Merely indicative of the mental illness that affects more than a few of our fellow Americans. Consider that he truly felt, deep in his sick soul, that everything he did was to bring the country to his way of thinking, regardless that it’s a minority opinion.
Since his choice of information is, apparently, the right wing bubble, he’s told day after day, week after week, that he needs to take his country back from the heathen.
What we seem to be able to do nothing about is to change this reality.
For instance, from Heather Cox Richardson this morning, is the reality of the ‘Transgender BS’:
This same antidemocratic extremism explains the anti-trans, anti-drag, and anti-LGBTQ legislation, all of which are an attack on equality before the law. A March 8 article in Mother Jones by Madison Pauly exposed how the wave of anti-trans legislation passing through Republican-dominated state legislatures is written and pushed by well-funded Christian activists and organizations who argue, like Orbán, that they are protecting children (although 86% of trans or nonbinary young people have reported the attacks on them are affecting their mental health, and nearly half have seriously considered suicide).
Advocates for those laws inaccurately claim that they are protecting children from genital mutilation, but as Nancy Goldstein of the Texas Observer pointed out, the American Academy of Pediatrics stands behind gender-affirming care. Dr. Joshua Safer, the executive director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City, explains: No other countries “are reconsidering the use of hormones and surgeries as first-line treatment for transgender children because hormones and surgeries are not first-line treatment for transgender children…. First-line interventions include mental health intakes and social adjustments…. Puberty blockers sometimes follow.” Those treatments are reversible if a patient changes their mind.
Nonetheless, the rhetoric of demonization is working: Brian Tyler Cohen reports (with video) that “Christian” pastor Jason Graber recently called for the execution of all LGBTQ people as well as the parents of transgender people: “They just need to be shot in the back of the head and then we can string them up above a bridge.”
The latter in bold is what they hear day after day, as the former in bold is the reality.
There is a transition here to include any one other than white and male in this exclusionary world, which is why the NAACP and other organizations are warning against travel to FL and why some notable names are choosing to leave the State.
InSantis and his team are thrilled with this designation and wear it as a badge of honor. The whole thing is about as unAmerican as we can get, but it seems to be growing and is definitely taken root.
The question is, what do we rational (or semi-rational) Americans do about it?