy coming out of Red States is getting hard to brush off. Look again at the picture at the top of this page. How is it we’ve shoved that down the memory hole while the party who made it happen is staging a comeback? They’re not hiding it. Will it be on stage tonight, and will anyone see it if is? Find time to look at Corn’s piece in Mother Jones and get the book if you want to understand how we got here. The crazy isn’t going to go away with Trump — it will still be around long after him. We need to recognize it and deal with it. Fingers crossed over the debate... 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