If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan
Well let's see, it's been an eventful week or so, what with Republicans freaking out about Critical Race Theory (a legal-educational concept that's been around since the 1970's) and trashing the military (a, if not THE beneficiary of conservative "Support" until this last week) so, where does one even start with this shit?
Well then, I saw this post about Pat Robertson calling Critical Race theory a "monstrous evil" and even as he admitted that People of Color are oppressed, he seemed to be trying to justify that oppression by saying that if we try to study or understand structural racism in society and how it impacts law (which is what Critical Race Theory is) then something something Gazpacho white people will be the slaves.
In other words, this is the same shit racists have been saying forever, because their deepest fear is that they'll be treated the same way as they've treated other people.
For fuck's sake, Pat, why didn't you just come right out and say your wrinkly old ass is fucking honkey racist. I mean, Jesus, this shit is the same kind of bullshit that Southern Segregationists said about...well pretty much every advance by Black folks and other people of color until they were assimilated into the Republican Party and just stopped talking about it in public. Evidently, such discussions continued apace in private where moderate Republicans like myself who never bought into this racist bullshit were not included.
I'm going to level with you all here, if I ever said anything like this in my life, my Mom would've found out about it and beat my ass black and blue. Can't sit down for a week? Fuck, by the time she got done with me I wouldn't know what a chair was. I'm fucking serious, this type of shit simply was not tolerated in my family and it's not like we ever made any special effort to be anti-racist or educate ourselves on the topic. We recognized that this shit is, simply, wrong.
Racism. Is. Wrong.
Hell, even racists implicitly acknowledge this, not least when they get offended if you call them a racist. Hell even after fourteen years of this bullshit (counting from when the anti-Obama conspiracy theory shit got rolling) I've yet to meet a racist asshole who is proud of being a racist asshole.
It's almost like every last one of these motherfuckers knows it's wrong. They just want to do it anyway.
Humans are pretty much all the same within the constraints of biological sex and gender, acknowledging that the latter is fluid as a cultural, mental and societal construct that may not mesh well with who an individual person is.
And it's funny how conservatives, the supposed champions of individual rights, trip over that exact concept when the rubber meets the road. They only care about "Individual rights" when it comes to ownership, power, social dominance and wealth. They could give a fuck about individual rights if you want to live according to your gender or sexuality or be left alone by the State (and others) regardless of your color.
Indeed, according to modern conservatism "Just wanting to live your life" is something they seem to think should be a crime. In fact, these people act more like Soviet Communists, or The Party of Orwell's 1984 than the vaguely-libertarian conservatives I grew up around and who educated me. FOX News tries to make all these nuts who watch it feel like they're some kind of political insider, and that only goes double for Newsmax and OAN and all these nutty conservatives on social media. They seem to want people to believe that if only they believe it hard enough, if only they march in lockstep a little harder, they too could be having lunch with Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lard-Ass, all they have to do is believe.
Ever notice how nobody ever openly says what they believe, or what they want people to be marching towards? Well, I'm here to tell you, intentionally or otherwise, Pat "Crypt Keeper" Robertson just spilled the beans.
Bare minimum, Individuality for me (regarding things that I want) but everybody else is all the same according to how we want to classify them...is, at best, a shitty philosophy. That is especially understandable when you realize that people are pretty much the same wherever you go, and regardless of the country or the culture, political conservatives and religious nuts are very likely to be raging hypocrites with a fetish for use of force and weapons.
And I'll note that in a lot of the rest of the world, said fetish doesn't actually apply to the military or the police, which are seen as organs of the State (as they are, and should be) rather these fucking people like the idea of having their own guns to use to force others to do their will (which is also true of American conservatives) or they support forces which are, by definition Anti-government (as in the Islamic world in general, and places like Afghanistan right now in particular) at least until such forces become the government and do something they don't like. In other words, civilization is not usually a thing political and religious conservatives usually support unless it grants them totalitarian control of people's lives.
