In fact?
Republicans (With Trump in the lead) have embraced an altered Reality….
Democrats again…
Try to embrace the ‘Right Thing’….
Come Election Day….
Democrat’s seldom get Big rewards for their efforts….
Just this past week, a false rumor that Kanye was debanked by JP Morgan (in fact, Kanye quit the firm publicly) inspired the right-wing media to rallyto his defense after he spewed a series of threats and libels on the Jewish community.
Also this week, Donald Trump once again complained about American Jews being ungrateful and lacking the good sense of either their Israeli compatriots or Evangelical Christians. This is one of Trump’s favorite themes to make about the Jews, along with noting Jews are good with money, naturally loyal to Israel, and own Congress. All these comments are far worse than the worst thing Omar ever said about Jewish people, but the idea Trump would ever apologize, or that Republicans would even ask him to, let alone vote to condemn his remarks, is beyond implausible.
Needless to say, however unwilling they may be to call out and stigmatize antisemitism within their own ranks, Republicans are even more blasé about expressions of racism against Muslims, Latino immigrants, and Black people. This week, Tommy Tuberville appeared at a Trump rally and claimed, as though it were obvious, that Black people as a whole are criminals and that Democrats support crime because they see crime itself as a form of social justice: “They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullshit! They are not owed that.”
None of these comments drew a rebuke from any important corner of the party. No-enemies-to-the-right is the operating principle.
Perhaps the most revealing indicator of the Republican Party’s complete inability to control bigotry is the rise and rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a representative from Georgia. Greene is a self-described “Christian nationalist,” an ideology that proposes frankly to give Christians a privileged status while confining adherents of any other religious belief to formal second-class citizenship. She has mused that “an unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists, and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation, with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands” — imagine if Omar said that one! — and, more notoriously, that the Rothschilds planned a series of forest fires using space lasers in order to buy up land….
…
One effect of the Trump era has been to abandon any pretense of this. The gates are a smoldering ruin, and the kooks have overrun every corner of the party. If anything, the non-kooks are being weeded out — Liz Cheney is being shown the door even as Marjorie Taylor Greene is being courted.
There are bigots and extremists on both sides. But one party is able to denounce and punish bigotry. (Look at how Biden forced three Los Angeles City Council members to resign after their racist comments leaked.) The other party isn’t even trying….