The following is a reply I posted to a “Liz Cheney conservative” who expressed despair over MAGA but pulled the “both sides” card when it came to acknowledging the role “moderate conservatives” have played in bringing us to the brink of a literally Fascist revolution:
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While I understand, and have compassion for, where you’re coming from, we would not be here now if not for decades’ worth of “Liz Cheney conservatives” who refused to see where the tide was flowing… and who did, in fact, help it flow in this direction.
I’ve been politically active since the 1980s, and politically aware since the 1970s. In my younger years, I actually considered myself moderately conservative. I belonged to the NRA, decried “extremists” on the left, and voted for the occasional Republican. For a brief period (1978-1980) I was a sincerely evangelical Born Again Christian. Even after I shifted further leftward, I read American Conservative magazine and books by Ann Coulter, George Will and Rush Limbaugh so I could speak intelligently about the views I opposed.
And what I witnessed in those spaces and sources during that time has driven me further to “the left” than any amount of peer pressure from “exstream (sic.)” leftists could possibly have done.
Because my membership in the NRA got me on the mailing lists for organizations that sent me catalogs full of Nazi regalia and racist conspiracy books while I lived with my Jewish then-girlfriend.
And my days among Evangelicals altered me to the seething racism, pervasive lies, and revolutionary zeal to “take America back” and affirm “a Christian nation” by force if necessary. I heard with my own ears people tell say that lying to “non-believers” was actually advised by Christ in his remark about being “wise as serpents” (that is, liars) because lying to people deluded by “the Father of Lies” (Satan) is perfectly okay with God.
And I’ve watched as the books I read, and the ads I saw, and the remarks by people who feted Ann Coulter as “a conservative intellectual” even as she recommended “physically intimidat(ing) liberals” all led us to the doorstep of 1/6 and Project 2025. I saw “liberal hunting licenses” sold as “jokes” in The American Patriot Bookstore near where I lived in the late 1980s, and I recall how Ronald Reagan’s “tough love camps” literally tortured my sister, my first wife, and my late brother-in-law in the name of a “sobriety” the Reagans themselves did not practice.
I have argued for decades with my father as he voted for G.W. Bush twice even though Dad admitted he opposed the invasion of Iraq. And I watched Liz Cheney’s dad send mercenaries into New Orleans with orders to kill American citizens if those mercenaries felt those citizens were “looters” (read: Black and homeless people in a disaster zone) while Cheney himself sat on the Board of Directors for that mercenary army (then called Blackwater, now called by an ever-changing series of names because the group keeps being convicted of war crimes) and profited from those deaths.
Liz Cheney herself may be horrified by the monster she and her father have unleashed.
You may be horrified by it, too.
But I’ve spent the last 40-someodd years WATCHING YOU FOLKS UNLEASH IT.
So yes – please DO quit voting.
Because I know from copious experience that you “moderate conservatives” opened the door wide for the Extremist Right, set them at the table of power, and supported them as they spent decades destroying the lives of everyone who does not think and act like you.
Satyros Phil Brucato 