The Republican party (and RWers in general) has always had its factions. The violent antigovernment faction has always been there, inspired by old western movies and mythos around the rugged individual trying to make it on his own, and being stymied by government forces. That faction has been growing and merging with others (like the anti-science factions and the evangelical factions). It's now a party dominated by sufferers of Dunning-Kruger (or those taking advantage of them) who use QAnon and random YouTubers on the internet as their main source of information.

More than that, they've become a blood cult, living in a doomsday scenario within their own heads where they are the saviors of a white population being driven out of the majority by immigrants and crime. It's their raison d'être for many of their horrific fascist leanings. Let's look at a few of these.

Gun Control/Mass Shootings: We've long known that the NRA controls the messaging both inside and outside of Congress, re: the right to own ridiculous amounts of firearms. The gun nuts and ammosexuals and lawmakers have all swallowed the nonsense hook, line, and sinker. The notion that guns make us safer - like the Mutually Assured Destruction model for nuclear weapons - is based in insanity. We have had an absurd amount of mass shootings the last several years.

To paraphrase the hammer aphorism, when your only tool is a gun, every problem has a target on its back. Considering that after Sandy Hook, after Stoneman Douglas, after Uvalde, with the responses ranging from "more guns in the school" to "it's the price of freedom", it's pretty clear they are living in a fantasy world where blood and corpses mutilated by high-powered rifles are acceptable, so long as they get their way.

Abortion: Evangelicals have long been opposed to a woman's right to make reproductive healthcare decisions in private with her doctor. There have been a few extremists who have gone farther down that road and murdered doctors who provided abortions. Still, despite a majority of Americans believing that a woman's right to choose is important, the overturning of Roe -v- Wade has resulted in some states passing draconian anti-abortion laws. Most of these bills have a small carve-out for those cases where the life of the mother is at stake, but naturally there are those who even want to push that envelope.

When is the life of the mother in danger? I can speak from personal experience from when a previous partner had an ectopic pregnancy. This is when the fertilized egg attaches to the fallopian tube instead of in the uterus. It will grow there like a cancer until it kills the host. Apparently these freaks writing these bills think the only time a fetus should "die" is when it kills the mother too.

That doesn't even take into account what used to happen before abortion was made legal. Women would bleed to death from botched abortions (either by "back alley doctors", or their own hands). Republicans are apparently okay with this.

Covid: During the reign of TFG, Covid was first not a problem, then a hoax, then something that could be prevented or treated using UV light, bleach, or horse de-wormer. After TFG lost re-election, a vaccine was released, and recommendations to wear masks were already ubiquitous. More so was the RW pushback against both. Anti-vaxxers pulled out their saved links to dubious websites pushing pseudoscience, and wearing a mask became political. They claimed that wearing one infringed on their individual rights, despite proof that it would help stop the spread of the disease.

It was their insolence and intractableness that led to over a million deaths, often these same people who refused the vaccines and masks which science declared would protect them. To some extent, we can claim that they Darwin Awarded themselves out of the gene pool for the betterment of mankind, but plenty of innocent lives were lost along the way too.

There are surely other topics that illustrate the Republican and RW embrace of death and mayhem, and they likely all follow the same trajectory. Given the choice between a healthy society and individual rights swimming in a pool of blood, they will always choose the latter. Unfortunately, I don't see a way out of this, as the internet becomes increasingly infiltrated with propaganda. The biggest question is: Why is it just the United States? If we can figure this one out, we might have a chance.