Republicans hate that reality is against them.

A couple of years back, I blogged about how much conservatives had come to resemble the Soviet communists they spent so many years loathing. As the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel once put it, when you claim the right to rule based on truth, any dissent becomes a threat. Plus it upsets President Snowflake’s extremely fragile fee-fees to suggest he’s wrong about anything. Even though he is.

As Paul Campos (I think) once said, it pisses them off worse that reality itself is against them. Gay marriage, for instance, hasn’t destroyed straight marriage. No pastor has been forced to hold a church wedding for gay couples. Gay people are not more likely to be pedophiles than, say, Christian ministers. Children raised without a male and female parent do not grow up defective.

Women using birth control are not slutty, promiscuous or denying their true nature. Women are every bit as capable as men at — well, anything. Voting, fighting, science, construction, parenting, every human skill has a huge overlap between male and female ability. Many women are better at “male” skills than the average man, just as some men are better caregivers than the average woman.

To take the current administration, tariffs don’t work. Canada doesn’t want to become our 51st state. The Felon is not a political genius who’s erratic actions are some cunning 11-dimensional chess game.

This isn’t new. There’s a notorious quote from W’s first term, where one of his staff sneered that while the liberal “reality based community” criticizes the War in Iraq, W would just sweep onward, creating new reality after new reality and laughing as liberals protested futilely. Of course they didn’t create a new reality: W’s declaration of Mission Accomplished presaged more than a decade of violence and collapse in Iraq as the occupation failed to bring order and stability (thank you, President Biden, for ending it). Reality always wins in the end. Unfortunately that just makes them more delusional, like the communists who clung desperately to the dream of the USSR as a force for world socialism instead of a dangerous dictatorship.

In some ways they’re in tune with the classic political tract Leviathan, which argued the only source for truth should be the monarch. Scientific reality undercuts most of RFK Jr.’s views so science must be crushed. As Paul Krugman says, we’ll see “the administration firing anyone suspected of being more loyal to science than they are to Donald Trump.”

The current administration is “particularly hostile to agencies that generate what they feel are findings that obstruct their own agendas. Safety regulations of all sorts, environmental concerns, climate change, and of course anything that comes within a million miles of suggesting that some groups in society have historically been put at a deliberate disadvantage relative to others: all of it has to go.”

Not only do they have to lash out at dissenters, they have to pretend the Felon knows what he’s doing. Case in point, the head of the United Auto Workers has declared tariffs are great — who cares if rich people lose money on stocks? As if 401ks and IRAs weren’t the primary retirement-funding for millions of working Americans. Or the argument that having overseas workers laboring in dangerous conditions for pennies a day are somehow ripping off American consumers.

On top of that, we have the right-wing media ecosystem where everyone’s scrabbling for attention and the money is in saying increasingly outrageous things. Benny Johnson, who got cash from Russia (allegedly not knowing about it), goes back to the classic, covid as a conspiracy. Newsmax wants viewers angry that bike lanes exist. I’d laugh off all this bullshit but a surprising amount will filter into the mainstream. The lies about schools catering to furries, for instance, are crackpot bullshit but Republicans won’t let go of them.

It’s unfortunate that when things like the Felon’s idiotic tariff policies smash up against reality, all of us will feel the shocks.