"Stop the Steal" is about as real as birtherism, Qanon, and the hundreds of conservative conspiracy theories. But just because it is illogical doesn't mean it's not effective at organizing Trump cultists.
I'm calling these people cultists because they are no longer Republicans. William F. Buckley and George Will have no place in these hordes of marching fools who believe that Republican governors and Secretary of States actively organized against Trump and managed to so ingeniously orchestrate a grand voter fraud conspiracy that they left no actual evidence of it. These are people completely under the sway of a madman howling nonsense into the social media winds.
These cultists are now threatening the lives of government workers and administration people just trying to do their jobs. It's happening all across the country: sporadic outbursts of armed cultists gathering to threaten the workers of democracy.
What's truly frightening (in addition to the guns and anger) is the fact that this is an outraged mob organizing organically around a concept that has no actual directive. They will pop up in various town halls next year and harass public officials for any Twitter conspiracy theory. There's nothing the SOS can do to 'stop the steal' because people voted legally. They might as well be gathered outside a meteorologist house shouting 'stop the storm...hurricanes are bad.' The weatherman doesn't make the weather...they just report it. Secretary of States have a similar dilemma when it comes to talking to these people about votes. The only way to satiate these mobs is to agree with their nonsense and then give them an even bigger target to go after.
Joseph Goebbels famously said: ‘It will always be one of the best jokes of democracy that it gives its deadly enemies the means to destroy it.‘ Trump acting on this achilles heel isn't an accident. He spent his early adulthood under the tutelage of Roy Cohn but he actually studied two major movements: right-wing Christian Evagelicism and its magical thinking doctrine and Nazis. it's been famously reported that he kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed but he also studied Hitler's rise to power through the use of bad faith arguments.
Jean Paul Sartre described 'bad faith' as acting inorganically against ones own interests for duplicitous means. “Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is." What Trump and the GOP have done is engaged in systemic acts of bad faith that are so poisonous that there isn't one bit of logic to it. They have cranked these ppl up and set them loose around America like malfunctioning toy soldiers. They march around screaming and brandishing weapons at...viruses and voting and science and facts...creating a base of simmering outrage against any manufactured 'scandal': QANON, birtherism, Tea Party, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, her emails, Russian hoax, fake news.
The only way they'll be happy is if you join their bad faith cult and deny reality. And most Republican politicians are so weak that they aren't even willing to stand up for reality. Forget democracy: they threw that under the bus years ago. POC? Science that could save lives? They have no problem betraying that. But now they face the ultimate challenge: how do you negotiate with idiots? More importantly how do you contain and control these idiots so that they are useful for their gerrymandered minority-rule kleptocracy? Without these idiots the Republican party would lose in almost every state. Their fate is deeply tied to continuing this bad faith politicking which is completely antithetical to actual governance.
The GOP is now controlled by idiots who are completely under the magic sway of charismatic con artists. The party is hostage to the drunken whims of Sean Hannity and OAN, and Newsmax and whatever authoritarian televangelist who captures attention. Therefore about 45% of our country is squarely planted in an alt reality.
When the history of this time is written in some grandiose "Decline and Fall of the American Empire" collection people will not only marvel at the sheer idiocy of our self-inflicted wounds, but that we had a majority population that was scared of everything.
Literally everything triggers these people. Of course they are scared of black people, but really all races. And all religions besides Christian, and even most denominations of Christianity. They are scared of gays, lesbians, transgender people, they are scared of people who identify as more liberal, they are also scared of people who are just from other countries. They are terrified of teacher's unions and workers organizing. At the same time, they are scared of losing worker's rights they got from workers organizing. White ppl are terrified of becoming socialist but then they don't want to lose their elderly government socialist programs. They are scared that the government is trying to take their guns from them...but then they are also scared the government isn't taking guns away from imaginary ANTIFA and the NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY (that has membership numbers in the hundreds).
They are scared that someone is trying to destroy Christmas. They feel like they have to fight a war against people saying 'happy holiday' as the bare minimum acknowledgement that other religions and people do have things to celebrate this time of year besides Christianity. They are scared of people other than them exercising their rights as citizens, speaking out, voting...but they are also scared of losing those rights. Everything scares them, which was strange b/c they have almost all the power.
Bad faith conservatives have done what Nazis, communism, and no outside enemy could accomplish: they have weakened America from the inside by playing on our 'cowboy Western' mythology and virulent racism.
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