After the Freedom Truck, we spotted, visited, and avoided a Budweiser Truck ($12 Michelob, no thank you), and then moved on to a tent with a religious theme. A “Great Awakening” booth had books and DVDs on the essential fakeness of the COVID pandemic, the country’s Christian founding, and more. My friend and I stopped to speak with an attendant at the stall; she immediately began to try to convert us. She asked if we really knew what would happen once we died; I replied that I didn’t think anyone knew the answer to that question. Her eyes now burning, she told us that she knew, asked our names, and started to pray for us. Once she asked if we could repeat after her that Jesus Christ was our lord and savior, we walked away.
The whole thing veered from strangely funny to unsettling to deadening. Another booth was for AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens. It’s the conservative AARP; among other things, they support raising the minimum eligibility age for Social Security. At the fair, they were giving out red grip pads with “THE LEFT NEEDS TO GET A GRIP” emblazoned on the front.
Outside of the big tents are rows of smaller ones that line the edges of the fair. One activity involves taking a mini-passport and going to the booth for each of the states and territories represented at the fair. Connecticut Public Media reportedthat Freedom 250 was demanding that the states fund and staff the exhibits.
Because several states declined to participate, the result was bizarre. The booths for Vermont and Hawaii were decorated with two chairs, a stamp, and a backdrop that has the name of the state. New Jersey declined to send a delegation. Instead, an organizer told me, Freedom250 reached out to conservative Cape May county. That is how Cape May came to represent the entire state of New Jersey at the fair.
. . . We went into another booth that exhibited the work of an artist who made stylized images of American cities and monuments. It wasn’t immediately obvious, but he also seemed to be a Christian nationalist. In the style of a pre-printing press illuminated manuscript, he included a fabricated quote from George Washington: “Do not let anyone claim tribute of american patriotism if they even attempt to remove religion from politics,” it read.
Federal departments had booths, as well. The Justice Department’s was entirely devoted to the Bureau of Prisons, with at least three recruitment tables to become prison guards. The Department of State had giant mockups of the new, limited-edition Trump passport.
One guest gravely asked whether this would apply to everyone seeking a new passport; another, younger man, eagerly asked how to get one.
By that point, we had had enough. A few days later, the friend I went with texted me, describing a “psychic shock” he got from the fair.
“Things are worse than I thought,” he wrote.
Same energy.