I am currently on haitus from all social media. It’s necessary because my nerves are shot.

When I wrote the post on left wing hate, I shared it on Facebook and one person actually responded as if I had called them out specifically, and that’s not the case, because I have to include myself. My posts and comments were just getting out of hand.

Nope. I had nobody specific in mind when I wrote it. I simply saw the same things a lot of other people are seeing. Or should be.

Things from the childish, “he lost, get over it” from mostly progressives or very liberal and understandably angry folks to extremes like “all Republicans are garbage” or worse. And yeah. There is worse.

Now please, understand, I don’t like writing about this subject. Everyone has an opinion on politics; just look at your news feed on social media.

My opinion doesn’t count for much. I’m one man. And you can agree or disagree, that’s all fine.

But one “QAnon” congressional representative is already drafting impeachment papers for Joe Biden, and he’s not even in office yet. You know, I’ve heard some stupid shit on the news before, and while I know by now I’ve been wrong every time I have said “I’ve seen it all now” that I was using an unrealistic cliché, what scares me to death is that our country has been sliding down a hill with no boundaries. There are no gates for the slalom. The rules for behaviours once considered aberrant have been blurred.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about free speech. From the fucking porn you masturbate to and the religious material you read and beliefs you hold to your friends and favorite sports, it’s none of mine or anyone else’s business unless we are engaged freely in conversation. Judging people and prying and spying, those are different parts of entirely different matters.

We all have judged if we have any brains at all, and we make decisions based on them. Who to vote for, who to admire, what to buy. And all of that is fine. That’s life. It’s what we do.

But wrong decisions that cross the lines are becoming a huge risk to the freedom we are given, and take for granted. Or did until Donald Trump. People on each politically idealistic side were frightened by the witless, fascistic speech and inhuman deeds he and his administration were committing.

As we can plainly see, his voter base remains fully intact and quite dangerous. I want it made clear what that means.

Trump started out his campaign by calling cable and written news outlets like CNN and The New York Times “fake news”, and not only is that incorrect usage, it’s also an obvious lie. And the lie took hold, because the sentiment among the far right was already there. I know people who buy DVDs or subscribe to Netflix or Hulu and never watch them. The DVD shrink wrap is never broken. That’s scary. Their television is never tuned to anything else but Fox News or Newsmax or the terrifying OAN. It’s true, and it may be hard to imagine, but the majority of viewers who watch that drek can’t afford to get more than basic satellite and cable TV, much less buy videos. The poor who feel hard put upon by their government willingly go for far right wing news and ideology and they love to blame liberals, and man do they love a good conspiracy theory. The more lurid and farfetched, the better, like the one where Hillary Clinton was supposedly a cannibalistic pedophile and child trafficker operating out of the basement of a D.C. pizzeria. Which, by the way, did not even have a basement, but that little discrepancy didn’t stop a Carolina man from driving to that pizza place and firing shots inside.

Oh, sure, people were aghast. But others laughed at it. It was too kooky, right? But not harmless. Nobody was killed that time. Yet anyone who was there was as traumatized as anyone else ever involved in a shooting. Lies are dangerous.

And so, after the great big lie from Donald Trump that Mexicans and other Hispanics were about to invade us and were even tracked throughout their journey, became an imminent threat and the Army Corps of Engineers was stationed at the border, stringing razor wire and filling sandbags. Its not legal for military personnel to be used on US soil for combat operations except in the case of a real, honest to god foreign military attack, the probability of which is less than none. But Trump really wanted regulars with M-4 assault rifles lined across the border. There was some outrage over it but not enough and it was quickly forgotten, at least by mainstream media. Most people haven’t bothered to look up whether the engineers are still there. Legally, they couldn’t stay, just so you know.

US airspace and waters are different. Fighter jets routinely operate what’s known as CAP, combat air patrol, and the Navy and Marines deploy choppers and Ospreys to support Marine One. No problem there; it’s a nightmare, keeping a president safe. You know how many threats a president gets? And what’s worse is the threat of the unknown. You can’t be too safe.

The Lies

Then came lies that never ended, grew more outrageous and much more dangerous. Trump never stopped his visceral hatred of and lies about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He lied about so many things that whoever was tasked at Politifact with counting those lies probably needed therapy. Holy shit, what a job.

Now, the ultimate lie, the one where the election was stolen from him, has caused the growing anger, disenfranchisement and bitterness of his supporters to do the unthinkable: not protesting, but actually staging a violent attempt to assassinate the vice president of the United States and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. And who knows how many others. We’ve seen previews of this when Trump told people in Michigan to, in essence, kill their governor. Was anyone surprised?

Not that I remember. It was all over the news for a few days but people, remarkably, seemed to forget it. If it isn’t headline news, it isn’t news at all, therefore it doesn’t matter. Sadly, that’s a reality people have lived for years, especially since newspapers have declined in circulation.

The news has taken on an odd template: cookie cutter main stories dominate, usually limited to two or three topics. There is no news roundup for the world and the US in half-hour each format. Theres nothing. There are no news anchors on cable doing anything like reading you all kinds of stories; just hosts with those two or three main stories. Along with their personal analysis, and it wouldn’t be so bad if they at least broke every hour for a segment about just the news and nothing but.

For that kind of news you have to rely on local stations, almost none of which are independent anymore, or the Big Three evening news shows in a half hour format with commercial ads in breaks that seem endless.

In 2020, the dominant two stories were the general election and the COVID-19 pandemic. Big enough subjects to be sure. We are on approach to half a million people dead in the United States and Donald Trump made it far worse than it needed to be because of his lies and stonewalling. It played a role in the decisions people made at the polls; when die-hard Republicans lost loved ones and saw the truth too late; many saw too that almost everything Trump had said was a lie. And their mind was on one thing: getting rid of him.

