Predators (Happy Q Year 2020-2021, Part One.)

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before!
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, see his banner go!
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus go... [Sounds of violent struggle, burst of static, and the station changes.]

Well long, tall Sally
She's built for speed, she got
Everything that Uncle John need, oh, baby
Yeah, baby, woo, baby
Havin' me some fun tonight, yeah

Well, I saw Uncle John with bald-head Sally
He saw Aunt Mary comin' and he ducked back in the alley, oh, baby
Yes, baby, woo, baby
Havin' me some fun tonight, yeah, ow

Well, long, tall Sally
She's built for speed, she got
Everything that Uncle John need, oh, baby
Yes, baby, woo, baby
Havin' me some fun tonight, yeah

Well, I saw Uncle John with bald-head Sally
He saw Aunt Mary comin' and he ducked back in the alley, oh, baby
Yes, baby, woo, baby
Havin' me some fun tonight, yeah. ~Long Tall Sally, Little Richard

I used to be a conservative. Really, I did. And I'm not sure what we've been seeing from these fucking people these past few months, but conservatism ain't it.

Since Trump the election lost they've tried to use the courts to overthrow the will of the people and abolish Democracy, threatened military coups only to be told to go fuck themselves by the military and since then they've spent all this time conspiracy-theorizing and jacking off instead of doing things like passing needed Coronavirus relief, passing routine defense bills and working with the incoming administration for a smooth handover of government.

And, frankly, they're outright fantasizing about everything from a Chinese invasion to a domestic military coup. Never mind that China can't project power that far. Never mind that moving 50,000 soldiers (especially without enough dedicated airlift and sea-lift assets) is as hard to conceal as the rising of the sun. Never mind that the Air Force and the Navy would've detected and destroyed any Chinese invasion force pretty much the minute it left it's own economic exclusion zone. Never mind that had this somehow actually happened and such a force did slip through, half the Pacific rim would have seen the United States Navy and Pacific Air Forces kick the People's Liberation Army Navy's ass into the next universe, there would have had to be a Chinese invasion of Canada...which I can't imagine would have gone that well...and thus a full NATO response. Never mind that that FOX News would have camera crews covering every second of the monster redeployment of troops that would happen, the operation to support and/or liberate the Canadians, everything from the mustering of local National Guard companies to clouds of C-17 Globemaster III's landing at Dow Air National Guard Base in Bangor, on those monster runways at what used to be Loring Air Force Base, and for that matter at every other useful runway in the Northeast, not to mention of the fact that full-conventional US military hyper-war against a country like China that's about 20 years behind us would almost certainly make Desert Storm seem like a protracted military campaign by comparison. It would be bloody as fuck even for us, but it would be short, especially against an expeditionary force at the end of long supply lines that run through hostile territory.

Never mind how our troops appear to have actually voted, after years of Trump's rabid disrespect for the military, and never mind the apolitical nature of the United States Armed Forces as an organization, not the fact that Republican losses were not, in the grand scheme of things, really all that bad...

And sure as hell not as bad as the collapse of civilization, destruction of one's country, death, destruction, and war.

Except, there's this guy I know, old guy, Trump supporter, works a service industry job. You know, the usual. I pointed out to him one day "Ya know, I find it interesting that all these Republicans who rabidly supported this dude two months ago are heading for the exits, have turned on him or are real quiet."

Mostly because I do, in fact, find that pretty interesting and not a little funny. My bet is that starting in 24 days they're going to do their damnedest to pretend the last five years never happened, or was all a joke, or something.

The old guy's response? "I still support him, 100%, The rest of these motherfuckers can all go to hell."

Now, this dude lost people to the virus, and has, on the whole, been suspiciously quiet since about the spring of 2017. He has not profited by this mess, not one damn bit. But he's still all in for it.

And not one bit of any of this was enough to save Donald Trump. Not even if there was a real war with China going on would it have mattered one damn bit in the context of how our system actually works.

And since then, on Christmas morning some nut blew himself up in Nashville, taking down communications for the entire city in the process. We have American suicide bombers now. Think about that for a second, think about it in the context of not only American, but Western culture and religion, of our cultural win conditions, of our understanding of the human will to survive.

These fucking people can see the end, if they don't accept change or try to broaden their appeal, or give up the racism or try to care about anything but their personal profit. They know in four, five, at the most ten years they'll be completely outdated. More to the point they know without Trump, Republicanism is reduced to "Please Clap" like Jeb Bush in 2016, only worse.

Extreme right-wing bullshit and rabid desire to maintain white superiority, if they can't maintain white supremacy, is turning these fucking people into American equivalents to Daesh and the Taliban in ways that Christianity...even the Fundamentalist kind...just couldn't do all the way down to a doctrinal or theological level. I see so many of these people having stripped Christ out of Christianity and trying to replace him with Trump as a way to try to get around that. But Trump is on a base level, a coward, who'd never sacrifice anything for anybody, so that doesn't really work either.

But still, they want their shitty philosophy to go out not with a bang or a whimper, but with its hands outstretched reaching for somebody else's throat. On a certain level, it doesn't really matter whose it is.

That's why the Republican attitude about the virus, and the shitty Trump administration response to COVID-19 and any talk of "Herd Immunity" should be understood as cover for an attempted genocide.

Modern Republicans, far removed from Reagan's desire for peace or the professed regard for life held by Bush 41 or Bush 43, see mass death and "fewer people" and think "more for them." Everything is a zero sum game, so they think they're going to get more if a bunch of people die. As long as it's not them (as individuals) they don't really care.

They think of themselves as the predators, like a pride of Lions on the savannah but they don't know jack shit about Lions.

Never mind that enough dead bodies would crash the economy and wreck civilization all by itself.

There is a perverse nihilism at the heart of all this, almost a preference for conspiracy theories and hate and woo woo religious crap over facts and reality and anything that doesn't mark upper-class conservative white people as 'special' in some way.

These are the same fucking people who love them some Social Darwinism but they hate the theory of Evolution with the fire of ten thousand Blue Hypergiant stars...not because of some religious imperative, but because science doesn't make them the center of the universe or give them the power over others that they crave.

And if we don't start dealing with the hate, self-centered nihilism and vapid preference for unreality, and find some way to de-radicalize American conservatism, one way or another we're going to be stuck with a lot of these problems we have right now for a very long time, and as these people's numbers shrink and they fall by the wayside in no small part to their ideas literally killing a lot of their own people, their attitudes and violence are only going to get even worse.

These Fucking People would rather believe it's the End Times than accept equality with other human beings. Think about that for a second.

I wish I had something more positive to say going into the new year, but I don't.

We're going to have to deal with this problem, and fast, or even more people will die.

That's all.