The Republican Party Has Nothing to Offer Anymore

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Jessica Wildfire
Sep 26, 2020

I used to be a Republican. I know.

Republicans don’t stand for anything now.

I used to be one. Like a lot of millennials, I grew up in a neoliberal household that filled our heads with stories about welfare queens and illegal immigrants. Our parents listened to Rush Limbaugh. They complained about taxes and crime during dinner. They schooled us in trickle down economics and deregulation. They excused our racist grandparents. “They’re just old. There’s no point in arguing with them.” They told us that evolution was hard science, but climate change was a hoax.

They watched “Dallas” every Friday night.

Donald Trump was the cool rich guy who showed up in commercials, and sometimes our favorite TV shows like “The Nanny.”

How bad could the guy be?

We were taught to be apathetic.
Growing up old school Republican, nothing really affected you.

We didn’t go to church or read the Bible, but we also didn’t care too much what evangelicals did. They could watch all the Pat Robertson they wanted, as long as they left us alone.

We called this religious freedom.

We didn’t care much about the pro-life movement. We were confident that no matter what happened, our membership in the middle class would continue to guarantee our access to things like birth control and healthcare. We were politically apathetic, and called it compromise. It was a selfish way to live, only caring about your own rights and happiness.

Our first time at the polls, we voted for George W. Bush.

We regretted it almost immediately.

Republicans don’t stand for the economy.
College didn’t make us more liberal or progressive. Republicans did that, by wrecking the economy.

They’ve done it three times now:

2002: The dot-com crash.
2008: The housing market crash.
2020: The Second Great Depression.

Our current president turned a recession into a cataclysm. He encouraged open revolt against lockdowns, blunting their effectiveness. For months he railed against masks, the one thing that would’ve allowed us to return to our jobs. Now he’s rushing to a vaccine, a move that’s guaranteed to waste millions of dollars in resources.

Donald Trump claims to love the economy, but he doesn’t know the first thing about economics. He didn’t make any of his own money. If anything, he squandered the fortune his father left him.

When republicans say “economy,” they mean greed.

They don’t stand for hard work.
Republicans claim that if you work hard enough, you can get anywhere. But they don’t really believe that.

We spent our adolescence getting good grades and working part-time jobs to pay for our own clothes and phones. In our 20s, we moved out and tried to support ourselves.

We got real jobs and apartments.

Republicans thanked us by deregulating every industry to please rich campaign donors and their lobbyists.

They let a housing bubble destroy the economy. We lost our dream jobs. Millennials either endured the shame of moving back with our parents, or we spent our 20s stitching together gigs and part-time work to get by. We pursued endless side hustles. We worked nights and weekends. We didn’t thrive. We didn’t build wealth. We didn’t start families.

We watched in disbelief as politicians gave enormous bailouts to the very same CEOs who stole our livelihoods, then they hopped on the news to shame us for our social media habits.

They don’t stand for family values.
Republicans are the first to claim family values. But they have just as many affairs and divorces. Our current president has bragged on radio shows about how little time he spends with his own kids.

He makes jokes about banging his daughter.

He takes children away from their parents and locks them in cages, justifying it by saying, “They’re not American.”

He lets toddlers die, because they’re not white.

It’s not just the president.
Red states have higher rates for spousal abuse and domestic homicide. They lead in teen pregnancy and poverty. They ignore pleas for mandatory maternity leave. They’re fine letting parents spend a third of their income on daycare, so they can both hold down jobs.

Most Republicans believe women shouldn’t have to work while raising kids. They belong at home. But they’ve created an economy where it’s impossible to raise a family on a single income.

Under Republicans, families are miserable.

Most of them just don’t know it.

They don’t stand for equality.
Racial inequality helps Republicans cover up the sad state of the economy. Instead of taking responsibility, they blame economic problems on things like immigration and affirmative action.

They tell white people they’re struggling because of government handouts, high taxes, and over-regulation.

They know they’re lying.

They use race as a driving wedge between voting blocks, in order to stay in office. They’re more than willing to let black people die. If anything, it ensures race as a constant point of tension.

They pander to white supremacists for their vote. They tell mobs of angry white people, “You’re not racist. You’re not intolerant. You’re just misunderstood, and taken advantage of.”

Everything they do affirms racist attitudes.

They promote women to positions of power, but only when those women promise to guard conservative values. To be a woman in the Republican party, you have to trade your soul for a political career. You spend the rest of your life tearing down women’s rights.

