Schwab: History doesn't write itself; GOP is lending a hand
By Sid Schwab / Herald columnist
If, in a few hundred years, historians (assuming humans still exist) seek to understand the fall of the Republican Party, followed closely by the fall of the United States, they’d find it perfectly encapsulated in the murders, a couple of weeks ago, in a Colorado LGBTQ nightclub. It’s all there.
Increasingly desperate for a hook on which to reel in voters for whom they’ve had nothing to offer, legislatively, ever since electing Ronald Reagan, leaders and media mouthpieces of that once-respectable party have turned to denigration. Aimed at the LGBTQ community, immigrants, people of color, and — just reaffirmed down Mar-a-Lago way — Jews. Except in a couple of states, Trump’s voter fraud lie is losing appeal, so attacking non-straight, non-white, non-Christian, non-native-born people it is.
Whenever hate crimes are committed against those groups, the flame-fanners deny responsibility. Tucker Carlson makes millions pushing lies about “grooming” children. Screaming Marjorie Taylor Greene and gun-slinging Coloradan Lauren Boebert get elected on it. Ron DeSantis hopes to become president on it. Right-wing media marinate in it. But when someone takes their hideous mendacity seriously and does some murdering about it, the well-rehearsed response from the purveyors is “Who, me?” Followed, when culpability is suggested, by cries of “politicizing a tragedy.”
How deeply embedded is their incendiary, malevolent anti-LGBTQ rhetoric? The father of the murderer, himself a former porn star, said this on hearing what his son had done: “I go on to find out it’s a gay bar. I got scared, ‘S***, is he gay?’ And he’s not gay, so I said, phew … I’m a conservative Republican and we don’t do gay.” Phew, indeed. Just an assassin. To a Foxified “conservative Republican,” there’s worse, evidently. Data for historians.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/schwab-history-doesnt-write-itself-gop-is-lending-a-hand/
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