Former congressman Denver Riggleman
Opposed QAnon, got voted out of office
It was Oct. 2, on the floor of the House of Representatives, and he rose as one of only two Republicans in the chamber to speak in favor of a resolution denouncing QAnon. Mr. Riggleman, a freshman congressman from Virginia, had his own personal experiences with fringe ideas, both as a target of them and as a curious observer of the power they hold over true believers. He saw a dangerous movement becoming more intertwined with his party, and worried that it was only growing thanks to words of encouragement from President Donald J. Trump.
“Will we stand up and condemn a dangerous, dehumanizing and convoluted conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. has assessed with high confidence is very likely to motivate some domestic extremists?” asked Mr. Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer. “We should not be playing with fire.”
Mr. Riggleman is a living example of the political price of falling out of lock step with the hard right. He lost a G.O.P. primary race last June after he officiated at the wedding of a gay couple. And once he started calling out QAnon, whose followers believe that a satanic network of child molesters runs the Democratic Party, he received death threats and was attacked as a traitor, including by members of his own family.
The undoing of Mr. Riggleman — and now his unlikely crusade — is revealing about a dimension of conservative politics today. The fight against radicalism within the G.O.P. is a deeply lonely one, waged mostly by Republicans like him who are no longer in office, and by the small handful of elected officials who have decided that they are willing to speak up even if it means that they, too, could be headed for an early retirement.
“I’ve been telling people: ‘You don’t understand. This is getting worse, not better,’” Mr. Riggleman said, sitting on a stool at his family bar one recent afternoon. “People are angry. And they’re angry at the truth tellers.”
Now he says it “gives me shivers” to be called a Republican. He hopes to show that there is still a way to beat back the lies and false beliefs that have spread from the fringe to the mainstream. It is a heavy lift, and one that depends on overcoming two strong impulses: politicians’ fear of losing elections and people’s reluctance to accept that they were taken in by a lie.
Mr. Riggleman summarized his conversations with the 70 percent of House Republicans he said were privately appalled at the former president’s conduct but wouldn’t dare speak out.
“‘We couldn’t do that in our district. We would lose,’” he said. “That’s it. It’s that simple.”
There you have it, the rank and file are angry at truth tellers. And FGOP leaders, e.g., Cruz, Greene, McConnell, are either also angry at truth and reason, or too afraid to stand up for it. For the ones in fear, re-election is more important that standing up for facts, truths and reason. For the rest, they are self-interested or truly deceived.
Toxic echo chambers like Fox News, Breitbart and dozens of other slander, hate and lies factories keep the delusion pressure on. Mainstream republicans stay united in their irrational fear, anger and distrust. Fascist echo chambers are where the most comforting lies, slanders, emotional manipulation and crackpot motivated reasoning are to be found. Maybe that's mostly why some or most on the radical right now refuse to even hear truth tellers any more. Inconvenient facts and truths are too discomforting to be tolerated.
This truth bears repeating: Sometimes it takes moral courage to face and accept inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning.
That kind of courage is in critically short supply in the FGOP.
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