Extreme MAGA Extremists

W.J. Astore

The latest fear-raising fundraising letter from President Biden

I got another fundraising letter from Joe Biden and it’s a doozy. The words “extreme” and “extremist” are used a dozen times to describe MAGA Republicans. Other words used to describe Trump and MAGA include dangerous, threats, vengeance, vindictiveness, trample (“the American way of life as we know it”), and smashed (as in a MAGA movement that allegedly seeks to smash and destroy democracy).

Now, I’m no fan of Trump. He’s a con man, not a public servant, and I won’t vote for him. Even so, this Biden fundraising letter is the equivalent of promising a bloodbath if Trump gets elected again later this year.

I can’t recall a presidential campaign like the Biden/Harris effort. Its message is almost entirely negative. It’s based on fear. Fear of Trump, fear of MAGA, fear of “extremism.” There’s almost no hope and no promise of substantive changes for the better. It’s a singular message: Vote for Joe because Trump and his followers are very very bad.

This latest fundraising letter embraces Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric that Trump’s followers are irredeemable deplorables. It encourages Americans to fear their neighbors if they happen to wear a MAGA cap and support Trump. It stokes division rather than encouraging unity. And I simply don’t think it’s effective politics.

Biden’s message is simple: Vote for me because the other guy is even worse. Now I’m seeing claims from the Democrats that Trump is even more physically enfeebled and mentally confused than Biden.

If Biden loses this November, surely it will be due to a campaign that has no compelling and positive message to motivate and inspire people to vote for him. It’s just not enough, I think, to run on a message of fear.

“Fear MAGA extremism” isn’t enough

10 thoughts on “Extreme MAGA Extremists”

      1. That sounds like a whole line of merchandise, Bill: T-Shirts, Hoodies, Posters, Bumper Stickers… etc,

        Like

          1. Roger that. We can run it with NOTC line of the same things:

            VOTE NONE OF THESE CANDIDATES 2024
            The Best Woman or Man For The Job

            Liked by 1 person

  2. I agree…..and so do quite a lot of thoughtful voters who are disgusted by the message that Biden’s ‘handlers’ think will work — what are we? Sheep? Stupid? It’s insulting.

    Liked by 2 people

  4. Re Extreme MAGA Extremists

    You are dead-ass wrong.

    First, you can’t expect anyone running for office to put every reason you should support them in every mailing or speech or whatever, but that you’re unreasonable about that isn’t so important.

    What is important, is that Americans aren’t frightened enough of Republican fascism. It is the real thing. This is no ordinary election coming up; it’s our last chance to save our sorry asses from genuine, real-life, real-time, homegrown, all-American fascism, with all that entails. If you don’t think so, you are suffering from a bad case of It-Can’t-Happen-Here-ism.

    The Republican Party is wearing all of the indicia of a fascist party except the uniforms, and in the 21st century the uniforms don’t count, because, maybe taking their cue from modern horror films, they don’t want to look scary anymore; they want to look like the just-folks next door.

    Everything else is unmistakably there:

    • Lying as a principal political weapon, never submitting to argue to defend their lies, just piling on more and more to make finding the truth too wearying, destroying one’s trust in any source of info. making it easy to accept . . . whatever. And The Big Lie, the stolen election, is identical to Hitler’s myth of the Stab in the Back by Jews and socialists, the lie of a needless surrender to explain away Germany’s WWI defeat. The movers and shakers know it’s bullshit but they feed it to their supporters — and it works! – Scapegoating marginalized and defenseless groups, i.e., immigrants (despite huge US needs for workers of all kinds, from skilled and unskilled labor to PhDs). The 6 out of every 7 MAGAs who don’t care a rat’s ass about policies, want to see somebody they don’t like get hurt. All those pathetic pictures and all that footage of children in cages at the border, mothers wailing? The TV people ran it because they thought it was all so heart-tugging but the MAGA folks loved it! To see so many brown people made miserable was like getting all the porn they ever wanted.
    • The assault on our institutions, the courts, the FBI, the schools, all the media that doesn’t exist to make them what they are, like Fox and America One, If they’re all no good, it’ll be OK to destroy them ASAP, right?

    • Their contempt for the rule of law, their willingness to do anything they can get away with to gain and wield power, their eagerness to use the law as a tool and a weapon to help their friends and hurt their enemies, and I mean Republican judges too as well as the dumbass MAGA bozos. Why else would the Supremes say, essentially, that it’s OK to gerrymander? Think about the Voting Rights Act; the Supremes disemboweled it by saying, upon no evidence, that it’s not necessary any more, followed by exactly what they knew would happen and wanted to happen: Republicans everywhere have done all they can to trash and burden their adversaries’ right and ability to vote.

    • Their inclination to and tolerance for violence and the threat of violence, also all the way from the Jan 6 traitors to the millions who wish they could have been there, to the MAGAs in the armed forces and on police forces. Look how any public opposition to them now brings death threats. Do you imagine all 9 — all 9! — of the Sup Ct justices said the 14th Amendment doesn’t say what it says as plain as day, what it could not possibly say more plainly, that they produced that utterly bullshit decision that any first year law student can pick to pieces blindfolded because they believed in what they were doing? For all of them it was unthinkable to inflame the torch and pitchfork crowd by interpreting Section 3 to mean what it says, because none of them wants to spend the rest of this short life looking over his/her shoulder for the assassins guaranteed to come for them had they deprived the MAGAs of their darling. When they take over, the Jan 6 people and the millions like them are going to have to be given what they want, and what they want is to break things and see people they don’t like made to suffer.

    • They are doing all they can to destroy democracy in every way they can, to take power however they can, and do you imagine that when they have it they won’t do everything they can to hold on to it? If they win the White House and both houses of Congress this year our elections as far into the future as anyone can see or reasonably imagine are going to be Putin-style elections. And when they take power, every nasty cop and bureaucrat and neighborhood bully who has even a tiny bit of that power will wield it at their whims and whoever is on the receiving end won’t be able to do anything about it. Vigilantes? Death squads? Arbitrary detention? Inexplicable fatalities in prisons and police stations? Bet on it.

    • One more trait and then I’ll shut up: they falsely accuse their adversaries of being and doing what they themselves are and do. Just watch. Every time – every time! – some reporter puts a mike in a Republican politician’s face and asks about some outrage, out comes a phony accusation and an ad hominem attack on the Democrats for an imaginary same thing or something like it.

    These are all well-known badges, signs and indicia of fascism and the Republicans wear them now, in spades, and the Democrats, instead of calling a spade a spade and warning the country that the barbarians are within our gates, have just begun to notice what is going on. Joe Biden should shitcan his stupidass desires for bipartisanship and try to remember that these Republicans are a lot more like Nazis — a lot more — than they are like Robert Taft or Everett Dirksen or Arlen Spector or Bob Dole or John McCain. This country has already had fascism, but that was fascism just for some, Jim Crow down South for a hundred years from the end of Reconstruction until LBJ’s Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. This time around it’ll be for everyone they don’t like, and that will surely include you and me, brother.

    So Joe Biden and his fear-mongering? He should be ringing the fire bell daily, and good and loud. We are in terrible trouble and the only people who can save us, Democrats, don’t know how to fight.

    Robert Projansky Portland, OR

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    Liked by 1 person

    1. My point is that fear-mongering isn’t enough. You must give voters a reason to vote for you, not just provoke them to vote against the other guy.

      Give them hope. Inspire them. Don’t just encourage them to fear.

      Liked by 1 person

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