They stand for corruption.
No other president has tried harder to use the office for his personal benefit. Republicans in general will do anything for money. They’ll say anything for donations and support.

They’ll shake hands with anyone.

It’s easy to wield power when that’s all you care about.

They stand for hate.
For the last decade, Republicans have only stayed in power by encouraging their core voters to hate everyone else.

They tell their base that the real problem is black people. It’s same-sex marriage. It’s immigration. It’s abortion. It’s terrorism. It’s transgender bathrooms. It’s feminists. It’s scientists.

It’s snowflakes and safe spaces.

It’s always anything and everyone but their own leadership.

Republicans have nothing to offer anymore.
A Republican isn’t going to solve your problems.

Not anymore.

They’ll give you plenty of excuses. They’ll give you something or someone else to blame your problems on. Republicans are great at promising to oppress other groups. It’s the only card they have left.

They play the hate card.

They’ll take away everyone else’s rights to make you feel safe and superior. They’ll let you march around with a gun.

None of this will make your life any better.

If we keep going in this direction, pretty soon there won’t be anyone left to persecute. That’s when Trump supporters will finally have no other choice. They’ll have to turn on each other.

Homogeneity isn’t harmony.
Trump supporters think their dreams will come true when everyone finally looks and thinks the exact same way. They want everyone to wear the same red baseball cap and worship the same god.

History shows us what happens in homogeneous societies. They don’t achieve peace or harmony. They get restless.

They start looking for reasons to attack each other. They form denominations. They find witches to drown and burn. They find demons to beat out of people, and heretics to execute.

The drive for homogeneity is a self-destructive one. In the long run, societies are better off when they embrace difference.

Hate always turns on itself.
Imagine a world where the Trump administration fulfills its goals.

They attain herd immunity, at the cost of a million lives. They get rid of all the immigrants and Muslims. Everyone is heterosexual, or at least pretends. Everyone salutes the flag. Nobody can get an abortion. Every school has a giant plaque showcasing the ten commandments, even though the president doesn’t follow half of them — and everyone knows it.

That’s when things are going to get truly ugly for Trump’s supporters. They’ll look around and see the truth. It didn’t make their lives magically better. You think they’re angry now. Just wait.

When there’s nobody left to explain why they don’t all have mansions and yachts, they’ll start accusing each other.

Let’s end the nightmare.
Republican vs. Democrat isn’t working anymore.

It never really did.

Anyone who still believes in things like hard work and fairness has jumped ship from the party they grew up with. They’re endorsing a Democrat for the first time ever. This election, Trump and his enablers are going to have a lot more to worry about than swing voters.

We know we need to end Trump’s nightmare administration before hate destroys everything. If we wait for Trump supporters to finally wake up on their own, or if we pander to them, lots and lots of people are going to die, and not just the ones the president likes to make fun of in tweets. It’s going to be someone we care about.

We’ll know we could’ve stopped it.

https://medium.com/discourse/the-republican-party-has-nothing-to-offer-anymore-9d54fcefeb3f

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Well, they’re flat-out embracing fascism right in one of their mainstream publications, The Federalist.  They’re basically saying that letting people have freedom isn’t working for the conservative agenda… so, they have to stop allowing people to have freedom.

Listen to one of their own:

https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/20/we-need-to-stop-calling-ourselves-conservatives/

To talk now of “family values” is to assume that there are enough Americans able and willing to marry and raise children together for something like “family values” to matter in the public discourse, much less in the halls of power. To talk of defending “religious freedom” is to misapprehend that the real risk today is widespread irreligion, which will leave so few religious Americans in the coming generations that the government and large corporations will inevitably — and easily — persecute them.

So I’m guessing they’re going to want forced marriages (which this creepy  conservative pundit does think is a great idea -- https://twitter.com/AriDrennen/status/1578419621803483138 That same guy thinks adult males should be able to date 13-year-old girls because “they’re at their most fertile”), and also put an end to “irreligion” – in other words, force people to join a religion.  And, of course, that’d be the religion conservatives decide is the one to follow, because they aren’t very tolerant of competing religions.

It's not enough for them to have their religion.  YOU have to have it, too, or they feel like they can't compete in the world.  Again, their answer is always force and violence.

While it might be necessary, as Askonas argues, to enact a serious program of technological development to build a future that supports human flourishing, it is also the case that to do so on a scale sufficient to save our country will require political power — and the willingness to use it.

