By Any Means Necessary.

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

As I've mentioned here and there, I work in a casino. Specifically, it's a casino owned by a Native American tribe. At work this morning, toward the end of the shift I was talking to a friend of mine, Ashley, who is part Native. She mentioned she was having issues with this younger girl in a discussion class on Native American issues that she's taking. Now, mind you, she said this is a discussion-class, where the whole point is to talk about stuff. Ashley said this young girl makes a point of rolling her eyes and sighing dramatically whenever she speaks. Now mind you, Ashley is extremely well-informed about Native issues, she stays current on top of having numerous books about various subjects, and she generally always has been pretty well informed, overall.

She said this other girl takes a strongly pro-US government stance...claiming that Indian Boarding Schools (which were notorious for abuse and for attempting to eradicate Native culture and language) were good for Native Americans...and that the Trail of Tears (a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Eastern Native American tribes involving forced relocation to what is now Oklahoma, from 1831 to 1850) was voluntary...to which my first response was "What...Are you kidding me?" As I immediately pointed out, I went to Christian schools and a shitty public high school and I knew better than that...by the time I was like, ten.

My mind of course, also immediately flashed to all the shitty efforts to rewrite history in places like Texas, and how that State's board of education is dominated by Fundamentalist nuts who mostly have no background in education. People like this girl in my friend's class are the result of that crap.

But ya know, that's not the only vector for this disease.

There's also people like Mark Robinson, a Black Republican city councilman from North Carolina who apparently is the new popular guy on Fox News and shit. (And what is it with these people trying to claim that Michelle Obama...a beautiful woman with two beautiful daughters who look like their parents...is a man? Not just that, but those two have been married long enough that their relationship and family predate marriage equality or even the serious push for it by a number of years...just sayin.') It's people like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson and all these Republicans and Trump nuts who get up there on these TV shows and lie their asses off as if God, Karma, the Ten Commandments and their unpopularity with the majority of the public were somehow not real things. It's all these people scuttling to cash out now before the worried-about "Blue Wave" hits and they may have to worry about being thrown out of office...as if money is the most important thing in the world.

I was taught that lying is wrong. I was taught not to lie, and in the course of learning that lesson I got an ass whuppin' or two. I remember at least one in particular that was for that reason. I was taught not to lie by people who were, functionally, conservatives at least at the time.

What the fuck happened?

I don't have an answer, I'm asking You. 

I, having been raised conservative, would no more think to say that Michelle Obama was a man or that the Trail of Tears was voluntary (nor to repeat any of the countless other conspiracy theories and lies these people have foisted on the public) than I would think to say that the Moon is made of green cheese or the Sun revolves around the Earth or that said Earth is flat. The vast majority of this stuff is demonstrably false, and the rest can be proven so with just a little work. In a world where we all have vast amounts of information at our fingertips as close as our cell phones or the nearest computer...there's no excuse for this crap, None.

There's even less excuse for the one of the same white conservative dudes who claim to be so rabidly against homosexuality, pedophilia and sexual abuse (unless it's done by one of their own, I guess) to be ranting about sodomizing a (male, by the way) high school student with an object. Sorry if it sounds crude (although, no, I don't actually give a shit if it offends anybody) but there was a time when if a dude was ranting about sticking things up another dude's ass, his sexuality might just be questioned...by which I mean likely fists first, questions later because there was a time where conservatives were a lot more numerous, less crazy and more consistent about what they considered to be perversion. I mean, yeah I'm old but there was a time when talking like that on TV wouldn't just cost you that TV job, it'd mean you'd be lucky to ever work again. I know of incidents like that from when I was a kid where somebody would say something stupid or threaten somebody (although I can't remember anything quite that bad) and then they'd get fired from their job and have to move out of the neighborhood. 

