My social media is being flooded with outraged RWers pretending they have been forced, (yes, FORCED, I tell you!) into supporting the repulsive, fascist Donald Trump by outrage over yesterday’s verdict.

This is, of course, nonsense. Still simmering from the trauma of a black man being elected, sixteen years ago, (and then REelected) they are delighted to openly cheer on a white supremacist who’s become the hero of Nazis and KKKers. For decades on Usenet, Compuserve, LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’ve been reading their wistful longings for their own American Pinochet. Now they’re so excited you can practically see them squirming in their seats as they post about what they’re going to do to the rest of us if Trump isn’t elected president this year.

The only people who come close to disgusting me as much as these traitors are the dozy moderates and complacent liberals in the Beltway who, for years, reacted to concerns about the rise of these fascists by chuckling, handpatting, and telling the rest of us to relax — they were on top of things. They knew what they were doing.

I got called “naive” more than once. No, no, I was told, actually pointing out the fascist agenda of Christian Domininionists as they embedded themselves into a mainstream party, or asking about the endgame of the southern strategy, was too over-the-top.

And it wasn’t just Beltway politicians who kept intoning their own version of “it can’t happen here.” “It’s not our job to point out when someone is lying,” more than one reporter told me in the early oughts. Elizabeth Bumiller actually told an auditorium of journalism students that “You can’t say the president is lying” even when he lies. “…it’s live, it’s very intense, it’s frightening to stand up there,” she said. “Think about it, you’re standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country’s about to go to war.”

As a prominent reporter, she had access that the rest of us could only dream of, but — golly gee, it was soooooo SCAWWWWY standing on live TV talking to that big strong man, the PRESIDENT.

So now, here we are.

Even if the insanity we are seeing online reflects only a vocal minority, this situation is dangerous. I’m afraid the best we can hope for are discrete examples of right wing terrorism akin to what we saw in the nineties with the rise of the militia movement. And that is bad enough. People may die.

Whatever happens — we didn’t have to get here.