That is not to say that many conservatives had not already had enough of Trump; plenty had. The reason they weren’t usually vocal about it was because being wrong–being that wrong–about voting for him was humiliating in the polarized political climate. Some people, in person or on social media, said to the converts, “glad to have you”, while others said, “fuck all Republicans, it’s you’re fault this shit happened and you’re going to hell.”

That’s the great division we face, a reality the news actually covers. But they do nothing to remedy it; the opinions used to be relegated to Face The Nation or other similarly formatted programs. Instead, it’s hour after hour of each host interviewing guests and asking leading questions that are followed up with the host revealing some tidbit and then condemning one party or another.

This was more true in 2020 than ever before, even as COVID-19 did exactly what Dr. Fauci said it would do in late autumn. It was true too of the post election coverage. If a major category five hurricane hit during that time, I wouldn’t know it unless I checked NOAA. If a major earthquake happened in that time I’d have to check seismographs at USGS. And I get it. We are in a health, economic and political crisis that has people out of work, dying and fighting.

It will not be resolved easily and certainly not with sufficient alacrity. Joe Biden has his hands full and has already gathered some of the best minds to help him out. But it’s not going to be fun to watch, much less so with thousands of people ready to kill “traitors” on sight. On inauguration day, you’ll be able to see things you’ve never imagined before in security measures. It’s a mess.

And whether or not the Senate votes to convict on Trump’s impeachment, his voter-cult base will still be what they are. Their numbers will grow, because history has proven so. Their fanaticism will be far more pronounced, because history has proven that it happens that way, and “history” never had instant, world-wide communication.

What I’m saying is, there will be another Donald Trump, and he will be far, far worse than anything you can imagine. The cult of MAGA will welcome anyone who is racist, sexist, dictatorial and who wants to take away every freedom, every thing, that they themselves claimed to be protecting the day of the Capitol Building siege. Every hate-filled website that enjoys freedom of speech will find out what it’s like not to have it as they are removed from service or told what to say or write. You thought Fox News was state-run media? Hell no; you’ve never seen that here, and it should be something you never want to see. China controls all access to the media for its people. It controls all media. Connecting to the web is forbidden except for the purposes of espionage.

Television? Don’t you love your Netflix, eh? On Demand movies, specials, sitcoms? You think it can all never be taken away? You better think about it again.

And while you’re at it, imagine other things that could happen under a worse man than Donald Trump. Imagine someone more corrupt backed by the branches of government that he will immediately compromise and then eliminate. That picture should make you think about a lot of things. Mostly, how to avoid it.

Because if we defeat this new cult, it cannot be through tunnel vision on the news. Nor by hateful rebukes to rhetoric on social media. It has to be done by disciplining our minds, controlling our words, and telling the truth. Our educational system is a shambles and yet our country’s survival starts with teaching children the real story of our country without censoring the injustices that have happened along the way. When I was in school there was an American history class that gave us textbooks that were graphic about slavery. But that wasn’t until junior high school. It has to begin sooner.

By high school age, information about every aspect of our government and every part of our history should be taught. I had two semesters of Medieval History which I had no interest in, and a teacher who was recruited by the school from Johns Hopkins mostly as a lacrosse coach, and who was fucking two students, was too stupid to teach without reading straight from his textbook made my learning disabilities wrap their tentacles around my brain to the point where I shut down completely.

What we need is obvious and yet resisted with vigor. I was reading about the Franks when Nixon’s terrible legacy was only just becoming known. I saw no sense in that kind of curriculum as opposed to current and recent events which would affect us for the rest of our lives. I at least knew that much. Nixon had fucked the United States up. It set a stage I could feel was going to be full of drama and disaster. It was a time when my Republican upbringing (not merely conservative) was being rejected by my conscience. Had I more education I could have saved myself the guilt later of knowing I had voted irresponsibly for Ronald Reagan.

It was Reagan and the actions of and during his presidency that took decades of divisive political beliefs clashing violently and set us on this path, to this moment in time. The man is still revered, but by now he seems like a pussycat compared to Trump in the MAGA party.

Too many people fail to see how terrifying that truly is; how far into pure evil factions of the right have descended. How dangerous they are.

The cross section of those who stormed the United States Capitol is like a sampling of the population. Military personnel active and retired. Police officers. Laborers. Truckers. The religious. The “average”. All full of anger. All full of hate.

With only one day between this night and the inauguration of our 46th President of the United States, the Capitol grounds are off limits. The perimeter is greater than that of any previous inaugural event. There may be no parade but that’s nothing to the sad fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is vetting every soldier in or to be sent to D.C. for security. Because fear of inside assassination attempts is all too real.

God damn this.

We should not be like this.

Yet we are here.

Pat Robertson said that “to be against Trump is to be against God” and that Trump was God’s Chosen”. He dismissed the “grab em by the pussy” remark as “locker room talk.”

Others backed that extreme religious claim up.

Mitch McConnell backed him. Not because he loved the man. He just had his own agenda and Trump would help him with it. Or so he thought. Trump was never for McConnell or anyone else. Just himself, the proof behind us now in those whose lives Trump broke; the fired, the marginalized, the compromised.

To stop this rambling post, I conclude with a single warning. Unite or watch millions die as our country dies under the heel of jackboots. The enemy is not going to be silent and will never again fear violence to get what they want. Unite to root them out one at a time or watch them grow in number. Unite to stop countering their hate speech with more hate speech or watch one far worse than Trump take his place. Unite with people you disagree with or watch as we fragment and lose our power that, combined, got Joe Biden and Kamala Harris elected.

Please, consider this.