So, Tell Me How You Really Feel!

Imagine being so stupid that you look at [Trump] this treasonous, traitorous, totally corrupt, self-serving, ignorant clown, this racist, semi-illiterate moron, this sexually-assaulting, pathologically lying, feeble-minded, morally bankrupt, constitutionally-illiterate simpleton, this bloated nitwit with his cotton candy hair, radioactive tinted skin, and obese dishevelment and think, "Now this is a guy I really admire." --Democratic Underground Post by 634-5789

I don't know who this originated with, I've given attribution to where I got it from.  It's one of those kind of statements to which the reply is, "So, tell me how you really feel."  

This comes close.  

Not having lived my life under a rock, I have no frame of reference to explain anything that's led to the development of an "extreme right" with the capability of gathering the kind of support that it has.  And when I run into someone I know who thinks this way, my first thought is, "How did that happen?"  

Driving home on the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago at rush hour, I noticed homemade banners with extremist right wing slogans and Q-Anon conspiracy theories painted on them hanging on the chain link fence of a footbridge across the freeway.  A woman named Veronica Wolksi was responsible for them, putting them up just about every afternoon.  During the afternoon rush hour, traffic crawls at less than 5 mph along that stretch, making the banners visible long enough to get the point.  Among the messages she put up there were all kinds of COVID denying claims, Pro-Trump slogans, lots of support for the big lie, and lots of Q-Anon promotion.  It never really bothered me, though plenty of people driving by in the afternoon traffic rolled down windows and exhibited their middle finger pointed upward.  

Then, all of a sudden, the banners disappeared.  I thought perhaps she just got tired of being yelled at and flipped off, or that someone had demanded that she quit using public property for a one-sided, extremist political rant.  But then, I read in the Chicago Tribune that she had passed away.  From COVID-19.  

She didn't go quietly, either.  

Hospitalized at Amita Resurrection Medical Center, a large hospital on Chicago's north side, her supporters besieged the hospital for more than a week, demanding that she be treated with ivermectin.  Police had to be called to keep order as a small group demanded access to her room to perform "wellness checks," insisting that the hospital discharge her to someone who had her medical power of attorney.  She died of complications of COVID-caused pneumonia and hyperthyroidism, neither of which would have been resolved by ivermectin and, in fact, would probably have hastened her death if they had given it to her.  

The walkway bridge over the Kennedy hasn't been used for political slogans since, at least, not that I've seen.  Maybe that means that some of her supporters have recovered their sanity after this little episode and decided their life is too valuable to waste on conspiracy theories.  But I doubt it.  This little incident characterizes just how absolutely insane and ridiculous is this kind of extremism. 

You can read the whole sad saga here, Veronica Wolski, Extremist Right Wing Covid Denier and Trump Supporter, Dies of COVID.

If these people are out in public, who's being put in insane asylums nowadays?