Living through mass insanity
The late Molly Ivins once wrote how in the Texas state legislature it was not uncommon to have legislators at odds with one another to go to “fist city.” How long today before they go to guns?
In researching his new book, “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” Robert Draper had first to get past the obstacle that conservatives he hoped to interview saw him as an implacable enemy. He routinely encountered Fox News and Rush Limbaugh fans like 55-year-old Scott Brian Haven, a Utah health-insurance salesman, who “viewed Democrats, government bureaucrats, and members of the media like me as any combination of Communists, traitors, swamp creatures, and human scum.”
Haven was sentenced in March 2020 for making just shy of 4,000 calls to the Capitol switchboard threatening violence against House and Senate Democrats.
“I am going to take up my Second Amendment right, and shoot you liberals in the head, you pussy, fuck you!” was just one.
When confronted by FBI agents in the summer of 2018, Haven recited the Gospel according to Limbaugh: “Conservatives don’t commit violent acts against political opponents. That type of behavior is conducted by people on the left.”
“This party has lost its damn mind,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger said during planning for the House investigation on Jan. 6. Kinzinger’s party now trafficks in “dangerous, dehumanizing lies,” Draper writes. MAGA Republicans have established a cottage industry “that promotes delusions en masse” the way Oprah gave away cars. Fraud is under everyone’s chair.
Draper writes in The Atlantic:
What happens to a political party when it becomes unhinged from objective truth? A couple of weeks ago, I received a phone call from a woman who until recently had served in a position of regional prominence in the Texas Republican Party. The woman had read something I’d written pertaining to the insurrection at the Capitol and found it to be thoroughly inaccurate. She wished to inform me that friends of hers had been there on January 6 and had seen nothing remotely riotous taking place. But, the woman added, whatever violence had occurred that day had been the work of antifa. She then said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s videotaped phone conversations that afternoon, in which she implored governors to deploy National Guard troops to the Capitol, had been entirely staged. The woman closed by declaring that those who remained in federal custody for January 6–related offenses were being “politically persecuted.” When I asked her where she had gotten all this information, the woman replied that she had done her own research.
Throughout her monologue, the woman sounded completely sure of herself, unswerving in her belief that the violence I had witnessed firsthand on January 6 was entirely made up but was in any event understandable, given her certainty that the 2020 election was stolen. That self-certitude is what has stayed with me, more than the rambling illogic. I wish I knew what it would take for her and millions of her MAGA compatriots to one day be disabused of their shared delusions—to look back in chagrined amazement and say, as Scott Haven did in the federal courtroom, “This wasn’t me. This wasn’t me.”
You are living through a mass insanity history will record. Remember how it feels. Let us hope we all survive to read about it.