While you wail away at Libs & Dems stealing your lunch money, you don't realize there's a 5-alarm fire going on in your own house.
It's high time some of you so-called conservatives wake up and realize what's going on. I repeat, unless MAGA is somehow reeled in, this will end in a really bad way.
As Capitol rioters, QAnon believers and other radicals gain in number, one moderate Texas Republican warns: 'We’re on a self-destructive path.'
www.latimes.com
McKINNEY, Texas — Mayor George Fuller is troubled by what he sees and hears in this conservative Dallas suburb.
Battles with liberals are enduring and predictable, but what worries Fuller is the deepening rancor between Republican moderates and far-right conservatives over what America should look, sound and feel like. Inspired by nativist fervor and fed by Donald Trump’s rage, the Republican Party here
encompasses anti-vaccination protesters, QAnon conspiracy theorists and those whose mistrust of President Biden only hardens
as he reverses his predecessor’s policies.
“It’s just not the party I recognize anymore,” said Fuller, 58, a moderate Republican whose Trump-supporter siblings no longer speak to him. “We are at a place where families are torn apart by political ideologies that are so skewed and out of whack.”
What is evident across this county — where in the 1970s the oilmen-rancher
TV drama “Dallas” was filmed — is that extremism has gone mainstream in certain pockets of America. Hard-line sentiments that would have been whispered only years ago are now spoken unabashed. That worries Alonzo Tutson, a Black Independent, who said right-wing radicals here are everyday people who say “howdy to you at soccer practice. They just blend right in.”
Texas was home to three dozen of the 377 alleged insurrectionists arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, tied with Pennsylvania for the most of any state,
according to a study by terrorism experts at the University of Chicago. Of Texans charged, 20 live in half a dozen rapidly diversifying blue counties around Houston and Dallas, including several in McKinney’s Collin County.
The study found that Texas’ rioters were older, more professional and had fewer ties to radical groups than past far-right conservatives. All came from counties that had lost white populations in recent years. Collin County’s white population has declined at a rate of 4.3% since 2015. The study’s authors cited increased fear among conservative whites that they would be overtaken by minorities in a “Great Replacement.”
“Now that Biden’s in office, a lot of people look to Texas as the counterpoint,” Paul Chabot, 47, a former San Bernardino reserve sheriff’s deputy, said last week at McKinney Coffee Co. He described the area as, “Living how America used to be.”
Stonebridge Ranch in McKinney — where Chabot’s relocation company helps resettle Californians, many of them conservatives — was designed in 1988 by the same architects who designed Woodbridge in Irvine in 1975.
The county’s historic homes and expansive developments hum with a conservative extremism propelled by fear, disillusionment and social media that trade less on facts than on evoking tribalism.
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“I firmly believe that D.C. was just a test run,” Tutson said. “They are willing to take this to the more local levels, and you’re going to start seeing these same results of what happened in D.C. in various cities, your county seats all throughout the U.S.”
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They watch Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and follow conservative Telegram online channels. They believe aspects of QAnon theory, including that the government has been infiltrated by pedophiles, and bridle at it being called a conspiracy: “It’s no longer a conspiracy theory when I can show you facts,” Jenkins said, wearing a “Jesus Matters” T-shirt, a nod to conservative opponents of Black Lives Matter, which Andrews dismissed as “Marxist.” The pair draw their information from online reports and controversial documentaries
such as “Vaxxed.”
Andrews doesn’t wear masks or observe social distancing, and switched her 8-year-old son to private school after public schools eliminated in-person classes. The women say they are not anti-vaccine — Andrews vaccinated all three of her children as babies — but say they oppose COVID vaccines, which they consider untested. They recently attended a conservative anti-vaccine conference in Tulsa, Okla., whose headliners included Trump supporters such as attorney Lin Wood and My Pillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell.
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Such issues played into McKinney’s municipal elections on May 1, which drew historic turnout. If it was a referendum on extremism, as Mayor Fuller suggested, extremism mostly lost. Fuller was reelected by a wide margin. Most of the candidates who attacked him were defeated, except for Stan Penn, a Trump supporter who forced his moderate opponent for City Council into a runoff but then quit last week, citing the nastiness of the race.
“I’ve been accused of wanting people to die to line my pockets. I’ve been told, ‘I hope you get COVID and you die,’” Penn said as he sat last week in The Celt, an Irish pub he opened in downtown McKinney after retiring as a bank president.
Penn, 60, described himself as a “center-right, chamber of commerce Republican,” but said friends stopped talking to him during the election. Others boycotted his business and told him to leave town.
“It’s all tribalism, and it’s a cancer on our country. It’s destroying us,” he said of the infighting among conservatives that’s proliferated online.
Fuller agreed. He said the acrimony of the campaign marred his victory and split his family, including at least one sibling who is a QAnon believer. The bitterness in his family, in his state, is resonating nationally. That troubles him.
“I’m thoroughly concerned for our country,” he said. “We’re on a self-destructive path.”