So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.

They might, looking to American history for inspiration, conjure up the image of the Pilgrims — those iron-willed and audacious Christians who refused to accept the terms set by the mainstream of their time and set out to build something entirely new, to hew it out of the wilderness of the New World, even at great personal cost.

Or they might claim the mantle of revolutionaries, invoking the Founding Fathers’ view (or, at least, Thomas Jefferson’s) that periodic revolution to preserve liberty and civil society has always been and always will be necessary.

So, conservatism isn’t working – ditch it for authoritarianism.   Small government didn’t get them enough control over the public, so, ditch small government in favor of an all-powerful government.  Totalitarianism.  Dictatorship can be "justified" if you know what's best for everyone, right?

 Use the Pilgrims – religious fanatics who hung witches – as role models.  Then embrace the idea of “periodic revolution,” – in essence, killing people to enforce your will whenever other thinkers have other ideas.  Thomas Jefferson was talking about going to war with another country so we could have our own.  This guy is viewing Americans who disagree with him as another country.  And, thus, free to kill.

To be sure, there has been plenty of talk on the right lately about what should be done differently now. Some, such as Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, and Adrian Vermeule (along with a larger cohort of conservative Catholic thinkers), advocate a conservatism that is comfortable with big government and in fact sees it as necessary not only for the common good but to tame what Ahmari recently called the “private tyranny” of woke corporations empowered by unrestrained market forces.

Basically, conservatives claimed to be for “small government” (although  they never practiced it) because it gave people more freedom.  But then they figured out that if you give people freedom, they come up with ideas that displease conservatives.  So, giving people freedom was a mistake, and now conservatives should embrace a big, totalitarian government to shut down thinking they don’t like.  Which is all “woke” is.  “Woke” just means you’re aware of social inequalities.  Conservatives don’t like that.  Racism is fine... being anti-racist is not.  Bigotry's not to be questioned, just enforced.

Indeed, a willingness to embrace government power has been a topic of fruitful debate on the “New Right” in recent years, as it should be. However uncomfortable traditional “small-government” conservatives might be with Ahmari’s argument, it is more or less true.

Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips.

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

“Blunt instrument.”  Basically, a truncheon to enforce their will upon people who disagree with them.  Free thought is their enemy.  Like, gay marriage.  There’s no reason for anybody to really be against that – it’s not hurting anyone, it’s basically “mind your own business about gay folks.”  Adam and Steve being married ain't takin' one single damn thing away from you.  But  conservatives think that must be stopped, because it disagrees with their religion.  And their religion is more important than other people’s freedom to live like they want to.   Conservatives think, for some reason, they have a right to tell everyone else what to do.  Why?  “God,” I guess.  Once you think you're speaking for "God," you can justify any atrocity you feel like committing.  Because, after all, you're God by proxy.

To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.

So, government should rule over capitalism and take over businesses.  That’s fascism.  Not allowing people to divorce… that’s government rule over your life, far more than anybody on “the left” has ever done.  “Free markets” and “small government” have proven not to work in favor of their quest for power, so… those things must be disposed of.  Liberty must be disposed of.  Otherwise you’ve got people thinking for themselves – and thus disagreeing with conservatives a lot of the time – and that just can’t be.

In other contexts, wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code. It will not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime, to agree on “reasonable limits” on when unborn human life can be snuffed out with impunity. As Abraham Lincoln once said of slavery, we must become all one thing or all the other. The Dobbs decision was in a sense the end of the beginning of the pro-life cause. Now comes the real fight, in state houses across the country, to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing the unborn.

“Dramatic expansion of the criminal code,” i.e. freedom to jail or kill anyone who doesn’t agree with the Christian version of Sharia Law.  Gestapo tactics -- rule through force and fear and terrorism. Again, freedom doesn’t work for Republican goals, so… freedom’s gotta go.  It's the only way to spread Christianity!  

Conservatives had better be ready for it, and Republican politicians, if they want to stay in office, had better have an answer ready when they are asked what reasonable limits to abortion restrictions they would support. The answer is: none, for the same reason they would not support reasonable limits to restrictions on premeditated murder.


On the transgender question,

"The transgender question."  Sounds uncomfortably like "the Jewish problem," doesn't it?  To this they have a final solution, no doubt.

conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.

