The series "The Outer Limits" was never as popular as "The Twilight Zone" but I still rarely missed an episode of either of them when I was a kid. Both could have been used in the title for this blog. I went with The Outer Limits because I found an image I liked.
No extremist has beliefs too far removed from reality or too fascist to be embraced by the Republican Party as long as its adherents can be counted on to vote for their candidates.
The GOP welcome mat has been rolled out for adherents of QAnon, which is based on the premises that "an international cabal of Satanic pedophiles extract and consume a mysterious substance found in the bodies of trafficked children. They think well-connected devil-worshippers also control the United Nations, the global economy, and even the Oscars" (Salon).
GOP members of Congress have refused to roundly and soundly condemned the NAZISM espoused by the likes of Ye and Fuentes. "Oh sure it's bad but - wink, wink - it's not really all that bad."
Between these two we have all the Republican politicians who have embraced the Big Lie. If they believe it they are delusional, gullible, and/or stupid as these three are not mutually exclusive, or they are craven, power hungry, and/or unethical as these three aren't mutually exclusive either.
The Republicans who are savvy enough to understand the inevitable demographic shifts in the United States realize this is their last chance to turn the country into a white supremacist fascist autocracy at the ballot box.
Their solution to this has been, and continues to be, to try to destroy fair elections.
Another way to look at the Republican Party as it is today is to compare it to the Democratic Party and consider which is the "big tent" party which embraces true democratic principles. Consider:
Wikipedia defines big tent party as a term used in reference to a political party's policy of permitting or encouraging a broad spectrum of views among its members. This is in contrast to other kinds of parties, which defend a determined ideology, seek voters who adhere to that ideology, and attempt to convince people towards it.
This is how they describe how the term has been used in the United States. Consider especially the part which I highlighted below:
The Democratic Party, during the New Deal coalition, which was formed to support President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies from 1930s to the 1960s, was a "big-tent" party. The coalition brought together labor unions, working-class voters, farm organizations, liberals, Southern Democrats, African Americans, urban voters, and immigrants.
The Blue Dog Coalition is a big-tent caucus of centrist and conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives, some of whom are socially conservative and fiscally and economically progressive or vice versa. For a brief period after the 2006 and the 2008 elections, when Democrats held a majority in the House, the Coalition wielded increased influence over the party, but its power declined again after most of its members were defeated or retired in the 2010 elections. Its Republican counterpart is the Republican Main Street Partnership.
To counter the New Deal coalition, the Republican Party was for much of its history a "big tent" party that encompassed a wide range of right-wing and center-right causes, including a wide range of politicians who were fiscally conservative and socially moderate or liberal and vice versa. During the 1970s and the 1980s, the Republicans attracted support from wealthy suburban voters in the South and Midwest, Northeastern moderates, Western libertarians, and rural conservatives across the country. From 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five out of six presidential elections, with the only exception being a narrow loss to the Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976. The culture wars of the 1990s and the growing influence of the Christian right within the party have prompted the socially moderate and liberal sections of the Republican base, particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest, to begin slowly leaving the party in favor of moderate Democrats or independents.
What began in the 1990's as a slope which became more and more slippery as time passed became a precipice with the election of Donald Trump and more and more extremist Republicans. The moderate Republicans who remained in Congress now find themselves at the mercy of the extremists for their political survival.
The party became toxic to legislators like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who maintained their ethical compass.
Many if not most of the episodes of "The Outer Limits" and "The Twilight Zone" were morality tales which ended with a lesson. Two classic Twilight Zone episodes come to mind. One is "The Obsolete Man" with Burgess Meredith as the librarian who survives the end of the word but realizes he still have his books to read, and then steps on an breaks his glasses. The other is "People Are Alike All Over" where an astronaut lands on Mars and is greeted by friendly seeming aliens and ends up in a closed room. Then the wall on one side goes up and he sees he's in a cage in a zoo being gawked at by a crowd of Martians looking at an Earth creature. The last lines are:
Specie [sic] of animal brought back alive. Interesting similarity in physical characteristics to human beings in head, trunk, arms, legs, hands, feet. Very tiny undeveloped brain. Comes from primitive planet named Earth. Calls himself Samuel Conrad. And he will remain here in his cage with the running water and the electricity and the central heat as long as he lives. Samuel Conrad has found The Twilight Zone.
Among these 10 episodes of "The Outer Limits" you will also find many which were morality tales, for example "The Galaxy Being" which warns about man's hubris.
