There’s No Way Out of America’s Insane Predicament of Misinformation and Violence
By: David Lee Hill
Tags: Society, Culture, Media, Misinformation, Politics

White nationalists marching in the streets of Virginia. Not once, but twice. And they got the Presidential seal of approval with a public announcement that there were “fine people on both sides.” We’ve seen vigilantes take over cities and become the police. Yes, I’m talking about 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse and others in Oregon.

This is the continuation of a m̶i̶l̶i̶t̶i̶a̶ ̶m̶o̶v̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t loose-knit band of domestic terrorist outfits who seek nothing more than to overtake the U.S. Government. To be honest, this strain has existed among us since the South lost the Civil War. They’re still pissed. They’re still racist.

And they say things like, “The South will rise again!” as a testament to their belief that the South shouldn’t have surrendered.

This too was recently given the (former) presidential seal of approval when Trump released a statement saying Robert E. Lee would’ve won the war in Afghanistan and protested an old statue of the former Confederate General being taken down in the State of Virginia.

A full 2/3rds of Republicans in the South now support secession from the United States. 66% of Southern Republicans are basically asking for another Civil War — or at least they want to leave the United States.

How do we get out of all of this?

Where does America go from here?

This morning, in light of the restrictive new abortion laws passed in Texas, with other states almost certain to follow suit, I was thinking about the best-case scenario.

And it’s not pretty.

Let’s say for a minute that the U.S. Supreme Court changes its mind and decides to rule against the Texas abortion ban or the Florida mask mandate ban that protects our school children from the threat of COVID…what then?

Let’s say Democrats somehow miraculously take Florida and Texas. Let’s say they retake Georgia again, this time with a Democratic Governor. What then?

I think a lot of Liberals are living under this false belief that if we just push hard enough, if we just pull enough people off of their couches and out to the polls to vote, eventually we’ll work our way to a victory so great that it can’t be denied.

But it will be denied. On Newsmax and Fox News. It will be denied on Parler and Gab. It will be denied in all of the right-wing pockets of America, online and off. It will be denied in churches and by evangelicals, the same way our last Presidential Election was denied.

The extremists that are now controlling the Republican Party don’t care about law and order. They don’t care about process or Democracy. They’ve shown us that much. And they are more than willing to use violence to achieve their political goals.

Between the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmore and the armed rallies at the Michigan State House; the January 6th Insurrection and the constant threats of violence coming from the party, what makes us think they’ll go so quietly into the night?

Wouldn’t an overwhelming victory just further radicalize the Republican Party? Is it possible that we’d have even more violent extremists and domestic terrorists to worry about than we do now? I can’t see this playing out any other way.

This is what happens when people are so committed to bad ideas they simply cannot give them up. This is what happens when people reason with their emotions and all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories. The real world goes away — and everything can be justified in their minds when their beliefs come into conflict with the cold, hard facts of reality.

I doubt the extremist band of the Republican Party, which makes up the vast majority of the party, will suddenly wake up from the misinformation nightmare they’re swimming in. I highly doubt they’ll go quietly into the night.

And the prospect of constant political violence from the extremists in America might become a feature of our national life. How will we address that threat if it happens?

I don’t think America has an easy or even possible way out of the crazy predicament we’ve gotten ourselves into. The misinformation is just too strong.

There are too many people going nuts.

Recently, the FBI added QAnon and other conspiracy theory groups to the listed of domestic terrorist outfits. And before you scratch your head in bewilderment, just realize that a man here in Florida recently killed a family of four, including several children, shooting an 11-year-old girl several times while telling her she needed to tell him where “Amber” was in their home.

Except…Amber didn’t live there. “Amber” was a delusional belief the man had that there was sex trafficking going on in the home — he believed they were trafficking children and he was doing God’s work. How do we approach this looming threat of ever-increasing crazy in American society?

Whatever we decide, figuring out how we respect free speech while clamping down on the spread of crazy conspiracy theories and recruitments for domestic terrorist groups is a must. How else are we going to reel the crazy in our society back from the precipice? How else can we stop them from enlisting other people to their insane ideologies? I have no idea.

But something needs to be done.