They’re modeling themselves after their hero Putin. He was similarly shameless as he transitioned his country toward one-party rule.
At a certain stage in the process these types know that it benefits them more to show contempt for liberal-democratic institutions than it does to continue to pretend they respect them. The Know-Nothing 27% eats it up.
It’s not that they don’t have the ability to keep crackpots out, but that they don’t WANT to anymore, because crackpots do exactly what they want, which is to keep congress in gridlock so that they can both point to the democrats inability to do anything AND to “show” that government doesn’t work. This is all in service of keeping their real constituents happy - their donors.
Which is a long way of saying: Please, people of Georgia, do not do this to the country.
Also, maybe the fucking author needs to get his head out of his ass and pay attention to what happened on January 5th, when WE elected the second Black man to the senate and the first Jewish senator from my state and the first Jewish senator from the deep south since the 1870s…
His money’s evidently still good enough for The CW (or the local affiliate), based on the ad I saw while flipping channels last night. (Couldn’t sleep; omicron/cold/flu/whatever has my days & nights mixed up)
On his website, Symonette makes a variety of bizarre claims, including that Omar and other prominent Black Democrats, artists and athletes — including former President Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Spike Lee, Colin Kaepernick, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. — are “DECEVING [sic] FAKE BLACK PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY INDIANS!” In a sermon now deleted from YouTube, he claimed that the Senate is controlled by a secret underground of “Cherokee Mormons.”….
SYMONETTE WAS KNOWN as Maurice Woodside until 1992, when the black supremacist cult leader he followed, Yahweh ben Yahweh, was jailed for leading a conspiracy to murder 14 white people in initiation rites. Woodside was among the Miami-based Nation of Yahweh cult members charged in two of the murders, but he was acquitted. After the trial, he changed his last name to Symonette, which was his father’s surname, before eventually reinventing himself as Michael the Black Man, a pirate radio preacher who delivered broadsides against gays and Democrats.
Thanks: that helps me understand why in the world they were able to find so many Black people to sit behind him while wearing those t-shirts. Honestly, I thought they were paid extras, but this makes more sense.
It’s probably a combination of both, I’d guess. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that at least some people coming out to visibly support Trump were paid extras, but there are also enough Black Americans who embrace Trumpism, so…