Certainly the Delaware Republican Party has done its bit for pushing politics as hard to the right as possible, which is exceptionally odd given that the long tradition of the First State's GOP had long been one of bipartisan centrism under the likes of Governor and later US Representative Mike Castle.
But in 2010 Castle lost his US Senate primary to upstart right-winger Christine O'Donnell, whose most famous moments came from (believe it or not) denying she was a witch and demanding in a debate with her Democratic opponent, "Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" (She lost in a landslide to Chris Coons.
The DE GOP has gone down hill so fast that large Democratic majorities control both houses of the General Assembly, and the Democratic primary for Governor, Mayor of Wilmington, and about half of the seats in the General Assembly effectively IS the election. They have so badly lost that one GOP State Representative wrote a highly publicized editorial bemoaning the "tyranny of the majority" that has blighted the state with "one-party rule" through the horrible mechanism of ... Democrats winning elections:
Elections have consequences, and the choices made by individual voters over years have created a monoculture of thought and action in the state Legislature. Delaware House and Senate Democrats can already pass any bill requiring a simple majority vote, without the need for any participation by Republican lawmakers. As a result, too many such bills fail to incorporate any perspective not shared by the majority.
Then this year there was the rather bizarre stunt of inviting the GOP poster girl for transphobic hate, Representative Nancy "Tranny, tranny, tranny" Mace, to visit Delaware and spew her hate about Representative Sarah McBride, the first-ever openly transgender Congresswoman, and one of Delaware's most popular politicians.
They've been reduced to running increasingly fringe candidates in a handful of safe districts, and by mimicking what has worked for Republicans nationwide: creating a network of bogus organizations (the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Delaware Women's Self Defense Association, and others) and developing an alternative hard-right media presence.
This media presence was built off the audience for some pre-existing right-wing talk shows (WMDT, etc.). We now have one statewide news site controlled by a conservative grocery chain owner, another regional paper owned by a GOP legislator, and ever-the-right-wing-upstart First State Update, literally produced by an incel in his basement (but people patronize it because he monitors police bands and usually manages to beat everybody online with reports of major traffic accidents or shootings). Given that we have no TV station in Delaware and our state "newspaper of record" is a Gannett publication, what sounds like a dribble of hard-core MAGA is actually much more.
Because we generally live in a world where national news -- even on the far right -- is dominated by a handful of major corporate players, we don't usually consider the impact of these local wannabes. Instead we talk about Fox News, One America, the New York Post, the Washington Examiner, the Daily Signal, the Daily Wire, etc.
But I am increasingly becoming aware, as we listen to MAGA voters clamoring for ever more brutal behavior by the Trump regime, that we've missed a critical point here. These local far-right "news" sources are the first-line breeding ground for extremism.
Take The Delmarva Times, for example, which aspires to be "your premier destination for comprehensive news coverage of the Wicomico, Worcester, and Somerset regions, as well as broader state-level developments in Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia," and "to provide timely, accurate, and insightful journalism that serves the diverse communities of the Delmarva Peninsula."
The DT also has a firm commitment to "high-quality journalism that upholds the principles of fairness, accuracy, and objectivity," and asserts that "Transparency and accountability are core values at Delmarva Times. We believe in being transparent about our sources, methods, and editorial decisions, and we hold ourselves accountable for the accuracy and integrity of our reporting."
Of course that commitment to transparency does not extend to naming either its owners or its staff: there are no bylines ever provided, articles run as either by "The Delmarva Times," "The Easton Gazette" (which ceased actual existence about a century ago), or even "The Delmarva Parent Teacher Coalition" (another completely anonymous organization focused on wild, unfounded charges about public education, primarily in the Maryland counties bordering Delaware).
So "transparency and accountability" are totally boilerplate bullshit here -- but that's no surprise. We have inaugurated a media environment where small start-ups everywhere along the spectrum are often choosing to come aboard anonymously.
But what about "quality journalism"?
You can see how that works on The Delmarva Times Facebook page, which, yes, is acknowledged there as a formal part of the DT media presence. There our anonymous staff of plucky patriots really cuts loose.
Let's take a look first at the quality memes put out daily via this "quality journalism" news organization:
Take note of the number of reactions and shares on each of these posts. The page has a following of 137,000 people.
Now let's take a look at the comments some of them draw:
I urge you to consider that the people commenting here on deporting, imprisoning, or executing the targets of these memes ... are not joking. They are ready for their government to start killing people to "save" America.
They are also NOT REACHABLE by moral arguments or economic hardship created by their own electoral choices. You can stop trying now. We are not -- if we survive as a democratic nation -- going to bring these folks over to our side in any significant numbers. We are going to have to not only defeat them, but show them firsthand what "molon labe" means.
Another note: I did a quick run-through on the commenters on about five different posts with more than 200 comments. Only 35-40% of those folks commenting here appear to live on Delmarva. My best guess based on unscientific sampling is they are spread fairly evenly across the nation and LOTS OF THEM hail from blue states.
This is the fringe media ecosystem below the one we are used to seeing in our feeds.
There are others, below even this one, that are darker and increasingly more racist, nativist, Islamophobic, misogynist, homophobic, and etc., and on those sites they are not just talking about the need for killing ... they are actively planning it.
I am not going to show you those sites, at least not today. Partly that's because you need some time to process this, and partly because shouting out those sites and sponsors and commenters is actually dangerous at this point. They track people down who would expose them.
There are three big lessons here:
1. There are a LOT MORE potential concentration camp guards, ICE detention agents, paid informers, and lynch mob members out there that you probably already think. And ICE is already recruiting in those spaces (though doing so in a deniable way -- "We did not tell anybody to share our employment ads in that space, but we cannot control what patriotic Americans choose to do.")
2. You are already swimming in a sea of these people -- at the PTA, in the grocery store, at the Y, where you go out to eat ... And they pay attention to you if your're wearing LGBTQIA+ friendly shirts, or drive a car with anti-MAGA bumperstickers, or talk badly in public about the President.
3. You need to rethink your positions on issues like doxing, self-protection, and responding to harassment in public places, at work, or online. It's proliferating. The key component to any police state society is that the government cannot possibly hire and pay for a large enough secret police to keep tabs on everyone. SAVAK, the KGB, the Kempei Tai, the Gestapo ... all depended on informers -- including your family members AND your children.
So you NEED to know, and your friends and compatriots NEED to know who is on the other side in your locality. And you need to share that information, even if the authoritarians call that "doxing."
A few more George Orwell quotes are always in order:
On informers:
“The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.”
On why MAGA adherents are the real "sheeple":
“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
On how hard you will have to fight:
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself
Things are going to get worse.
Start preparing for what happens after the protests fail.
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