What's even the endgame here? (Fight The Memeocracy, Part Four)

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

A couple days ago, Madison Cawthorn said that the British would not have surrendered at Yorktown if George Washington had been wearing a mask.

Excuse me?

First of all, George Washington took steps to expose troops under controlled conditions to diseases like Malaria and Smallpox in order to immunize them and prevent disease outbreaks among his soldiers. 

Second, as regards Yorktown in particular, General Charles Cornwallis and his army of British regulars and German Hessians knew they were fucked. They were caught between American and French land forces and the French Navy at sea, they had endured daily bombardments for over three weeks and made several failed attempts to break the siege or spike American and French guns (partially successful, but the guns were repaired each time) and they'd lost their outer defensive works. The British had even tried to evacuate, getting only a few hundred soldiers out before the weather bottled their ships up in harbor and their remaining ships were destroyed. Legend has it that a cannonball from the final volley of artillery fire smashed through Cornwallis's dinner table. 

There effectively was no room for any funny stuff by that point, and in fact, as a final slight to Washington, Cornwallis himself did not attend the surrender ceremony, instead delegating that duty to his executive officer, Brigadier Charles O'Hara. George Washington in fact refused to accept his surrender and forced O'Hara to surrender to his own second in command, Benjamin Lincoln. Yorktown was the last major action of the Revolutionary War

All that was just off the top of my head, see, I had to slog through learning this history in elementary and middle school...because I went to Christian schools and at the time. Christians were obsessed with pre-modern American history, from Columbus to the signing of the Constitution, but with particular emphasis in the Lutheran school (in California, mind you) on the Pilgrims and various English explorers and (incidentally) pirates...because a fair number of pirates, particularly those of New Providence in the Caribbean (today part of Colombia) were Puritans, and in fact were a branch-off of the American Puritans, which included the Pilgrims and shit.

That summer, when a bunch of us went to a Christian camp up in the mountains we all had great fun singing "Yo ho ho it's a Pirate's life for me" because of that.

The next year, we moved and I switched schools to the same Catholic school a couple of my Mexican friends went to, I got a huge dose of the history of the Conquistadors and the Missions in California and, incidentally, Native American history as well, not only the history of the Mission Indians but also because that school had a fair number of Native students...mainly military dependents who had one or both parents stationed at either MCAS El Toro or MCAS Tustin.

For fuck's sake, I can still quote from Johnathan Edwards "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God" from memory, Colonial American history is like catnip to conservative Christians, I'm serious.

So it's really no wonder, especially considering the political situation in the UK right now, that yahoos like Madison Cawthorn are effectively saying they want to give it all back, with the accrued interest of 245 years of American expansion. 

That might conflict with his oath to the Constitution, though.

And since they couldn't find some way to get most of us to go along with their selling America out to a foreign power (though it was mainly the Russians, in real terms) Republicans tried to get Americans to ignore COVID-19 and hope it would go away...and all the evidence points to them doing this because they wanted even more people to die than actually did.

A year and a half into this thing, with the disease itself beginning to be under control in the United States, and they're still pushing this crap.

There's only one real problem with all that. It's their voter base that primarily believes them. Effectively, they've ended up killing one hell of a lot of their own people and they seem intent on killing still more. The general idea seems to be that they figure that way rich people will save a few cents on their tax bill or some such bullshit.

And there's still, after all this, people buying into this stupid, selfish ideology who are willing to throw themselves under the bus so rich people can pay a tiny bit less in taxes or whatever.

And of course, "Conservatives" justify this by insinuating to people that if they believe in it hard enough they might get rich too, or alternatively if it wasn't for [Insert out-group of choice here] they might be rich already, while making sure it's as hard as possible for people to get the education (and fat and happy on various forms of bread and circuses so they don't have the initiative) that they'd need to actually have the knowledge and the skills to become wealthy. 

And of course, education has its own way of undermining the current forms of conservatism that are in fashion, so there's that, too.

So Republicans want you to be dumb, poor and sick while having no faith in or knowledge of your own country (despite all their own jingoistic braying like jackasses) and for all intents and purposes they don't really seem to even care about their own professed religion except that they seem to want to usher as many people as possible into heaven or hell on their watch.

Democracy (and politics in general) is a numbers game and your power derives from the position you have, not the idealization that you want. Republicans seem to have the two confused, and along the way they've allowed their Party to become a home for every shitty ideology known to man and I'm sure they're working on concocting worse ones to justify the next wave of cockamamie bullshit already.

Of course this is what happens when you mistake memes (internet-based or otherwise) for ideas and don't investigate anything past how you initially "feel" about it. When you spend your life reacting to everything on a gut level, you're going to get some shit wrong.

But lately it seems that's all they do.

What's even the endgame here?

Note I ask this as a former Republican myself, I can't even recognize these people anymore.

Part Four.