As Texas Shows, the GOP Big Lie Strategy has Already Destroyed Much of America
When politics are based on lies, fascism thrives
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- Republicans and their media are lying right now about why people are dying from the cold in Texas.
- The GOP has been embracing lies instead of policy since the Reagan Revolution.
- It’s become a way of life for Republican politicians.
- As a consequence, Republican voters are among the most misinformed people in America.
- When the electorate believes lies, democracy doesn’t work.
- The Libertarian billionaires who own the Republican Party don’t believe in democracy, so this is working out exactly the way they want.
- This is a formula for the destruction of democracy and the rise of fascism.
Back in the 1970s, Texas disconnected its power grid from the rest of the country so they wouldn’t have to put up with federal regulation of their energy system. As a result, people are dying across that state right now.
But rather than tell the truth, Republican officials across the state, from the governor on down, are lying to their people.
People are shocked that the Republican Party would embrace lies, from Trump’s lie that Covid was “just like the flu” and “will vanish soon” to his lie that he won the 2020 election “in a landslide.”
The audacity of these lies is so mind-boggling that many figure they simply must be true:
The lie that frozen windmills are to blame for the failure of Texas’s privatized and deregulated electric grid.
The lie that Donald Trump actually won an election that he lost by over 7 million votes.
The lie a $1.5 trillion tax cut for billionaires (the fifth of this size since 1982) made life better for average working people.
Republican Senator Ron Johnson‘s most recent lie that the attack on the capital wasn’t an “armed insurrection.”
People are astonished by the audacity of these lies, but equally astonishing is that tens of millions of Americans believe them.