The Seismic Shift in the Republican Party

I was a young boy in 1964, but old enough to remember Barry Goldwater and the conservative ideals he represented.  I didn’t agree with  him, but I had a great deal of respect for his intelligence, his honesty, and his sincerity.

More recently we had Ronald Reagan.  He was every bit as conservative, and, while he may have been a bit more doddering and less intellectually gifted than Goldwater, he seemed to be basically an honest person.

Contrast that with the Republican party of today, built, as it is, on a fairytale land where only true patriots can see through the hidden conspiracies involving 60 different courts (including the SCOTUS), the people and their assistants who certify state elections in each of the key states, and the U.S. Attorney General. This cabal stole the election from Donald Trump, an honest, selfless, and able servant for the American people.

Also involved in this conspiracy is the world-wide media.  Shortly after the election, there were a few media outlets who supported the “stolen election” narrative, but they stood at odds with every other news journalist on Earth, which, they claim, are corrupt purveyors of fake news.

Most of these organizations have since backed off on the stolen election theory, because since there is no evidence to support it, they’re being sued for defamation by the corporations they alleged abetted the massive voter fraud they say went into stealing the election.

Some of them, e.g., the Washington Post, collected and published a list of the 32,000+ lies and misleading statements Trump made during his four years in office.

This is reminiscent of the religious fanatics who take every word of the Bible literally and are therefore left with the troubling notion that the Earth is only 6000 years old.  Of course, believing this means rejecting the entirety of science.  OK, so how can it be that there are fossils of animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago?

“Demonic intervention,” meaning that the Devil, aka The Great Deceiver, planted those fossils to trick people so that they might question their faith in the accuracy of the Bible.

This is essentially the position of the entire Republican party right now.  You can believe in its tenets, but what comes along with the belief system is extreme amounts of baggage that most people, thank goodness, reject out of hand.