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It Was All a Mirage

It Was All a Mirage

Did Modern Republicans lie to themselves? Or were their principles built on little but a foundation of sand with no true intellectual or learned background behind them?

Brian Griffiths's avatar
Brian Griffiths
Aug 13, 2025
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I want to highlight something that I read from David Graham in The Atlantic:

For years, prominent voices on the right argued that Democrats were enacting a police state. They labeled everything—a report on homegrown extremism, IRS investigations into nonprofits—a sign of impending authoritarianism. Measures taken by state governments to combat the spread of COVID? Tyranny. An FBI search of Mar-a-Lago? The weaponization of law enforcement.

Now that a president is actually sending federal troops and officers out into the streets of the nation’s cities, however, the right is in lockstep behind him.

For over twenty years, I have been discussing these sorts of issues from the right. I have been one of the voices talking about the creeping police state, creeping totalitarianism, state Orwellianism, and overall government overreach. For most of that time, voices on the right agreed with me even if we were not in lockstep over other issues.

So why am I one of the few on the right still concerned about it today?

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