So, if parents choose to take their kids to a show where somebody in drag reads a storybook, they should go to prison and have their kids taken away, because exposing a kid to something outside of what conservatives want you to think is child abuse.   I could, just as easily and with far more evidence to back it up, claim that taking your kids to church is child abuse, because a lot more people have been hurt and had their lives wrecked by religion than by seeing a guy wearing a dress reading Cat In The Hat.  But I wouldn’t want to outlaw people taking their kids to church because that would infringe on individual freedom, and it’s not always harmful.  

Basically, it’s “WE’LL decide what parents should and should not teach their kids.  If what you want to teach your kids doesn’t agree with our political-religion, then we’ll arrest you.”  Mind-control at its fashy-est.

Also… who decides what’s “sexually explicit material”?   Is an anatomy textbook “sexually explicit”?  Is Catcher In The Rye “sexually explicit” because it has bad words in it?  If you can criminally prosecute people based on some arbitrary version of what’s “sexually explicit” then you can arrest anyone for anything.  That never ends.  That’s an open-ended power.

If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.
To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.

Surrrrreeeee… fascists are always willing to just drop their fascist ways once they’ve subjugated their “foes.”  They never just… y’know… find more foes.   What this guy’s espousing has no end to it.  Once they get what they want they’ll say they need to maintain that level of power to keep enforcing it… and then they’ll only encroach a little more, and a little more, and a little more, because they know they can get away with it.  What this guy’s talking about is INCREDIBLY dangerous, but he’s comfortable with it because otherwise maybe a drag queen’ll read a storybook somewhere that you don't have to go.  Jesus frickin’ Christ.

For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road.

Or, “Either we control everyone’s thinking or we should just go ahead and destroy the world, because there’s no sense in having a world in which other people get to disagree with us.”   They've lost the war of ideas and so they're just going to knock over the board and try to FORCE their shit on everyone.   That's honestly about the size of what this guy's saying.  And he seems to think he has a right to do that.

Anybody who’s still in denial that conservative Christianity hasn’t become a sick and evil thing needs to wake up and see what their own side is saying.  What they’re after is anything but “freedom.”  They get mad if you call them “the Christian Taliban,” but that’s EXACTLY what they want to be.  They’re making their plans right out in the open now, because they know their base will accept it, like good trusting Germans.

If these bastards take power -- and they probably will -- it's likely not going to be more than a few years before they start building camps.  And I wish that was alarmist.  I really don't think it is at this point.

The 14th Amendment, Section 3, Plainly States What to Do with an Attempted Coup

MICHAEL MOORE
DEC 17




There are few clauses in our Constitution, though written and amended through more than two centuries, that could not be more clear and more relevant to the threat we face today:

14TH AMENDMENT • SECTION 3

UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

"No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress who, having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress to support the Constitution, shall have [then] engaged in insurrection or rebellion or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof...”

The other day on my podcast I read aloud 121 names of members of Congress, all of them Republicans, who were reelected to the U.S. House and Senate last month. They each share two things:

1. On January 6, 2021, they all voted to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election, effectively participating in an attempt to stage a coup, overthrow the United States government, prohibit Joe Biden from entering the White House and reinstall Donald J. Trump as an unelected president of the United States; and

2. On November 8, 2022, their actions to stage this coup and commit sedition were rewarded when the voters in their mostly gerrymandered districts returned them to a new term in Congress that begins two weeks from this Tuesday — unless the other 400+ members of the House and Senate invoke the 14th Amendment and refuse to seat them.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was written to guarantee that anyone who seeks to overturn or overthrow the government — or gives aid and comfort to those who do — is never allowed to serve as an elected official in any federal, state or local office again.

Yet there has been little or no mention anywhere of the impending return of these 121 Members and Senators.

To the best of my knowledge, no broadcaster on any network, no “paper of record,” no one in Congress has stood and read into the record the names of those who intend to come to D.C. in 11 days and take an oath of office they have already egregiously violated.

Who in this next week will take the 12-and-a-half minutes necessary to look into the camera and read the names of the traitors who on January 6th voted to cement the demands of those who stormed the Capitol earlier that day — their demand that Congress not certify Joe Biden as the duly elected President and to keep Trump in the Oval Office as essentially our Dictator?

