Weaponizing Nonsense

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED, unless you've been living on, say, Mars, that the Republican party of the United States of America has changed a lot over the past few years. Not only has it moved considerably to the right, waxing ultra conservative, but has, to an objective observer, gone a bit bonkers. Eisenhower and Nixon now seem, by comparison, like flaming liberals. Ronald Reagan, who despite his considerable womanizing was and still is lagey regarded as a man of principle, might at this very moment be turning over in his mausoleum. Check out the 1956 Repulican party platform; if you didn't know better, you might think it was written by Bernie Sanders. Trump changed everything. As always, many voters in 2916 were loooking for a non-politician Washington outsider; in Trump, they got one. The rest, as we say, is history. In an insightful new monograph: "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican party Lost Its Mind" author Robert Draper lays out in graphic detail the transformation of the G.O.P. from a conservative-moderate entity of the business establishment to....this. This? This is a party more than two thirds of whose members still insist that the election of 2020 was stolen from Trump, more than two thirds of whom still regard the capitol insurrection as justified, and if not most of whosse members subscribe to a whole host of fatuous, debunked soncpiracy theories, of the sort popularized by the shadowy internet entiry "Q-Anon".The new breed of youg republicans, margie t. Greene, Madam Boebert, et al, are a group of loud mouthed alarmists who think that anyone who does not support Donald Trump is destroying America. Like birds, crazies of a flock flock together, it seems. Current republican projects include making it as difficult as possible to vote so as to reduce the turnnout of liberal minorities, eliminating all mention of homosexuality or racism from America's public schools, and reducing violent crime by arming America to the hilt. If you don't think all of thes twisted platform planks are over the hils and far away crazy, go check yourself in. We are fortunate that people like Robert Draper can stomach the material well enough to research and write about it. It might amuse our descendants, or, perhaps, horrify them.