In a June 19, 2015 editorial, Rolling Stone magazine writer Jeb Lund noted:        

“The Republican Party has weaponized its supporters, made violence a virtue and, with almost every pronouncement for 50 years, given them an enemy politicized, racialized and indivisible.

“Movement conservatives have fetishized a tendentious and ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment to the point that the Constitution itself somehow paradoxically ‘legitimizes’ an armed insurrection against the government created by it.

“Those leading said insurrection are swaddled by the blanket exculpation of patriotism. At the same time, they have synonymized the Democratic Party with illegitimacy and abuse of the American order.

“This is no longer an argument about whether one party’s beliefs are beneficial or harmful, but an attitude that labels leftism so antithetical to the American idea that empowering it on any level is an act of usurpation.”

Not content with this, Republicans have aimed slander and hatred at those who dare to vote Democratic. In the past, this has included:

• Blacks
• Women
• The disabled
• Environmentalists
• Liberals 

More recently, the groups Republicans most delight in vilifying are:

• Hispanics
• Gays
• Lesbians
• Transgenders

George Orwell’s classic 1949 novel, 1984, serves as a better guide to Republican electioneering strategy than any official statement of the GOP. 

1984 is set in a futuristic dictatorship called Oceania, whose constantly alternating mortal enemies are Eurasia and Eastasia.

A daily fixture of life in Oceania is the “Two Minutes Hate.” During this, Party members must watch a film depicting the Party’s enemies and express their hatred for them in exactly two minutes.

Chief among these is Emmanuel Goldstein, who is obviously based on Leon Trotsky, the longtime antagonist of Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union for almost 30 years.

The “Two Minutes Hate” serves as a form of brainwashing, whose purpose is to whip ordinary citizens into a frenzy of hatred and loathing for whoever the Party designates as its—and their—-mortal enemies.

It fully describes the motivations—and effects—of Republicans’ attacks on their self-proclaimed enemies.

Without a speck of evidence to back up such defamatory claims, Republicans—both politicians and their followers—attack Democratic candidates as “groomers” and “pedophiles.” 

This has led to deadly attacks on gays, lesbians and transgenders.

In December, 2014, Republicans in the Michigan House of Representatives passed “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

The bill allows public agencies and private businesses to refuse service to anyone under the claim that their “religious beliefs” had been affronted.

And the State government is legally prevented from intervening if a person claimed that his/her “deeply-held religious beliefs” was the reason for acting—or not acting—in a certain way.

Thus:

• An emergency room doctor can refuse service to a gay or lesbian needing medical care.
• A pharmacist can refuse to fill a doctor’s prescription for birth control or HIV medication.
• A DMV clerk can refuse to give a driver’s license to someone who’s divorced.  
• An employer can deny equal pay to women.

Republicans have introduced similar “right-to-discriminate” legislation in other states as well:

• On March 28, 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the “Parental Rights in Education” bill. This bans public school teachers from holding classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through grade three.
• In October, 33 Congressional Republicans introduced a similar “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would prohibit, on a nationwide basis, the use of federal funds “to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10, and for other purposes.”
• On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court’s reversed Roe v. Wade, guaranteeing a woman’s legal right to abortion. Soon afterward, Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton said that he would willingly defend at the Supreme Court any law the Legislature enacted that criminalized sodomy. 
• In Utah, Stuart Adams, the Republican president of the State Senate, said he would support Utah’s joining with other states to press the Supreme Court to end the right to same-sex marriage. 

Republicans have defended such legislation by equating gays with child predators.

In fact, the Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute states that 90% of child molesters target children in their network of family and friends, and the majority are men married to women.

Yet Republicans and their Rightist allies have refused to condemn such heterosexual—and Right-wing—child molesters as Dennis Hastert and Josh Duggar.

Josh Duggar, the “all-American” child molester

On May 21, 2015, responding to press leaks, Duggar resigned as director of the Family Research Council, a Right-wing organization dedicated to fighting sexually-oriented issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion and pornography.

In 2002-3, as a 14-15 year-old, Duggar had fondled the breasts and vaginas of five underage girls—four of whom were his own sisters.

And on October 28, 2015, Hastert—Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1999 to 2007–pleaded guilty to structuring money transactions in a way to avoid requirements to report where the money was going.

The reason: One of his victims had started blackmailing him.

Dennis Hastert

The reason: To conceal the truth about his past as a child molester. Hastert had abused four young boys when he was their high school wrestling coach. One was only 14 years old.