On Nebraska – Ted Genoways in NYT:

‘Mr. Herbster sees conspiracies everywhere — conspiracies to destroy him, conspiracies to undermine Mr. Trump, conspiracies to unravel the very fabric of the nation. “This country is in a war within the borders of the country,” he told the crowd at the Starlite Event Center in Wahoo on Thursday, a few days before Tuesday’s primary election. Over more than an hour, Mr. Herbster, dressed in his trademark cowboy hat and vest, unspooled a complex and meandering tale of the threat to America, interspersed with labyrinthine personal yarns and long diatribes about taxes.
It was convoluted but (as best I can understand) goes something like this: The coronavirus was manufactured in a lab in China and released into the United States in early 2020 by “illegals” from Mexico who were also smuggling Chinese-made fentanyl across the border. One of the smugglers, he said, had enough fentanyl in a single backpack to kill the entire population of Nebraska and South Dakota. The goal of this two-pronged attack, he explained, was to create a panic, stoked by Facebook and $400 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, to justify allowing voting by mail. Then, through unspecified means, the Chinese government used those mail-in ballots to steal the election — though Mr. Herbster hates that word. “They didn’t ‘steal’ it,” he told the crowd, his finger raised. “Do not use that terminology. They did not ‘steal’ it. They rigged it.”’

Read the article here.

Mr. Herbster is probably the next governor of Nebraska.
Okay, there are less than two million people in Nebraska, so it’s slightly absurd that Nebraska has as many senators as California, but alas, that’s America.

We can blame Trump – and Ted Genoways rightly states, that whoever will be the next governover of Nebraska, Trump already won – but the question remains why this mixture of mythologic nostalgia, surrealistic theories and self-hatred that became hatred of the people that offer you not enough respect, i.e. the elite, is so potent?

The difference between Putin and large parts of the Republican Party are the language, the type of Christianity and the vodka. And of course, the Republican party has no interest in invading Ukraine.