In his January 19 press conference, President Joseph Biden said: “I actually like Mitch McConnell. We like one another.”

In reality, McConnell refused to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy as President-elect until December 15, 2020—more than one month after Biden’s election on November 3.

Additionally, at least 147 Republicans sided with Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And even after the treasonous attempted coup of January 6, 2021, many of them still refuse to accept the legitimacy of Biden’s win.

January 6, 2021’s attempted coup

Tyler Merbler from USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Republicans have enthusiastically embraced Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him—despite overwhelming evidence that it wasn’t.

Legislators in Republican-controlled states are now working furiously to corrupt election machinery at state and local levels so they can nullify the votes of millions of Democrats in the 2022 and 2024 elections.

Their ultimate goal: Restore a lifelong criminal and Russia-appeasing traitor to absolute power as “President-for-Life.”

In 1996, Newt Gingrich, then Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, wrote a memo entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” It encouraged Republicans to attack Democrats with such words as “corrupt,” “selfish,” “destructive,” “hypocrisy,” “liberal,” “sick,” and “traitors.”

Republicans learned long ago that most voters aren’t moved by appeals to their rationality. Instead, what counts with them are emotions. And Republicans have become experts at appealing to these—especially the baser ones.

For Republicans, the Big Three emotions are: Hatred, Greed and Fear.

This has enabled Republicans to repeatedly score impressive electoral victories: Out of 17 Presidential elections since the end of World War II, Republicans have won 10.

But it’s not enough to see Republicans for what they are. Americans need to be seen for what they are.

Historically, the United States has always been a highly conservative nation. Going from “conservative” to “Fascist” is a relatively easy step—as millions of Donald Trump’s supporters have proven.

Since the end of World War 11, Republicans have regularly hurled the charge of “treason” against anyone who dared to run against them for office or think other than Republican-sponsored thoughts.

Republicans had been locked out of the White House from 1933 to 1952, during the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.

Determined to regain the Presidency by any means, they found that attacking the integrity of their fellow Americans a highly effective tactic.

During the 1950s, Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy rode a wave of paranoia to national prominence—by attacking the patriotism of anyone who disagreed with him.

Joseph McCarthy

The fact that McCarthy never uncovered one actual case of treason was conveniently overlooked during his lifetime.

During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Republicans tried to paint Bill Clinton as a brainwashed “Manchurian candidate” because he had briefly visited the Soviet Union during his college years.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Republicans lost their “soft on Communism” slander-line. So they tried to persuade voters that Democrats were “soft on crime.”

When riots flared in 1992 after the acquittal of LAPD officers who had savagely beaten Rodney King, President George H.W. Bush blamed the carnage on the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s.

George H.W. Bush

After losing the White House to Clinton at the polls in 1992 and 1996, Republicans tried to oust him another way: By impeaching him over a tryst with a penis-loving intern named Monica Lewinsky.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach, but the effort was defeated in the Democratically-controlled Senate.

The 2008 election of Barack Obama pushed the Republican “treason chorus” to new heights of infamy.

Barack Obama

Almost immediately after Obama took office, he came under attack by an industry of right-wing book authors such as Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

Consider the vocabulary Right-wingers use to describe their political adversaries:

“Liberals,” “radicals, “bankrupting,” “treason,” subversion,” “slander,” “terrorism,” “betrayal,” “catastrophe,” “shattering the American dream,” “leftists,” “Communists,” “government takeover,” “socialism,” “power grab,” “secularism,” “environmentalism.”

And while the Right lusts to constantly compare Democrats and liberals (the two aren’t always the same) to Nazis, its propaganda campaign draws heavily on Adolf Hitler’s own advice.

In Mein Kampf, the Nazi leader laid out his formula for successful propaganda: “All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials.

“Those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotypical formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.

“[The masses] more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”

Thus, Republicans spent the eight years of Barack Obama’s Presidency repeating the lie that he was born in Kenya—not Hawaii, as the long-form version of his birth certificate attests.