Ganner Rhysode: I am only one Jedi.
Nom Anor: You're insane!
Ganner Rhysode: No, I am Ganner. [Spinning his light-saber in a dizzying flourish] This threshold is mine! I claim it for my own, bring on your thousands, one at a time or all in a rush, I don't give a damn. None shall pass!
~From the New Jedi Order series Star Wars novel; Traitor, by Matthew Stover.
On Thursday, New York State Attorney General Letitia James filed suit to dissolve the National Rifle Association, which is incorporated in the state, citing fraud, among other crimes.
That night, I happened to be working in the break room at work.
At my work, quite often one of the break room TV's is tuned to Fox News, often another to CNN or MSNBC and the others usually to sports channels.
It seemed like they had Laura Ingraham on loop most of the night, spouting yellow-eyed hair-on-fire paranoia about Liberals coming to take away your guns and your Jesus and "fundamentally change American culture."
Listen to what I have to say next, and listen good.
When you're the organization that's too corrupt for Oliver fucking North you don't get to paint a state effort to dissolve your declining, politics-obsessed hard-right "charity" as some kind of nefarious conspiracy.
Not when it's perfectly well legal consequences for literally decades of bad behavior and increasing corruption that you did as part of your own actions.
Not when you long ago abandoned your stated primary mission of firearms education and safety and protecting the legitimate Constitutional right to keep and bear arms for endless shrill promotion of an ever-rightward political Long March that soon enough simply became an excuse to buy multi-million dollar mansions for the bigwigs and pay millions of dollars to just a few people out of the dues paid by thousands upon thousands of rural, white, working class people...many of whom, wondering just where their money is going, have quit the NRA in disgust.
Oliver North, of all fucking people. The guy who sold AIM-154 Phoenix missiles, F-14A Tomcat parts and other assorted weapons and equipment to Iran, to the people who were shouting "Death To America" damned near while they were shouting it, in order to finance illegal wars in Central and South America. That guy.
When you're too corrupt for somebody like Oliver North...who once literally was the spider at the center of a web of nefarious conspiracy....you don't get to claim that an effort to remove you from your opportunities to steal is some kind of evil machinations anymore.
Conservatives these days, from Trump on down, are constantly claiming that they're so badly done-to.
The people with a history of being balls deep in almost every bloody-minded mistake America has ever made and damned near every committed-with-deadly-purpose Sin this country has ever committed, mostly for no better reason than their own personal power and profit. The motherfuckers who have turned brutality, corruption, election tampering, fraud, racism, religious fuckery and stone-cold lying into high art forms, all while keeping all the bad shit just enough out of view that they can still, with a straight face, claim to be some sort of righteous and somebody, somewhere might just be dumb enough to believe them.
But no, it's literally everybody else in the entire world, with the debatable exception of the heirs to the goddamned Soviet Union who are trying to raise up a new Red empire or the Kingdom that birthed and nursed and raised and funded Osama Bin Laden and most of the goddamned 9/11 terrorists...and pre-COVID-19 at least also Chinese and North Korean Communists...who are the fucking bad guys. Well, them and goddamned long-dead slave-owning Confederates, there is that.
Go ahead, just ask them. Republicans will gladly tell you. They can't wait to tell you how much they hate the average liberal or non-Republican or moderate Republican American and that we are their enemy, but Kim Jong Murder-with-antiaircraft guns, Mohammad Bin Bone-Saw, KGB Lt. Col. Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban the Soros-ally turned Soros-hater and COVIDictator are their friends and mentors.
Actually, you don't even have to ask them.
They'll tell you, and gladly, like it's some big secret, like it's some great thing, like the crazy stupid bug-eyed kid that took a shit in the pool and somebody else had to clean it up.
They tell you with every bug-eyed stupid freak out over having to wear a mask in the middle of a pandemic.
They tell you with every racist or sexist rant on Facebook or Twitter or at the kitchen table.
They tell you with every smarmy, sneering Fox News broadcast by TV-dinner heirs and people who got their start outing gay folks to the college newspaper that some old guy sits their watching like a bug-eyed ADHD kid watches cartoons.
They tell you how much they hate you, how much they hate other people, or change, or progress or foreigners or stable governance. All it took was a Black man running for President on the terms of hope and change for Republicans to decide nobody deserved hope or change anymore. All it took was Barack Obama saying "Yes We Can" for Republicans to become the Party of No We Can't.
Ever notice how all it took was for somebody to say "Black Lives Matter" for Republicans to decide that, indeed, no lives mattered anymore?
In five years I've watched Republicans devolve from high-minded defenders of liberty and personal freedoms, some of whom may even have believed it or meant it, even if it was an interpretation of such that I may have disagreed with, who at least could sound like they believed in truth even if you didn't agree with theirs...to cowardly simpering fools eager to lick the jackboots of whatever foreign dictator or domestic uniformed thug comes wandering by....and you can't believe a word they say, not that they really believe much at all, but here's the kicker; outwardly, at least, they don't even seem to notice that anything's different.
Except that they know it's all coming crashing down, even if they don't know or won't acknowledge why that is so, and they're loading their guns and sharpening their knives to go out in a blaze of glory, practicing their gimcrack speeches in front of their mirrors like they think John Galt was real and they want to be That Guy, and writing their final manifestos all the same.
We're going to have to vote these fuckers out, all of them.
And then we're going to have to fight them off. You cannot reason with unreasonable people. You cannot live with people who don't think you have the right to exist.
You want change, you want progress?
Better wages, constitutional rights that aren't dependent on the mood of the cops? decent health care, human rights, racial equality, to simply be left alone if you're an LGBT person? To just live your life without one of these fools bothering you about how to do it?
You want an effective COVID-19 response, or for life to regain some measure of normalcy?
Listen, yo, if we want the future, we are going to have to pry it from These Fucking People's cold dead hands.
We didn't make it that way, they did. This is that Immanentizing of the "Conservative" Eschaton that I keep talking about.
This fight is what they wanted, what they are still demanding to have, what they hoped to turn the George Floyd protests into with riot police and unconstitutional arrests. No, I still haven't seen an effective procedure for social distancing when you'be been shot, so there is that.
Somebody might want to get on with doing that. Just sayin.'
Part Six.
Richard Secord was one of my squadron commanders. In ‘71 we called him Trickey Dicky, Jr.
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