And if no politician, no party leader, no one in the media will call for the enforcement of the 14th Amendment and stop the continuation of this coup attempt by this mob of election deniers, then may I ask for a single citizen, a solitary soul, a patriot or a picker of fruit, a PTA parent or a Golden Globe nominee, a TV meteorologist or a clever dermatologist — frankly, is there anyone out there, any of you who spend your days stuck in a cubicle at AT&T in Dallas, or managing a Target out on Airport Road or a Lutheran pastor out on the American prairie or the woman who is pushing the pretzel cart down 51st St. or the Surfboard King of La Jolla or the Girl Scout leader in Rapid City, the County Commissioner down the block, the D.A. up the street, the City Clerk next door, the head librarian at the Library of Congress, the National Archivist, the FBI Director, the archbishop of Buffalo, the Vice President of the United States of America — IS THERE ANYONE who will stand in the middle of the town square, on the lawn of the Mayor’s mansion, on the corner of Hollywood and Vine — how about on any front porch anywhere, everywhere, across America and simply read aloud for all within earshot to hear the names of these 121 who will return to the scene of the crime, our Capitol Building, on Tuesday, January 3rd?

And although this mob of Trump supporters killed 5 officers and injured hundreds of others who were trying to protect the Capitol, this meant nothing to these 121 traitors (and the other 26 Senators and House members who voted with them, but are either not returning or are still in the Senate and not up for removal until 2024 or 2026). To repeat, Biden’s election had been legally certified by every State election head, Republicans and Democrats, in all 50 states. But instead of using bear spray and the pointed end of large American flag poles which were rammed into the chests of Capitol police, these elected members figured they could accomplish the same thing — the overthrow of the U.S. government — by simply taking a vote on the floor of the House that night.

To essentially “burn” the ballots of 160 million Americans who voted in a free and fair election was something that had never been attempted in the history of the country. But that’s what these Republicans tried to do the night of January 6, 2021, in the hopes of reinstalling the unelected loser (who lost by 7 million votes).

Fortunately, there were nearly 400 other Senators and House members — Democrats AND Republicans — who stopped their rebellion, their insurgency, their attempt to finish the sacking of our government, their futile but treasonous attempt to aid and abet and provide comfort to Trump and his mob.

And now 121 of them, after their acts of sedition on that night, have been reelected to another term (with two House members promoted to the Senate). They will be sworn in two days after New Year’s. They will put their hand on a Bible and, lying through their teeth (perfectly fixed and whitened, thanks to their free socialist Congressional health care), they will “swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Does this strike anyone as a bit odd? Doesn’t it seem like if you tried to overthrow the government you should no longer be allowed to be a part of it? That if you provided aid and comfort to those who ransacked Nancy Pelosi’s office and spray-painted “C**T” on her wall, or if you, as a member of Congress, stood and voted for sedition through legislative action (either to secede from the Union or to prevent an elected President from taking office), you are Constitutionally prohibited from taking your seat on January 3, 2023?

Yes, that is exactly what the 14th Amendment says, ratified by both Houses of Congress AND three-quarters of all the states in the summer of 1868.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment could not be more clear about what to do with those who seek to overthrow an election or a government. Again, here is the exact language, with its 19th century grammar and cadence:

Section 3: Disqualification from Holding Office

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Five days after the January 6th insurrection, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and 47 co-sponsors in the House presented a bill that invoked the 14th Amendment calling for the removal of the 147 Congress members who voted to overturn the 2020 election on the night of January 6th. Nothing came of it.

Three New Mexico residents filed a civil suit against Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin, the leader of the “Cowboys for Trump” who participated in the uprising of January 6th, to be removed from office. In September, a federal judge ruled that he did in fact violate the 14th Amendment and was now “barred for life” from holding any public office — civil or military — both federally or in any state.

It is my sincerest hope that Couy Griffin of New Mexico won’t be the last.

(Update: two days after my podcast episode, “House of Traitors, Trump Tower of Treason“ and the writing of this Substack column, Congressman David Cicilline (D-RI) introduced a bill in the last week of this session of Congress, along with 40 co-sponsors, invoking the 14th Amendment to prevent Trump from ever holding office again due to his participation in and leading the January 6th insurrection. There was no mention in the bill of his co-conspirators, the 121 insurrectionist Republicans soon returning to Congress.)

Watching this flustercluck of the Republicans trying to sort out their Speaker of the House issue feels like a sneak preview of how they're going to govern. They're gonna snatch defeat out of the jaws of their victory, because the loonies want to be in charge of the asylum, and the ones left who actually know how to do business (although they still don't often do it) are going to be so busy babysitting they'll never get anything done. The grfiter loons just want to go after Biden. They don't want to actually do any of the nation's business because they know they aren't good at that, anyway, so they're wanting to chase a bunch of smoke.