I suppose things like that could be said form behind a pointy white hood, or maybe a gun and a ski mask, but I digress. There was a time when being a criminal meant you wouldn't be accepted by conservatives, and being found to be a white supremacist meant people would think you were a loser and might just beat you up for it, but I digress again. Fuck, I can remember when being against something like threatening a kid with sexual abuse wasn't just a liberal idea and when even (perhaps especially) a conservative-owned TV station wouldn't wait for public pressure to fire the asshole who said it.

Like I've been saying, in the last few years I've been watching these fucking people basically set every belief or value that they ever claimed to have on fire, mostly for Donald Trump. What, if anything, are they hoping to get out of this? What's even the possible endgame here? I ask this, because none of the current trends nor conservatives' nor Trump's levels of public support or trust seem conducive to achieving those goals...or maybe they were just that incompetent at trying it, It's hard to say when I'm not flexible enough to try to fit my head up my own ass so that I might be able to better see these people's point of view:

This Tweet got me thinking; What these right-wingers want is to break down Rule of Law, and our existing Constitution and Federal system so that they can bring back things like "Manifest Destiny" and Segregation...and try to shoot down the government and their neighbors while they're at it. No, it never occurs to these assholes that the liberals down the street have guns and would shoot back, nor that the government has more firepower than they could ever dream of having, or afford or maintain in a million years of trying. Yes, to a great degree these fucking people appear to be willing to give up damned near anything, including America's global power and place in the world and status as a First World nation...or even their own families, futures, and kids in order to get it. What they want, is impunity to do whatever fucked up stupid things they want. What they want...and why they prop up Dictator-wannabe Trump...is because these fools dream of being millions of little petty dictators...as if our country would ever survive such a setup. All these conservative white men think they'd get to be the local warlord...when the truth is that what most of them would get is dead, and in fairly short order...more likely from bad water or from starvation than from bullets or bombs or cannon shells or missiles.

Conservatives in general, and a decent percentage of conservative white men in particular, have lost the plot. They have, all too often with malice aforethought, refused to deal with a changing society and a changing world, and now...despite having somebody who they think is "one of their own" in the White House (Spoiler: He isn't.) they're continuing to lose their ass due to their own bad choices, and it's actually getting worse, because they think Trump is somehow going to protect them or give them something better.

He couldn't even protect his own lawyer, what makes anybody else think he will protect...or gives a fuck about...them?

Consider for example, these Illinois farmers. While farmers in most of the rest of the country are hella pissed off, worried about losing NAFTA and worried about getting hit by Chinese tariffs, these idiots are comparing themselves to the Founding Fathers of the United States! Talk about deluded, self-important assholes, my God. What in the hell is wrong with these fucking people?

This right here is the problem, all these people think they're going to be big damned heroes and shoot down the government. (How that works when the fire from their AR-15's is answered with 30mm Bushmaster II cannon shells, 120mm H.E. rounds from Abrams tanks, and Hellfire missiles, I'm not sure, but you can't convince them of this basic reality.) The last guy in particular really gets to me, because while there are various legends stating that most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence lost their ass in the ensuing years, the truth is most did not, and in fact most ended up in public service. Only seven of them came to bad ends, most due to their own actions, bad business deals, etc. and in a couple of cases acts that could well have been considered treasonous. The Founders were the elites of their time, and then as now most elites will remain elites short of major national calamity.

The farmers? They're expendable targets in the never-ending search for Republican vainglory.

We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.

— Malcolm X, 1965

The tragedy of America is that so many people want this only for themselves.

I was taught differently. I remember singing this song as a little kid in the Baptist school, it was written by a man who had "This machine kills fascists" written on his guitar, and who served in the U.S. Merchant Marine (in so doing surviving his ship being torpedoed) and later in the U.S. Army, so that he could say such a thing. Funny enough, he had his own bad dealings with the Trump family...

This land is your land, this land is my land
From the California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
And saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me

I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me , a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

When the sun comes shining, then I was strolling
In the wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me

This land is your land and this land is my land
From the California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

When the sun comes shining, then I was strolling
In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling
The voice come chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me.

~Woody Guthrie

That's the vision we all must stand up for, by any means necessary.