Colby Itkowitz writing in The Washington Post, outlines how Republicans in swing districts are freaking out.

At least nine Republican congressional candidates have scrubbed or amended references to Trump or abortion from their online profiles in recent months, distancing themselves from divisive subjects that some GOP strategists say are two of the biggest liabilities for the party ahead of the post-Labor Day sprint to Election Day.

The Dobbs decision has clearly energized Democratic voters to the point where they have closed the enthusiasm gap with Republicans,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, referencing the Supreme Court ruling that ended the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. Asked whether it hurts the GOP to have Trump back in the news, Ayres replied, “The best case for Republican candidates in the midterms is making the upcoming election a referendum on the Biden administration.”

The Dobbs ruling has motivated many people. Republicans have no idea what to do.

It is also possible the constant stream of “Donald Trump sold our national secrets” in the news is hurting the GOP as well, but who knows?

Mikhail Gorbachev, whose efforts to reform the Soviet Union only hastened its political collapse, is dead at 91.

At least he tried.

Legal Eagle Devin Stone explains in language that everyone can understand how much trouble Donald Trump is in and what his lawyers are doing wrong.

I have no idea where this all going to end up. I’d like to speculate and say an indictment is in the future, but until it actually happens, I won’t believe it.

Mike Rothschild, writing for Lithub, has a deep dive into conspiracy theories and the creation of QAnon.

In the post-Trump world, the QAnon movement split along two parallel tracks. Sometimes they happened to intersect, but many other times they went their own way. Most believers went down one, and a few went down the other. But both are critical to understanding why this movement persisted long after any hope of The Storm’s arrival had passed.

One track was a mainstreaming of Q’s core tenets to the point where the basics of QAnon—the drops, the obscure comms”—were no longer necessary, or even desirable. Q was no longer the cool, secret club that you had to speak the jargon to have a chance of getting into. It was just conservatism now. The tenuous coalition of MAGA-devoted Q believers and more progressive pandemic truthers that lurched out of Facebook in 2020 had become one unified front in 2021. In countless school board meetings, city council sessions, protests, health freedom conferences, and segments on major right-wing media, the same story was being told, and it was a story that even the most casual Q believer would have no problem embracing.

The other track was much farther on the fringe than even most Trumpists were willing to travel. This was where Michael Protzman and his devoted cultists in Negative48 rode, along with other, even more outwardly racist and ant-Semitic new Q promoters. On this track, Q drops were still gospel and the comms still were being decoded for all their secrets. And there were a lot of secrets. Trump and JFK Jr. spoke in number codes with Prince and Elvis, quantum medical beds and NESARA would deliver permanent health and prosperity to all, and Trump was still actually the president of a devolved military government. Fewer people were in this part of Q’s big tent, but they got a lot of baffled media attention for their bizarre antics—gematria cultists waiting for JFK and drinking industrial bleach out of a communal bowl to fight COVID will get clicks.

You may not want to, but you should read the whole thing.

Charles M. Blow, writing an opinion piece in The New York Times, has an interesting premise: Republicans are a problem. He starts by lamenting Liz Cheney’s primary defeat because she would not bow down to “The Big Lie.”

However, her loss does crystallize something for us that many had already known: that the bar to clear in the modern Republican Party isn’t being sufficiently conservative but rather being sufficiently obedient to Donald Trump and his quest to deny and destroy democracy.

We must stop thinking it hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party itself is now a threat to our democracy. I understand the queasiness about labeling many of our fellow Americans in that way. I understand that it sounds extreme and overreaching.

But how else are we to describe what we are seeing?

We have to stop saying that all these people are duped and led astray, that they are somehow under the spell of Trump and programmed by Fox News.

Propaganda and disinformation are real and insidious, but I believe that to a large degree, Republicans’ radicalization is willful.

Republicans have searched for multiple election cycles for the right vehicle and packaging for their white nationalism, religious nationalism, nativism, craven capitalism and sexism.

There was a time when they believed that it would need to be packaged in politeness — compassionate conservatism — and the party would eventually recommend a more moderate approach intended to branch out and broaden its appeal — in its autopsy after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss.

But Trump offered them an alternative, and they took it: Instead of running away from their bigotries, intolerances and oppression, they would run headlong into them. They would unapologetically embrace them.

This, to many Republicans, felt good. They no longer needed to hide. They could live their truths, no matter how reprehensible. They could come out of the closet, wrapped in their cruelty.

But the only way to make this strategy work and viable, since neither party dominates American life, was to back a strategy of minority rule and to disavow democracy.

I’m so happy this man concluded that Republicans don’t want democracy as if this is some new-fangled thing he just figured out.

Republicans want fascism. And nothing will change their minds. Rape allegations, fraud, tax evasion, lying, stealing confidential information, and general mob mentality, are always spun that Republicans are right and everyone else is wrong.

It’s a cult.

Liz Cheney refused to drink the spiked Kool-aid and paid the political price for being right in her convictions (this one time).