It's only going to make them look stupid. They're complaining about the state of the country but they're not going to do anything about any supposed problems because they'd rather try to find some way to impeach a guy who didn't do anything wrong, just so they won't have to feel like they're the dummies who elected an obvious fucking criminal. Hell, over the break I was looking through a mobster book by Ovid Demaris and it had a whole chapter on Donald Trump... and it was published in 1986. Republicans elected a known crook because they don't care, and now they want to pretend everyone else is just as morally bankrupt as they are. So they're going to waste a bunch of time and make clowns of themselves trying to prosecute a fantasy. And the whole time they'll keep on complaining about inflation and gas prices, while they try to make those worse, because the last thing they'd do is want to fix it. Inflation is their best hope of winning the White House next time, they sure as hell don't want to solve any problems.

So, now we're going to have a clown show around Kevin McCarthy. When Kevin McCarthy's not scummy enough for you, you're really a piece of work. Hey, maybe they could elect George Santos as speaker! He's going to claim he is, anyhow, so, why not?

And as if they couldn't get any sillier, Donald Trump Jr. is now selling Bibles, because the "televangelist/political propagandist" circle is now complete.

https://news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-jr-gets-holy-075812235.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

Fookin' he larry-ass. They don't even try to hide it anymore, because they know their base doesn't care. They'll HELP them fool 'em, because they think it'll piss off the "libtards."

The right wing know they're running a theocratic party, and here comes the stuff religions do best -- schisms! Everybody thinks the GOP is acting like this because they're having a "civil war" in the party, but if you really look at that party, you know what it actually is -- sects! There's a reason my small town has 5 pages in the yellow pages for Baptist churches alone -- it's all because religion can't unite a damn thing. It's all a bunch of competing grifters grabbing at the same pool of rubes, trying to get their money.

The Democratic party, for all its flaws, is still trying to be about actually governing. The Republicans have given up on that and devoted themselves entirely to grifting, scamming the rubes. And they've turned on Donald Trump now because he broke kayfabe about it. Turns out kayfabe doesn't matter, though... their base will keep showing up as long as they're entertained.

More and more, we're getting peeks at what the Republican party really thinks of its voters.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/12/raj-shah-fox-trump/

These are from documents shared among FOX News, the GOP's main propaganda outlet, regarding what they think of their viewers:







"Dumb cousin-fucking terrorists." That's not exactly how the Pickerings and Trent Lott and Haley Barbour put it, but I have heard similar descriptions out of them regarding their voters. I have cousins who are Republican operatives, and, yeah, they don't think much of the people who support 'em... the same way televangelists don't think much of rubes who send them money.

You know what's proof that they aren't wrong? When you show FOX viewers what the people fooling them think about them... it won't change a damn thing. They'll keep watching anyway. Because they're addicted to bullshit, and an addict will put up with any kind of treatment from their pusher to keep getting their dope.

Right-wingers are just flat-out saying it now. They want an authoritarian dicatorship, because freedom isn't working for them anymore.



Even with heavy gerrymandering, even with psycho candidates who won't accept the results of any election unless they win it, even with coup attempts, and even with an upsurge in terrorism from their side (which is only going to get worse... and likely a LOT worse, and even with right-wing lunatics buying social media empires to turn them into all-day-all-night Nazi-fests and even collaborating with Republican candidates... they still aren't comfortable with letting people have real freedom.

And they'll make all the excuses in the world to avoid looking at what they're actually doing.

Honestly, they don't care if they give up freedom, as long as non-white people and gay people and atheists and anyone else they fear/hate doesn't have any either. They're a party of spite, and of theocracy. They've abdicated their own will to witch-doctors who tell 'em what a ghost in the sky wants from them (obedience and money) and, so they won't have to feel dumb about it, they want everybody else to have to live under that same thumb.

Dictators and bullies get them all aroused. It's one reason so many conservatives are backing Putin and made Viktor Orban one of their ideals to emulate.

I dunno how long they're gonna keep admitting that they've given up on freedom before people will take them seriously and realize they're no longer a party anyone should be voting for, whether they hate Democrats or not. They're gonna "spite" everyone right out of having a free country anymore.

“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” ― David Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic wrote:

RON/ELON LAUNCH NEW TWITTER DISASTER!!!