Why Do You Think I’m a Threat To America?

Voting for Republicans is, tragically, voting against America — It’s really just that simple

Image by Ronald Álvarez Domínguez from Pixabay

Last week a very reasonable sounding fellow called into my show and said, essentially, “I voted twice for Trump and would again. Why do you think I’m a threat to America?”

We ended up debating tax policy and I never did fully answer his question (I’m a sucker for “reasonable”), so here’s my shot at it.

*Trump and the GOP are endorsing Tucker Carlson’s “Great Replacement Theory” that argues, in most of its various iterations, that wealthy international Jews (“George Soros”) are collaborating with Black and Hispanic people to replace white people at all levels of society.

This has led to an explosion of antisemitic, anti-Black, and anti-Hispanic violence and the murder of numerous people, both Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Jewish, in venues from synagogues to supermarkets to churches.

As America becomes more multiracial, bigots and political opportunists like Trump and the leadership of the GOP see this as an opportunity rather than as a threat to America. And, indeed, demagogues have used this strategy throughout history to seize political power, usually at the cost of great bloodshed and political and cultural upheaval, a price they’re openly willing to pay so long as it’s not their blood that’s spilled.

*Lying has become the core of their political strategy.

Back in 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called out the GOP for using the Big Lie strategy that Hitler had employed in his rise to power. Republicans across the nation believed that Roosevelt was going to put unemployed people in concentration camps, that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme that would evaporate when FDR left office, and that if FDR was re-elected “democracy would end within four years.”

In a speech in Philadelphia on October 23, 1940, Roosevelt warned America:

“I make the charge now that those falsifications are being spread for the purpose of filling the minds and the hearts of the American people with fear. They are used to create fear by instilling in the minds of our people doubt of each other, doubt of their Government…