In Delaware, despite being among the bluest of blue states, we have had our experiences with the active cultivation of a far right population that uses increasingly violent and even exterminationist rhetoric.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."
