Mayor George Fuller is troubled by what he sees and hears in this conservative Dallas suburb.
Battles with liberals are enduring and predictable, but what worries Fuller is the deepening rancor between Republican moderates and right-wing extremists over what America should look, sound and feel like. Inspired by nativist fervor and fed by Donald Trump’s rage, the Republican Party here encompasses anti-vaccination protesters, QAnon conspiracy theorists and those whose mistrust of President Biden only hardens as he reverses his predecessor’s policies.
“It’s just not the party I recognize anymore,” said Fuller, 58, a moderate Republican whose Trump-supporter siblings no longer speak to him. “We are at a place where families are torn apart by political ideologies that are so skewed and out of whack.”
What is evident across this county — where in the 1970s the oilmen-rancher TV drama “Dallas” was filmed — is that extremism has gone mainstream in certain pockets of America. Hard-line sentiments that would have been whispered only years ago are now spoken unabashed. That worries Alonzo Tutson, a Black Democrat, who said right-wing radicals here are everyday people who say “howdy to you at soccer practice. They just blend right in.”
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