From fringe to mainstream: Conspiracies, baseless accusations and lunacy is the new normal...

[DonViejo]

From fringe to mainstream: Conspiracies, baseless accusations and lunacy is the new normal for Republicans

The GOP has no firewalls to insulate itself from its crazies and the conspiracies and dark fantasia they spin out

GARY LEGUM

There has been a lot of speculation about what will happen to the Republican Party if Donald Trump, as seems more and more likely, gets crushed in the November election. The party has split into factions at odds with each other and seemingly adrift. Some Republicans are fleeing this orange-hulled Titanic of a presidential campaign as fast as they can launch the lifeboats. The fractures this election have created and exacerbated may not be healable.

The words “Whig Party” have been spoken many times in relation to the current GOP, with the implication that the latter will suffer the fate of the former and disappear, done in by the weight of its recent history of prizing affect over governing philosophy – what Josh Marshall calls its “nonsense debt” – and its own inability to adapt to a changing country. In its place, theoretically, a new party will rise to replace it, much like the Republican Party replaced the Whigs just before the Civil War.

It is equally likely that the Republican Party will stay intact after November, that it will still have enough of a power base in the House of Representatives and in the states to convince itself to limp along and rebuild. But it likely can’t be viable until it purges itself of all the racism and toxic waste it has spent the last 40-plus years cultivating. And as the confluence of several stories this week reminds us, disentangling a functional political party from the rot that has infected it at all levels is likely an impossible task.

Consider the following:

“Red Eye,” the popular Fox News overnight show, had on as a guest one Mike Cernovich, a Men’s Rights Activist and well-known figure in the “alt-right,” the name with which society has rebranded the far-right collection of racists and white supremacists from which Trump draws a fair amount of his support. Cernovich has trafficked in conspiracy theories and his Twitter feed is a mass of rape apologia and paranoia that the Democratic Party is going to assassinate him.

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http://www.salon.com/2016/08/10/from-fringe-to-mainstream-conspiracies-baseless-accusations-and-lunacy-is-the-new-normal-for-republicans/