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These are the wages of a campaign and an ideology of apocalyptic civilizational struggle: a pep rally that feels undergirded with dread, voters who dismiss leftists as “special snowflakes living in a bubble,” gathering in an 83 percent white county that went for Trump by nearly 20 points, and pointing across the road at a few hundred protesters behind a net barrier, wondering whether an international Jewish financier has underwritten a special attack for Saturday afternoon.
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“I think there’s a good share of them,” said Francis Gilmore, who’d moved down to Florida in the last decade. They were here to advance the Soros agenda. “You can go anywhere you want, do anything you want, live the way you want, say anything you want. No sort of control. They will control us.” Soros was the bad kind of billionaire, not like the ones in Trump’s cabinet, who “don’t have to rob the money from us because they’ve got enough of their own.”
Her friend, who refused to give her name, agreed. “There are many others besides George Soros but George Soros is the biggie,” she said. “All the braindeads suck in the false news, because they don’t have the ability to read and get the proper information.” The friend had gotten a lot of the hidden details from The Creature from Jekyll Island, a Federal Reserve conspiracy book written by an HIV/AIDS denialist who believes he knows the location of Noah’s ark and can cure cancer with a poisonous plant extract. When asked where else she gets her news, she replied, “Mostly radio.”
Gilmore and The Nameless Friend agreed that the protesters represented an unprecedented rejection of the office of the president and an ahistorical breach of civility.
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“[Trump] needs to drain the swamp of judges, too,” he said. “I don’t care what he does. I’m behind him 100 percent. Put it this way: If he became a dictator, and they said, ‘We want him in forever,’ he’s my man. He’s in. I’ll never vote against him … I love his power … It’s the power that does something to me.”
….
Trump’s speech was long forgotten now, the plug-and-play inanities of the campaign rolled out again even though he was already president, vague promises of what he will do coming one after the other, as if to obfuscate the fact that he is the only one to blame for not taking on what he can do. What remained was the glower—the resentment-as-lifeblood, that special animating energy that comes from conjuring what you wish, anointing it as fact, and wedding it forever to conspiratorial denial.
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- Discussion
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Trump fan: "If he becomes a dictator and if they said, 'We want him forever,' he's my man." https://t.co/t9L627erzB
— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) February 21, 2017
This is an ugly and weird part of the story of the past 15 years or so that is invisible to everyone in their bubbles, but it's real. /2
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 21, 2017
Yes, some people are in dire straits; some always are. But this new anger is driven by constant comparison to others. /4
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 21, 2017
As my cousins (much poorer than I was) later said: "We didn't know we were poor. We thought we getting by." This is how ppl used to talk. /6
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 21, 2017
And related to it is the paranoia that others can affect your life more than they can, b/c of immediacy of social media. Again, toxic. /8
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 21, 2017
But until politicians (and yes, "elites") shout back at the mob, we're going to be saddled with this populist horseshit for a while yet. /9x
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 21, 2017
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