On Tuesday, one Republican candidate in Florida held a “welcome home” for the leader of the Proud Boys as part of a “MAGA Revenge Tour” event that also included a Trump rapper and a conservative commentator best known for going door to door to accuse people of voter fraud. Also on Tuesday, a legislative session on updating Utah driver’s licensees broke down in a debate over whether the piece of plastic was the biblical “mark of the beast” or merely the first stage of a U.N. invasion.
In the much-beloved book and film, The Princess Bride, the kidnappers of not-yet-bride Buttercup face a forbidding wall of stone overhanging the sea, a wall called The Cliffs of Insanity. Eventually, both the giant Fezzick and the pesky Man in Black managed to climb these cliffs. But what goes unmentioned is how, on their way up, they must have passed the Republican Party plummeting to the bottom.
Mental illness is just that: illness. People who are living with any form of mental disability or disorder deserve privacy, proper assistance, and all necessary medical care. But what’s going on with the Republican Party is something else. These are people deliberately choosing to bale on reality; to embrace a fantasyland of conspiracy and confusion where Donald Trump is bravely fighting a network of cannibals and the U.N. black helicopters are forever hovering just out of sight. The biggest challenge to the nation might not be in any one specific event or claim, but in the way that an entire major party has abandoned basic ideas, like cause and effect, and championed the cause of nonsense over facts.
Words like “crazy” can be genuinely harmful when they crudely align policies born out of greed, self-promotion, and plain old hate with people experiencing mental or emotional distress. Calling the people flinging Hitler salutes along a Florida turnpike “Nazis” is perfectly accurate. Calling them “nuts” is not. They’re not sick, except in a way that’s more moral than mental.
What’s continuing to happen with the Republican Party has more to do with evil than illness, but that doesn’t make it any easier to remedy—or even to talk about. How do you address millions of people who had a conscious uncoupling with reality? How can answer an argument that has no basis in fact when the people on the other side regard that as a point in its favor?
When Deseret News asks “Is misinformation becoming a trend on Utah’s Capitol Hill?” the biggest problem is that they’re still posing it as a question. After all, the meeting described in the article, the meeting about whether the new driver's license bill would bring on the End Times, was just a follow-up to one that took place in January. At that meeting, the Utah House was supposed to debate a bill that would provide first responders with more funding for fire suppression and make it possible to reimburse local fire districts called in to fight fires outside their areas. What kind of claims did opponents of this bill make? Well …
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Citizens could be arrested for speaking out against critical race theory;
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The Department of Homeland Security could mobilize the Utah National Guard to force vaccination on everyone;
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The health department could create a police force to arrest people who didn’t wear masks;
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School boards could create “militarized response teams” to enforce mandates;
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The bill was written by the United Nations.
This, again, is a bill that makes it easier for funds to be moved around between fire departments. That’s it.
All of these claims apparently arose from members of the Utah house who, rather than read the bill, drew their information from a YouTube video created by a man whose organization also claims the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax. That video called this a “scary bill” that would lead to “U.N. policing.”
There was a time, not so long ago, when anyone making any of these claims would find a political opponent eager to snap it up, plant it firmly in a campaign ad, and run on what a genuine chuckleheaded asshat anyone making such claims had to be. After all, just read the damn bill.
Now, it’s a sure bet that at least some of the Republicans out there pushing the idea that the fire protection bill lets the local school board create a mask-enforcing militia, or that the new driver’s license bill is the next step toward U.N. concentration camps (and yes, the term “concentration camps” was used) will run those claims in their campaign ads.
Crazy is not the right word. But neither is foolish, evil, or even fucked-up. Republicans didn’t fall off the Cliffs of Insanity, they jumped. They are jumping. They will continue to jump.
A whole new vocabulary is necessary to describe a party that has parted ways with actuality. The only reason they don’t float off the planet is because gravity is real, and facts don’t actually go away when you stop believing in them. Unfortunately, societies are a construct, and a belief in fundamental reality is necessary to maintain that construct.
Here’s something else that is real: celebrating a departure from reason is dangerous. Whether it represents a momentary aberration in a political group, the ultimate expression of memes as a disease vector, or the failure of the species to make a smooth transition into an age of well-nigh infinite information, this growing and deepening well of unreason allows Republicans to justify any action without justifying it at all. That’s not an alternative fact. It’s just a sad truth.
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