The title of the article that caught my attention was literally a claim that teenagers in Sweden had taken to carrying rifles because of soaring crime rates, which the reader is supposed to believe are due to immigration. This is absolute horse shit, given that Sweden has (especially in comparison to the United States) a very low crime rate. Also, Sweden (like most European or other "First World" countries) has strict firearms laws which mandate licensing, including having to have a purpose for having a weapon (Self-defense not being a valid reason) safe storage and even prohibiting the carrying of firearms by civilians unless engaging in specific, legal acts such as attending a shooting range or hunting. Not only that, but police in Sweden are (by European standards, anyway) fairly heavily armed, they maintain good relations with their communities, and they'd be certain to both outgun and quickly arrest mobs of armed vigilante teenagers.
For extra points...the article itself was actually about someone supposedly throwing a petrol bomb at a police station in Malmo. There's nothing to indicate that actually happened, either. The closest thing I could find was an article about an alleged hand-grenade attack in the same city...but the people (not named in the article) who allegedly did it and were pictured being arrested looked pretty damn white to me.
Now, between this bullshit, the assorted right-wingers losing their shit over "Dreamers" and various other racist crap that I've seen in the past couple of weeks, combined with the fact that we're seeing large numbers of "Conservatives" and Republicans basically setting everything they've ever claimed to believe on fire in defense of Trump...I'm forced to make one simple conclusion:
For a majority of these people, all their "Conservatism" ever was, was cover for the racist bullshit.
Hell, given Trump's stated refusal to enforce and implement bipartisan Russia sanctions passed by Congress, the Nunes memo, and the fact that certain members of the far-right punditry are outright calling for a police state...I've become rather convinced that conservatism in the United States of America is basically dead. Certainly conservatism as I was taught it, and likely Christianity as well. have both been dead for awhile. I'm leaning toward placing the time of death somewhere between 2008 and 2012.
I'll go a bit further and say that I believe that racism ate both of them alive from the inside out. 50 years of the Southern Strategy probably didn't help...but the truth is, what it really took to create this situation was Donald Fucking Trump.
Yes, there are still some real, intelligent, relatively sane and obviously non-racist conservatives and Republicans (and for that matter, Christians) left...but none of them hold power right now and more than a few of those who I follow on social media (among them Bill Kristol and Max Boot) are noticing that they're now on the same side as the liberals and middle-of-the-road people and reevaluating their priorities accordingly.
That said, there's a substantial percentage of this country's population that seems perfectly willing to burn down this country and our civilization, to abandon every principle and teaching of Christianity, and to sell everything out to the Russians and even to give up their own rights, or the very concept of Truth itself, for the chance that they might get to call people of color racial slurs. I never realized that beliefs that I was taught were socially unacceptable and wrong (or words that I was never allowed to use) were just that damn important to people.
I have no tolerance for racism, but I like civilization, flush toilets, the internet and the ability to have pets that don't end up on the dinner table just fine, thank you.
These idiots don't seem to care that you can still get fired from your job for that shit. (Hell, one of my objections to not only "sexual potency and stamina" infomercials but Fox News on TV at work is that if I was on break and somebody saw something saying the same stuff on my Laptop, I could get fired.) They don't seem to care that acting or dressing like a Nazi in public can get you beat up, or at least might just stay with you forever and prevent you from getting a job anywhere that somebody has the sense to Google-search your name. Hell, they don't seem to care about anything but the cheap emotional thrill of being a racist asshole.
...And that, to a great extent, is the real problem. These people have spent all these years quietly pursuing the cheap, vacuous emotional thrill of racism and constant self-indulgent rage (for which they didn't have to do anything but be white) like that young dude who spends all his time looking at Anime porn and whacking off instead of going out and finding a job, finding a date, doing something constructive and otherwise contributing to and participating in society. These Fucking People assumed they would always be "on top" and so they did nothing. White conservatives did nothing to show their ways were better (or even any good at all) provided no leadership, expected to sit back and collect checks for nothing, and in general whenever anybody questioned them, they just got mad. In fact, starting around 20 years ago with ever-deepening hypocrisy, they started alienating any of their own who had a brain in their head and the will to think about what was going on.
Like me, a decade ago.
...And now that their parents are gone, or fading out, and generally passed from the scene as regards setting the tone, these idiots are wondering why the lights are going out and the world is moving on without them, and why instead of being "Great Again" under their so-called leadership, the United States of America has become the laughingstock of the world and the rest of the world is moving on without us.
In a lot of meaningful ways, especially as regards things like Climate Change policy and renewable energy, the rest of the world is simply ignoring us.
This virtually assures that we'll be back on-board as a junior partner in a few years when this crap is over. We will get told what to do by the British, and the Chinese, and the French...like some second-rate middle power...and we'll end up damned well liking it because we need to get back "in" to the international order of things and 25% of us traded away our position of international leadership for the chance to hate Brown people for a few more years...and half of our population just fucking let them by not voting.
You know, there's another way. There's been another way this whole damn time. All we need, is the will to face that truth. The choice is yours to choose between the light or the darkness with its fires. It is late, choose now.
- Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders. We believe that all men are created equal. Yet many are denied equal treatment. We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights. Yet many Americans do not enjoy those rights. We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings--not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin. The reasons are deeply imbedded in history and tradition and the nature of man. We can understand--without rancor or hatred--how this all happened. But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbid it. Morality forbids it. And the law I will sign tonight forbids it. ~Lyndon B. Johnson, prior to signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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