Trumperwocky.

Twas Brillig and the slithy toves
Did gire and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogroves
And mome raths outgrabe.
~Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky.

'There are no set facts here."

There is no statement that I've ever heard in my life, that I would consider to be more anti-conservatism than this one, so of course in this day and age this statement was not uttered by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, but rather by Republican Rep. Doug Collins (R-Georgia) in defense of Donald Trump. As I have said before, if this is what conservatism has made of itself, I'm damned glad I got out over a decade ago.

Conservatives have become the crazed Anarchist from the Mortuary in Planescape: Torment, pretending to be a zombie to spy on the Dustmen, and they don't even know why.

As somebody who was both a conservative 20 and a Dungeons & Dragons nerd (not to mention avid PC gamer) 20 years ago, I find this appalling.

I mean, seriously, without set facts, without a shared baseline of reality, how is anything possible, much less democracy, freedom...or indeed accomplishing anything at all?

To use a common statement from my days as a conservative Christian, without a belief in set facts, somebody could say the Bible is an auto-parts manual...or by turn, that an auto-parts manual is the Bible.

It's not just that without Truth, on a certain level, Democracy is not possible, it's that without a belief in Truth...at the end of the day, nothing is possible, except perhaps destruction.

Tell me something; I was taught that conservatism was based on facts and reality, or at least a certain interpretation thereof...as is liberalism, and up to a certain point the same can be said of any valid belief system at all. People are different, understandings of the facts will be different.

But you have to accept that there are facts. That there is truth. Otherwise, what's even the point?

Among other things, without facts and truth, religion itself is likely nothing more than tribal ritual, an exercise in feeling good about yourself, and it has no purpose.

Without facts, what are you even believing in?

Christianity, Judaism and Islam all share the same God. Buddhism, Sikhism, Traditional spirituality...all at least acknowledge some higher power than the Self, and have that in common with most other religions. There are, on a certain level, beliefs taken as facts that are common to almost all religions.

There is a reason for that.

If there are no facts, what exactly is the point of belief in Christ, or in an afterlife? If there are no facts, is not a religion based on worshiping Sporks just as valid? Celebrity worship? Heaven's Gate? How about belief that you are God?

Now you go and try and make your own Earth, in six days or even six billion years, without help.

You see what I'm saying here? Note that I'm saying it right out of 1990's Apologetics drawing on both books that I read and stuff I heard at the street level from a bunch of African American believers I was close to at the time thanks to my Mom's then-ongoing Social Work internship in Saginaw, Michigan..

Any idiot can say any old thing they want, but that does not make it true. There is always and forever a set of objective facts, that people ignore at their peril because reality is a wall that we all, always, run into sooner or later.

These people are in the wrong even from their own hard-right perspective. Funny how Conservatives have morphed into exactly the kind of moral relativists they accused liberals of being 20 years ago.

For the record, I just tried to Evangelize you, using the exact same stuff I would have 20 years ago, but this time for reality.

There's one key difference, though.

These people, Evangelicals and Republicans all, would cheer the AntiChrist if he offered them tax cuts.

And so it is with the Republican Party.

When the Secretary of State starts whining about "When will people love him" you know something is wrong with the dude. I mean, come on, what the hell kind of grown-ass man says shit like that, much less in public?

When that self-same Secretary of State immediately gets punked by Linda Ronstadt of all people (Full disclosure; I did not know that Linda Ronstadt was still alive) I'd suggest this is a big hint that something is wrong. And remember that this dude was first in his class at West Point. Education and social class does not mean shit if you started out as an idiot and made the choice to remain so, by being a closed-minded fanatic.

I've heard that Mike Pompeo keeps an open Bible on his desk. Maybe he should have tried reading it instead.

 Apparently, Trump is going full racist in public now, aside from his comments about Warren, he's plain out saying shit to rooms full of Jews equating them with money, and then telling them that they have to vote for him based on that money.

Listen up, yo. Speaking as a former conservative myself, my first response to somebody telling me that I have to support them is generally something along the lines of "Bitch, I ain't gotta do nothing of the sort, get the fuck out of my face before I bust you up." But then I'm old enough to remember when conservatism wasn't composed almost entirely of authoritarian boot-lickers.

