Remember how conservatives were outraged when we pointed out that Trump was blatantly appealing to white supremacists? How they denied the facts and defended Trump saying they saw no racism. Make no mistake, they saw and recognized the racism that supported the Trump campaign, they knew what he was doing as well as we did. So WHY did they deny what was so plainly obvious?

You might suspect they honestly believed that Trump and his movement were untouched by racism, completely innocent of the charges. You would be dangerously naive to fall for that explanation. Certainly a few of them, the most uninformed, the most unaware, the most gullible- MIGHT have honestly believed Trump was not openly courting neo-nazis and white supremacists, but they were just a tiny minority among his base. For the vast majority the facts were just as clear to them as they were to us.

So, they were lying when they defended Trump against the charges of racism- and the vast majority of them KNEW they were lying – WHY?

Another naive explanation is that they were trying to convince us to believe the lies, or to gaslight us. Certainly the protestations of innocence coming out of the campaign and the white house were an attempt to gaslight the public and media, but the ‘gaslighting’ explanation doesn’t explain the laughable defenses we saw from Trump supporters in interviews, in online discussion forums, on facebook.

Were these rank and file MAGA-minions trying to convince us that the lies they parroted were true? No- that was not their intent either. They knew their defenses were full of holes, contradicted by the facts, and by the very words out of Trump’s mouth. In fact they quickly learned any defense they offered would soon be undermined days or hours later by Trump himself, so they quickly learned to stop offering any argument in defense of Trump, and resorted to simply dismissing the facts and mocking those that pointed out the facts.

So, their defenses of Trump are lies. They KNOW they are lies. They are NOT spouting the lies in an effort to convince us the lies are true.

So WHY do they do they so fervently and publicly lie when they don’t believe it and they know we won’t believe them?

What you need to understand about these pathetic creatures is that they support Trump BECAUSE he is openly racist, BECAUSE he is a bully. They are weak petty people that get a THRILL seeing others bullied and abused by ‘their guy’ in ‘their name’. They are not happy with their lot in life. But by supporting Trump they ensure that other less fortunate people are publicly abused and demeaned and made to suffer more… and in their minds if others can be made to suffer more, then that means ‘THEY’- The MAGA mob- are winning by comparison.

For the most part they know themselves well enough to understand that this is what motivates them. They also understand these motivations are petty, ugly and evil- they know that for their entire lives such motivations were socially unacceptable. Decent people don’t act like this.

So we get to the real reason they lie- it isn’t that they believe the lies, nor do they hope to get us to believe the lies. No, they lie in an effort to convince us that they really do believe the lies.

The alternative would be to admit the truth, the truth that they are nothing more than small petty bigoted wannabe bullies. It is not socially acceptable to admit that. Not YET it isn’t.

Their hope is that it someday they can openly express these ugly evil desires without fear or shame, and in Trump they see a ‘man’ working to ensure that day comes soon. They want to see their sickness normalized, they want to display their pathology openly without shame. THIS is their motivation and they KNOW deep down that its what drives their support for Trump. THIS is why they they regurgitate obvious lies in his defense- PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY, buying time until they can admit their abhorrent views without shame. Until that day comes they will claim they don’t see the racism, that they do not believe the crimes, that they only support Trump because they believe he will ‘Make America Great Again’.

Take a second look at the MAGA moron in your facebook feed- have you seen them proudly proclaiming with a giggle that they are one of the “Deplorables”? They are trying to normalize it… testing the waters to see if their time has come yet.

The thing is, they haven’t really thought this all through to its logical conclusion. They haven’t really considered what it will mean for them, their children, their grand-children if they succeed in demeaning and degrading our nation, bringing it down to their level. They blithely assume they will come out on top in such a world- they cannot see the obvious fact that they will be one of its first victims. They will never even acknowledge the harm that will come to them as a result- As long as they get to see others being victimized more, they will consider themselves the ‘winners’.

It is petty, evil people like this that, more than any others, enable fascism. People that are unsatisfied with their lot in life, but can be placated if they see that others are suffering more.

They really ARE deplorable, and- if we are to survive as a nation- being deplorable must always be a shameful thing.

