The stakes of the election

Helene has exposed the scope of the right's alternative reality.

Photo credit: NCDOT communications courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

This weekend, FEMA workers were forced to evacuate Rutherford County, where Lake Lure and Chimney Rock are located, because of threats from local militia groups. According to a message sent by a U. S. Forest Service official, National Guard soldiers came across two truck loads armed militia members who said they were “hunting FEMA.” Relief workers were relocated to safer areas, though they returned later, but in “secured” locations.

The director of FEMA, who operated out of Asheville in the days following the disaster, has received threats and been subject antisemitic attacks, as has Mayor Esther Manheimer of Asheville. Government workers have been harassed and told to go home.

All of this hate is driven by spurious lies on the internet. Elected officials in both parties have called on people to knock off the nonsense. The Ashe County sheriff posted that FEMA workers were helping, not hurting. Congressman Chuck Edwards has put up fact sheets debunking the lies. State legislators have begged people to stop spreading the disinformation.

The one person who has not stopped is former President Donald Trump. On Friday, Trump posted, “It has just come out that Democrats in Washington and the Democrat Governor’s Office of North Carolina (Roy Cooper) were blocking people and money from coming into North Carolina to help people in desperate need.”

Cooper blasted Trump, calling the claims a “flat out lie.” The silence from Republicans is deafening. They will beg people not to believe the lies but refuse to call out the source of them because they are scared of getting attacked by Trump himself or hurting his campaign. That’s what you call putting politics before people. Republicans are more afraid or loyal to Donald Trump than they are committed to the people they are elected to serve.

Charlie Warzel of the Atlantic wrote a piece addressing what we’re seeing in Western North Carolina. He notes, as have I, that the right has created an alternative reality, devoid of facts. This dark fantasy world is willingly promoted by people who know it’s not real for political gain, but they’ve created something bigger and more dangerous than politics.

As Warzel writes, “What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality.” The sinister world of Alex Jones and Info Wars has become the model for a new society perpetually under assault of by murky but dangerous forces that control the government and society.

The fear is that the delusion the right has created will become the operating reality under Trump. There’s really no reason to believe otherwise. J.D. Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson told us last week that in 2020 we had a peaceful transfer of power, as if January 6 never happened. Republicans who once blamed Trump for the assault and called him unfit for office, people like Mitch McConnell, now back him whole heartedly.

There’s another group of conservatives who like to pretend like they are above the lies and deception who spend all their time and energy attacking Democrats. Ben Shapiro, the writers at National Review, and numerous other media personalities claim they don’t believe the bullshit promoted by Trump, but never call it out, leaving their deluded listeners and readers misinformed and angry. They are fellow travelers who are complicit in creating and nurturing a paranoid public that lives in a bubble full of imaginary threats.

Republicans can’t win without the mob. Their policies alone don’t appeal to a large enough segment of the educated populace. They’ve nurtured the false reality because they need the people who are scared of immigrants and believe the government is out to get them. In fact, their entire Get-Out-the-Vote programs is based on scaring people to the polls.

Trump’s rhetoric has gotten increasingly violent and threatening. As Politico writes, “His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.” He’s advocating rounding up immigrants and putting them in camps. He says we’ve been invaded and taken over by foreigners. He says immigrants have “bad genes.” His goal is to drive turnout up among racists who will go to the polls out of fear and anger.

Republicans who sit silently are complicit in not just creating a false reality, but of encouraging their neighbors to hate each other. We’ve seen them throughout our history. They are the McCartyites who destroy people out of deluded paranoia. They are the White Supremacists who built the Jim Crow South based on terrorizing African Americans. They are the Puritans who hanged witches in Salem.

The Republican Party of Trump is a political coalition of people who fear and hate those different from them and the people who will tolerate and exploit that fear and hate for political gain. Really, those are the stakes of this election.