Kendall Stanley: Still crazy after all these years

What to make of two headline stories this past weekend, one in The New York Times Magazine, the other in The Washington Post: “On the campaign trail, many Republicans talk of violence” and “How the movement to reinstate President Trump has gone far beyond him and now threatens the future of American elections.”

Charles Homan, writing in the Times, suggests the start of the Tea Party movement after the election of Barack Obama was the start of groups questioning elections and their outcomes. In the case of Obama, it was whether or not he was qualified to run for office because he was born outside the country. Sorry folks — American mother, American child. By the end of Obama’s time in office, 41 percent of Republicans still believed he was ineligible to run for office.

Stop the Steal was coined by Roger Stone, a Republican operative and part of Trump’s team in 2016. Even that far back, Trump claimed Ted Cruz fraudulently won the Iowa caucus.

The Stop the Steal website also touted the Trump Ballot Security Project, talking about some vague allegations of voting irregularities, none of which could be substantiated.

“None of it seemed of much consequence until April, when Cruz swept the Colorado caucuses,” Homan writes.

“Days after the state Republican convention, a couple of hundred people assembled on the steps of the State Capitol in Denver. “Stop the steal!” they chanted. “Stop the steal!” They had assembled to protest the process by which the caucuses had allotted delegates to Cruz, demanding that the state party hold a new straw poll.

“Watching videos of the demonstration now is like watching a dress rehearsal for the events of four years later. Rallygoers waved a Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag and sported Infowars apparel. A man in camouflage pants held up a hand-lettered sign with an apocryphal Thomas Jefferson quotation: WHEN TYRANNY BECOMES LAW, REBELLION BECOMES DUTY. The crowd chanted in call and response: “Do you want your freedom back?”

“Yes!”

“Was your freedom stolen?”

“Yes!”

Talk of stop the steal continued until Election Day — and then beyond.

“After Trump won the nomination in 2016, talk immediately turned to how the Democrats were going to steal the election. When Trump won, tactics of the group just changed gears,” Homan writes.

“When Trump won in November, too, the narrative did not end. It simply shifted again — this time to the popular vote, which he lost. There had been “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California,” Trump claimed in a tweet, and in another he declared, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Which brings us to the election in 2020, where of course there would be voting irregularities — because Donald Trump said so.

This time he didn’t win the election and the preceding years of efforts to Stop the Steal became a matter of “I told you so!”

Which brings us to today, when the Jan. 6 Committee has finished its hearings, to resume after the August recess.

Painting Democrats as purposely destroying America, some suggest it is a good thing the Second Amendment is around.

In Maryland’s attorney general race, “Both candidates described a country that was not merely in trouble, but being destroyed by leaders who despise most Americans — effectively part of a civil war. In both swing states and safe seats, many Republicans say that liberals hate them personally and may turn rioters or a police state on people who disobey them.”

And it’s not just Democrats some of the gun-wielding candidates are after.

One candidate was shown in one of his ads breaking into a home with a semi-automatic weapon going RINO — Republican in name only — hunting. And he’s in no mood to regret it.

I’m sorry but I cannot imagine a single Democratic candidate getting ready to shoot Republicans. Much as they like to claim it, I’ve never heard any of the Dems I know say they hate, personally, a Republican just because they are Republicans.

I’m sure there’s a Democrat somewhere who has said something incredibly stupid; neither side has cornered the market on stupid.

But the Republicans and their guns, and their rhetoric that they are in a civil war where they will want those weapons, is scary indeed.

Preaching violence to take back the steal and using violence to “save America.”

What could possibly go wrong?

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. 

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Kendall Stanley: Still crazy after all these years