And the worst part is, these fucking people are going along with this shit.

I mean, seriously, as even a former conservative...hell, as a Man...I do not get this.

When somebody insults you to your face the correct response is not "Thank you sir, may I have another."

Don't any of these people have any pride in themselves, or at least basic self-respect? Don't they have any pride at all, even in the negative sense?

Peddle ethnic hatred, of my own group or any other, right to my face and you're going to get smacked right in the mouth. You'll get it again if you insult me.

If you, in the next breath, talk about ignoring the Constitution that is the basis for our entire country, you've just made an enemy.

Look, I don't care who or what you are. These people are not your friend.

Strike that. I'm guessing the answer would be "No."

I caught this response on one of the Ronstadt threads. I'm literally not sure who or what this person thinks she's talking about, but despite the fact that you have to be at least my age to even know who Linda Ronstadt is, I've seen far more support for her online...and off, given that my roommate mentioned this to me later on, granted mostly in the context of "Hey wait a minute, Linda Ronstadt is still alive? I guess she made Mike Pompeo her bitch at some dinner thing." I mean, if you do not know at this point that conservatives are a minority in America, you haven't been paying attention. This was understood back in the 1990's, so far as I know. Granted my definition of conservative honestly did not include a majority of the people who are currently Trump supporters.

It should be noted that the area I lived in in the 1990's, Michigan's 1st Congressional District, was a Blue district at the time, now it's red, and it has at least its fair share of Trump Supporters. Thus, logically at least some of the people living in it voted for both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

See, it's like this.

This woman is a conservative like I'm a goddamned toaster oven.

Let's look at this, shall we?

Her Twitter handle is "I heart Mindy" so she's definitely got the overly high opinion of herself down real good...if not probably unrequited self-love, just sayin.'

Anybody who starts off with "I LOVE ME!" probably has issues, and probably doesn't, really.

She starts off with profanity. implied or otherwise. Ya'll tried that in my church back in the 1990's you could expect to be leaving fairly quickly because you'd be asked to leave, and likely escorted out. If you refused, the police would have been called. There was a time when this was not cool.

Ostentatious fake patriotism? Check. Middle-finger mentality? Check.

Some people think they're being cute when they say "Fuck you" to other people. I was taught there's nothing particularly conservative about it. Disrespect, Nihilism, and self-importance are not conservative values...or at least they weren't before Trump.

Fake machismo? (From a woman, no less?) Check. Rifle? Check. Sexualization? Check. Denial of any particular association with the values of traditional conservatism (!) while still trying to claim it to get the approval of the feeble-minded? Check.

Titillation to appeal to the erectionally-challenged? You do the math.

Check.the weapon.

Right in the middle of the banner pic like an upraised middle finger from Stalin himself.

It's an AKS-74U, the carbine version of the AK-74 rifle. I recognized it immediately.

That's a Soviet weapon. One still in use by the Russian military, I should add.

That's a major tell, consciously or not, I think.

This woman is not your friend.

Just like how today's Republican Party, in the face of Impeachment and polls showing that 60% plus of the population does not support them...is suddenly sounding very Soviet.

They're hurtling balls-out towards that wall called reality...and trying to deny that it exists. These people are the apparatchiks making Five Year Plans in the fall of 1991.

Right before the fall of the Soviet Union itself.

It's not so much the fall that kills you, it's that sudden stop at the bottom.

Physically or metaphorically it's largely the same.

Physics and the laws thereof will kill you whether you believe in it or not.

"There are no set facts here."

Remember that line.

And both Trump and institutional conservatism, not to mention a large percentage of the Republican base wanted the guy who said it to be a United States Senator.

Remember that the next time some Evangelical Republican starts talking to you about "Truth."

If we don't stop this shit, the fall is coming.

...

Stalin is a Genghis Khan, an unscrupulous intriguer, who sacrifices everything else to the preservation of power … He changes his theories according to whom he needs to get rid of next. ~Nikolai Bukharin