Erick Erickson, who it turns out did not, as I said earlier, found RedState, but was an early and prominent editor at same, discusses the consequences of being a conservative Trump critic:
Over the course of the campaign in 2016, we had people show up at our home to threaten us. We had armed guards at the house for a while. My kids were harassed in the store. More than once they came home in tears because other kids were telling them I was going to get killed or that their parents hated me. I got yelled at in the Atlanta airport while peeing by some angry Trump supporter.
We got harassed in church and stopped going for a while. A woman in a Bible study told my wife she wanted to slap me across the face My seminary got calls from people demanding I be expelled. And on and on it went. When I nearly died in 2016, I got notes from people upset I was still alive. When I announced my wife had an incurable form of lung cancer, some cheered. All were directed from supposedly evangelical Trump supporters convinced God was punishing me for not siding with his chosen one. For a while, given the nature of what we were getting in the mail, my kids had to stop checking it.
When my Fox contract came up, not only did I not want to stay, but Fox made clear they had no use for me. I had jumped from CNN to Fox with a number of promises made, none of which were kept and then wound up hardly ever getting on. After saying I could not support Trump, the purpose of my Fox contract became more about keeping me off anyone’s television screen than putting me on. When I did go on in 2016, I frequently found myself getting called a traitor by some Trump humping celebrity. After the election, that stopped, but most of my appearances did too except from a few kind producers with whom I had become friends.
Candidate Hillary Clinton was heavily criticized for using the word deplorables during the campaign, and while it was a clumsy mistake on her part, it appears that it wasn’t far off in terms of accuracy. Erickson failed the purity test and was run out of his old haunts by those more … no word really comes to mind but faithful … than himself.
Look for things to get worse before they get better in the so-called conservative movement. Erickson has been left behind and will continue to flail about in the wake of Trump. I’m wondering what happens to the Ericksons of the conservative movement when Trump’s circus collapses and his supporters are left with only bitter tears.
