The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

Our neighborhood troll’s “truly amazing” rejoinder to the previous week’s editorial reads like a MAGA rally speech, declaiming election fraud (disproved in every swing state), deriding the “false narrative” of climate change (on the way to making the Southwest uninhabitable) and declaring the 1.02 million fatalities caused by Covid to be part of some ”false narrative,” as well.

Calling the Capitol riot of January 6th an insurrection, is not, a “false narrative.” That ongoing Congressional investigation is revealing it to have been an attempted anti-government coup, incited by the defeated former President, abetted by Republican legislators, and fueled by the rage he ignited with the whopper of all “false narratives,” his “Big Lie,” about massive voting fraud, and an imaginary “stolen” election. All conspicuously unmentioned in our troll’s long list of “false narratives.”

I understood that editorial to be a cautionary tale about the strategies used by autocrats like Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, who hollowed out the core of Hungarian democracy in less than a decade and filled the void with his Fascist Autocracy. Please understand. That can, and in fact is, happening to American democracy today. The MAGA political playbook, to divide and pit Americans against each other, is a mirror image of the political subterfuge Mr. Orban used to neuter Hungarian democracy, by replacing state election officials with Party loyalists, packing federal courts with sympathetic judges, conducting free but unfair elections after egregious gerrymandering, stoking white Christian nationalist’s fear and hatred of dark skinned immigrants, and fomenting conservative’s rage against everyone else’s non-traditional lifestyles.

The GOP, like Mr. Orban, then transmutes that rage into targeted legislation that will gradually transform this nation into an illiberal autocracy, thinly veiled in the fabric of what was once a liberal democracy.

Want to know what the Republican Party’s most influential figures are trying to achieve? What, exactly, they have in mind when they talk about an America finally made great again? Then take a close look into the death of democracy in Hungary. You’ll be unpleasantly amazed.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island