We’ve been reading a lot in these pages about a new scourge haunting the lunatic right, Marxo-Fascism. I’ve even been called a Marxo-Fascist myself, but I’m really more of a Groucho-Marxist. I’m not even sure what a Marxo-Fascist is. I googled it and didn’t find much. Even my AI app didn’t know what it was. This really surprised me since the term certainly sounds like it was made up by someone with artificial intelligence.

What is at play here is a frequency illusion, a cognitive bias that makes a person who has just learned something, like a cool and sinister sounding new concept, see it everywhere, whether it is actually there or not. It’s like a little kid with a new toy, he takes it with him wherever he goes. The main cause behind frequency illusion is selective attention, the process of selecting and focusing on selective objects while ignoring other distractions.

Confirmation bias also interacts with frequency illusion. This refers to the tendency to seek evidence that confirms one’s own beliefs, while overlooking ample evidence to the contrary. You see this exhibited in climate change deniers. They ignore the mountains of solid scientific evidence and focus on some obscure factoids, like Viking artifacts, as proof that thousands of reputable scientists are wrong.

Selective attention, confirmation bias and frequency illusions have become a fixture among the lunatic right. How else do you explain Common Core, Critical Race Theory, climate catastrophists, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and all the other boogeymen in a long line of silly, senseless and non-existent threats? With their selective attention fixated on the idea that anyone not a right-wing lunatic is a dire threat, they see that threat everywhere. As soon as one boogeyman fades away, another pops up to replace it. With their focus directed to non-existent threats, they fail to see that they are the real threat.

So what’s a Groucho-Marxist? It is also a made-up word describing someone who does not take the new Republican Party or conservatives in general, seriously. How can you?

They preach law and order, then elect a felon. They preach fiscal conservatism then add $8 trillion (and counting) to the national debt. They advocate for a return to the gold standard, then fall in love with the crypto-ponzi schemes. They claim to honor the Constitution then demand federal prosecutors commit an illegal act. Seven (and counting) refused and resigned, including one who clerked for Justice Scalia. The few honorable Republicans left are being forced out. With a claim to make America great for the average Joe they only managed to pass a tax cut for the wealthy. His first term ends in a pandemic which kills 1 million Americans and is the first administration since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer Americans employed than when it started. They don’t fix the border, win the war on drugs, get rid of ObamaCare, save the coal industry, or improve the crime rate. Now, with a chance to do it all again, they bring in unelected billionaires and Muskrats to eviscerate the very foundations of our nation that really did make America great. These are not serious people. When the Republican base again finds little real improvement in their lives, that’s when they will start blaming these imaginary threats like Marxo-facists. It’s them, not us.

America has gone through these convulsions before; nativism, Jim Crow, and McCarthyism. It always ends badly. Lunatics always fail in the end. All we can do is wait for them to fail and be ready to clean up the mess.

The English Minister Frederick William Robertson said: “There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.” The New Republicans have hit the trifecta and fail to see that they are the real threat. They deserve no mercy.

A clear-eyed Canadian is better at describing us and our future than most Americans: “For most of the past century, America was powerful not simply thanks to its economic and military heft, but because American culture and American principles and American commitment to the rules-based international order attracted friends and allies. But the bullying and gangsterism of “America First” will reverse America’s polarity. As the United States once attracted, so it will now repel — and those who for so long sought to draw closer to the United States will now pull away. New trading relationships will be crafted. New alliances forged. And America will be diminished.

“This is what belligerent tyrannies — from Thucydides’ Athens to Napoleon’s France to Hitler’s Germany — have never understood: No empire can have enough hard power to bring everyone to heel, and when you try, you start the clock on your own decline. Donald Trump has only been back in the White House for less than a month but the worldwide reactions are already underway. Whatever America’s technological and economic future may hold, the long-term geopolitical decline of the United States is accelerating rapidly.” – Dan Gardner

We true patriots will be there, after the fall, to clean up the mess.

Tom Meara is a Jamestown resident.