I feel like the notion of this being an issue of class can be resoundingly put in the grave. People living in trailers or in their mother’s basement and millionaires with their own jets all share in these conspiracy-laden ideologies, it’s very clearly not an issue of “people just struggling and looking for answers in all the wrong places”.

I'm so done with the working class angle. Biden won a majority of Americans earning less than $50k/year. Trump won a majority earning over $100k/year. We can put to bed the lie that Republicans are becoming the working class party. You don't need to be a hillbilly in a rural trailer park to be a white supremacist. They are our neighbors, teachers, police officers, real estate agents etc. This rot is deep and systemic in America.

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And the GOP, with its decades-long ideology of bad government and no responsibility, latched on to this culture and used it to foment hatred against people like Obama and the Clintons and rally support around themselves. When a hateful, destructive ideology takes hold, it eventually starts burning itself up too until there’s nothing left, and that’s exactly where the GOP is. They’re now feeding and feeding off of each other.

This is what decades of extreme, hyper-partisan rhetoric has gotten them. You can't just tell your supporters "if the other team wins, life as we know it is over" for years, then turn around and make calls for peace. That's incompatible. Republicans have been engaging in apocalyptic rhetoric for years now, and this radical/militarized base of the party is the natural endpoint of that.

I hope the results of the Georgia runoff are an indicator that their extreme rhetoric is losing its effect - at least with a small majority of voters. Control of the Senate was on the line. Republicans called Ossoff and Warnock "radical socialists" and said "you won't have a country anymore" if they win. They won by a comfortable margin for what would otherwise be a Lean-R state.