Thread by @JoyAnnReid

We are living through a strange, modern-day version of the Dark Ages, where opening one’s body, and the bodies of one’s loved ones and even children up to COVID, while aggressively pushing to spread it to the unwilling, have become a weird right of passage in an American cult.

Trumpism at this stage is nothing short of a religion — devoted to assuaging his rage over losing the 2020 election by finding ever-more elaborate ways to tell him he didn’t really lose; while eagerly taking in the virus he survived (without the top-tier treatments he received…)

This while defending an arcane vision of white Christian male supremacy and impunity in everything from academics & history to policing, entertainment & sports. Most importantly this religion fixates on restoring white Christian supremacy in politics and governance at all costs.

The article of faith seems to be that if they can get control of every aspect of government from the school board to the White House and restore Trump to his throne where he can return to freely spewing racist, misogynistic vulgarity and hurting nonwhite people; change will stop.

These frightening changes to the demographics and the liberalization of the culture will just stop. And the rite of passage to demonstrate their total faith in the power of Trump to restore the power and permission structures that soothed them is to share and defend the virus.

If you were to drop in from another planet and observe America today, there’s no way you would believe we were the greatest emerging modern democracy after two world wars and the “cold war.” We are much more like a declining power, with a class of Vichy Republicans scrambling for

whatever power they think Trump will grant them in the broken, fascist autocracy, racked by pandemic disease, extreme income inequality, greed, cruelty and misery, that he plans to rule over like a decrepit king. And a Democratic Party that’s quietly fiddling while it all burns.

What a time to be alive.