“And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic…

Certainly, it was argued that I was over the top here 13 years ago when I said TB’s defense of the use of torture put him in the same league as the worst villains in history… but here we are with a president he voted for pardoning and praising war crimes… sucking up to mass murderers and inhuman dictators. Palling around with a butcher that cut up a journalist. Meanwhile TB was off on other forums explaining how it would only play into the ‘liberal agenda’ to make a fuss over the killing of Khashoggi.

Or maybe 12 years ago when I asserted that their refusal to disavow our resident neo-nazi troll on this board demonstrated that they were the party of white supremacists, that they were happy to accept racism as long as it advanced the party line… I was certainly censured for that bit of ‘hyperbole’. Yet now we have the tiki-torch marches, and hate crimes are skyrocketing, and we are caging, abusing, molesting and killing brown children. Punishing them for their parent’s “crime”- the crime of a parent trying to save their child’s life. Thousands of children stolen from their parents with no plan to reunite them. Openly white supremacist views pour from the white house, along with anti-semitic dog whistles.

How about when I warned that the right wing will stop at nothing to seize power, and we need to realize we are in a war… because the other side sure as hell knows it… yes, that was inflammatory, really out of line… yet they are now gutting all the institutions that might keep them in check- openly colluding with our nation’s enemies to ensure their voices are the only ones in power… openly calling multiple times for foreign intervention in our elections.

Maybe back then, I could have been called alarmist- when we were just a few steps down this road… but now? Just look how far this trip has taken our nation.

Hell, just 4 years ago if we argued they would be supporting the atrocities we see every damn day, the conservatives here would have been outraged at the slander… yet here we are.

Did I know back then that the road would lead us here? No… but I could see the warning signs that made it clear this road was a well-traveled but dangerous route.

What I can say now with certainty is that the ride is going to get a lot rougher, and that ALL the passengers are doomed unless we wrest control of the wheel from the madmen intent on seeing what nightmares come into view around the next curve.

As far as we have gone, this road can take us so much further into the darkness…

Well, you’re wrong. It CAN happen here. That’s not the same as saying it WILL happen here, history need not repeat itself. And even when it does its always with variations. But it can. We did it to the Indian Nations, we did it to the African slaves. We did it to every immigrant community we brought here for cheap labor, and guess what, we’re doing it all over again! We did it to the Mexicans when we conquered half their country to satisfy our Manifest Destiny, our own Yankee Doodle lust for Lebensraum. See, its not just the Germans. We felt as entitled to the Mexican West of the Pecos as the Aryan supermen felt about the steppes West of the Urals. What do a few Slavs, or Spics, matter, eh? And we even did it again, on a smaller, down-home scale, in the Jim Crow era.

That ugly streak is still a part of our character, our national make-up. We did not leave all the bigotry and prejudice of Europe behind when we came here. We are not exceptional, we’re perfectly capable of doing it all over again, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I was there, I saw it go down, I was 17 in 1964 and I lived in the Deep South. Oh yeah, I saw improvement, I saw progress, perhaps even more than I ever expected at the time, but I saw the resistance to that progress and improvement, too. The push back never really went away, and its coming back again, isn’t it? Jim Crow never went away completely. For a while I thought the problem was solved, or well on its way to being put behind us, forever. Now I’m not so sure. America is a land of great potential, but it has always promised more than it can deliver. She is like a beautiful woman–with rotten teeth.

I was not in my ancestral homeland when it happened in Cuba, I have talked to my relatives who went through it there and it all sounds hauntingly familiar. Fascism, of the right or left, will sneak up on you. That’s what they all said, it comes gradually, slowly, and one day you wake up and its there and it will not go away. Then comes the fear, and the despair.

It could very well happen here, perhaps not as bad as in Germany or the Soviet Union or Red China or Cuba, but we are certainly capable of it too. We are not immune. We are not really as exceptional as we like to think we are.

Listen to RL. Maybe he IS a bit over the top. Maybe he’s even a bit out of line. But he is not necessarily mistaken. I know exactly what he knows, and exactly how he feels, and I am scared too.