Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
If we can't stop this disintegration of trust in America & the ability to reform & make our government work for all people, apathy will turn us over to the hard right, ending the American experiment
There's been quite an outbreak of rightwing radicalism in America recently, much of it organized on and amplified by social media and all of it working to tear apart Americans' trust in their government and each other:
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"Pastor" Greg Locke got a few dozen of his cult's devotees to show up for a book burning in Tennessee last week, and racists and homophobes across the nation are trying to get books banned from schools and public libraries.
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Many of the people who attacked the US Capitol on January 6th 2021 had been cynically used by Donald Trump to try to stay in power, believing his lies that the election was stolen.
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During the summer of 2020 people turned up in dozens of small American cities armed with axes and shovels after unknown trolls freaked them out with widespread Facebook posts saying that George Soros had just paid for a busload of Black "Antifa" vandals to attack their towns.
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Ever since Trump decided he needed to get the economy running again if he was going to get re-elected and started downplaying the dangers of Covid infection, Trump-humpers have been barging into stores, restaurants and other public venues without masks.
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Anti-vax and anti-mask true believers continue picking fights on airplanes and harass school boards over simple public health mandates.
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A decade ago busloads of duped elderly Americans were trotted out in front of TV cameras to tell the nation they were the new "Tea Party" and want the US to "Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare."
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Now the groups who've succeeded in cranking up so many AstroTurf rightwing demonstrations are trying out a new strategy in Canada, and you can expect it to migrate soon to the US.
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Most amazing, it appears that the "Canadian trucker" event was primarily organized by foreign players who'd hacked an American Facebook account.
As a result of this tsunami of lies, racism, and disinformation, we watched during the Trump years as the United States began the shift from a representative democratic republic toward an authoritarian oligarchy, as has already happened in Hungary, South Sudan, Turkey, Ethiopia, The Philippines, Venezuela, and a handful of other nations in the past few decades.
The GOP, as we saw from their announcement last weekend about "legitimate political discourse," are still in thrall to this anti-democratic shift.
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