It is a time of magical thinking. A time of believing in magic. A time where magic will happen to bad ideas, really bad ideas, and turn them into enchanting and mysteriously wonderful ideas that benefit the people who believe in them. 

   Yes, the New Conservative Neanderthal Party, purveyors of voodoo economic, social and environmental ideas for many decades, are now rolling out a new method of fleecing the uninformed. Just believe in magic. Yes, believe with us and help us get elected and we’ll perform magic and make everything wonderful even as your wages stagnate, your health care is dismantled, public education is forgotten and we screw the environment for generations to come. 

   Believe in magic. 
We don’t fabricate that our bad ideas like climate denial are wrong. We just believe that by doing nothing at all to reduce pollution the earth will cleanse itself, the air will cleanse itself, the sickness caused by nearly two centuries of the Industrial Revolution will simply go away. It’s magic. 

   We don’t fabricate that our bad ideas like tax cuts for the rich and corporations are wrong. We just believe that by giving it all away, by reducing tax rates to historic and unsustainable lows for the rich and corporations, money will simply flow out of nowhere and into our society to pay for the common good. The economists who predicted the looming tax cut disaster just didn’t believe in magic. That’s the problem. The notion that tax cuts don’t and never will pay for themselves isn’t about economics, it’s about magic. If you believe magic will happen, it will happen in our book. Magic is letting go of stuff like factual economic data. Who needs factual economic data when you have magic on your side? 

   And yes, it’s magic to believe that fear-mongering and blaming immigrants for our problems isn’t racist. That it’s a magic world where a con man with a flap of orange hair and a pair of shiny shoes and a fraudulent business past isn’t a race-baiter. That it’s a magic world where a New Conservative Neanderthal Party candidate for U.S. Senate in Minnesota can compare former First Lady Michelle Obama to a chimp and not be racist. 

   Yes, it’s magic that those Karin Housley Facebook posts from 2009 are “fake news” according to the candidate in 2018. Racist? No, magic. Facebook posts don’t disappear from your past. Not when it is assessing the fact that America voted in the first black president and it stirred a response in her. It’s just magic that it’s not racist. 

   “I do miss Nancy Reagan. Ronald even more,” Housley wrote. “Speaking of Bedtime for Bonzo, I think even that chimp stood up straighter than Michelle. Uh-oh, someone is going to make a comment.” 
   Yes, inherent inner thoughts transformed into words in a Facebook post, also including comments about Barack and Hillary (“a porker in a royal blue pantsuit”), aren’t racist and sexist, they are magically transformed into some archival nonsense ginned up from the radical left “using an out-of-context Facebook post from ten years ago to manufacture outrage,” according to the Housley campaign. 

   It’s not magic that New Conservative Neanderthal Party candidates have been using slurs and misinformation for quite some time now, finding an overwhelmingly white base that seems to agree that sexism and racism are nothing to be ashamed of, given all the current threats from immigrant caravans full of bad people and middle-easterners headed our way. Sexism and racism can be paraded in full view as long as Democratic mobs roam the landscape, with plenty of socialists mixed in there for good measure. 

    It’s not magic that citizens of sexist and racist bent have to protect themselves from such unruly mobs, bent on the destruction of the country. No magic there. 
In the meantime, it’s magic to think that right to work laws actually protect and give freedom to workers to choose a downward path. It’s magic to ignore the fact that only six percent of non-governmental employees are protected by union benefits— push it to nine or ten percent of overall workers—which means ninety percent of the U.S. workforce are on their own in the eyes of the corporations and the One Percent. Yes, it’s magic to actually believe such a threat posed by the unions has threatened the economy enough for the New Conservative Neanderthal Party to enact (No) Right to Work laws in many states fearful of worker uprisings. It’s magic not to notice that those states have lower wage levels and few worker protections. 

   It’s not magic that fear and anger have been stoked enough to shove reason and factual information out of the picture for many Americans. It’s not magic the free press has been labeled an enemy of the people. It’s not magic that years of right wing propaganda has produced a people willing to accept a president who lies more often than he tells the truth, a president who spews warnings of Democratic mobs out to open up the borders and hand illegal immigrants Rolls-Royce’s and turn states like Florida into the next Venezuela as he blabbed away in a recent campaign rally in Nevada. 

   It’s not magic. 
It’s a well-worn script of a form of white American fascism where a minority of the population that believes in magic rules a majority of the people. It’s been happening right before our eyes for decades. The difference today is that we have Bozo the Clown for president and a segment of the population willing to submit to sexism, racism and widespread social dementia more than we have seen in any of our lifetimes.