Of course, historically the desire of these kind of people for power and control never seems to be sated by simply having it, or going up to a certain limit and then saying they've arrived at their vision of an ideal society. This is why I've said these people don't want America, they want the Killing Fields with an Applebee's and a mall. If you don't think that a Khmer Rouge Cambodia type situation is what these people want; I give you the Trump Administration's COVID-19 response, 600,000+ dead people, and the fact that it's come out that when the George Floyd Protests started happening, Trump wanted active-duty military personnel shooting people in the streets until the Justice Department and the military basically told him to go fuck himself.
Trump didn't want America, he wanted a killing spree in his name, as always, the cruelty was the point.
Modern "Conservatives" don't want America, they want totalitarianism where you're forced to salute the flag with somebody holding a rifle pointed at you to make sure you do it just the right way.
And American far-right conservatives have finally figured out that the military is very, very unlikely to ever actually help them with that. I mean, I could've saved them the trouble and told them this 25 years ago
Nobody knows that corrupt, autocratic regimes full of morons with totalitarian aspirations end badly more than the United States Armed Forces does. We've evacuated enough of their former leaders under cover of night as defeat by the other side closed in, for fuck's sake, or helped the people who wanted to bust a cap in they ass and then given shelter to their disgraced relatives.
Funny how it seems like the only way to prevent that type of shit usually boils down to civilization, people having a say in their own country, and strong national governments that make a real effort to translate that say into national policy. In other words, civilization.
Just pointing a weapon at somebody doesn't usually really accomplish much of anything, you have to know what you're pointing it at and why, and often increasingly how to do so without incurring the wrath of domestic or even foreign public opinion or riling up other enemies too much. The General was right, increasingly, you have to be educated and well-read to be a soldier.
It wasn't any different 25 or 30 years ago and when people like George H.W. Bush and Tom Clancy were setting the tone this was pretty well understood. I mean, hell, Bill Clinton won the Presidency in large part by painting Bush 41 as an out-of-touch egghead, repeatedly smacking him in the face with "Read my lips, no new taxes" and playing the aw-shucks ignorant hick on TV that he was anything but in real life...only to have Bush 43 do the same type of shit to Al Gore eight years later, then in 2008 Barack Obama ran against John McCain only to be undone by Sarah Palin. The truth, however, is that all these guys were to one degree or another intelligent men who were well educated and well-read and who tended to make decisions, good or bad, on their interpretation of the actual facts as presented by capable advisors.
Modern conservatism doesn't even want conservatives to be educated, much less well read and there's no greater example of that than Lauren Boebert, who dropped out of high school and only got her GED when she decided to run for Congress. I think the downward trend started when Conservatism, Inc. functionally forced Mitt Romney to run against himself and his own previous record in addition to Barack Obama. The truth is, corporations, the donors, wealthy people in general don't seem to want people in government who are intelligent and can make the right decisions for the right reasons. They just want people to do what they're told.
And sooner or later unless this bullshit gets put in check "What they're told" is going to come down to "Kill people."
And at the end of the day, these fucking people don't need the State for that, not when they have a movement big enough to basically be its own country. Figure if they even get half the people who voted for Trump last year, that's over 35 million people and certainly enough for them to rip off a chunk of America for themselves.
Remember what I said about how these people basically want the Killing Fields of Pol Pot's Cambodia, but with a mall?
That could be the future of some part of the United States of America unless enough of us say no. Motherfucking One America News Now just came right out last week and said that's what they wanted. Note to the Appeasement Republicans and the Bipartisanship Democrats, you cannot appease, have things in common with or reason with people who don't think you have a right to exist. To say that these people are Nazis is probably a disservice to history. Left to their own devices these idiots would plumb depths that the Nazis barely scratched the surface of, and we'd best be aware of that. These people are moral bottomless pits, and they would sooner kill the world than be forced to face that fact, and they'd sooner destroy themselves than take any action to correct it.
The basic psychological tendency of sinful, unregenerate Man to view himself as the "good" guy in all circumstances, regardless of whether his actions are actually good or not, is one factor there. Another is decades of American exceptionalism, a philosophy concocted to try and prevent the least bit of examination of collective or individual circumstances by Americans. For a people so obsessed with relative status, we're far less interested in the actual status of other people than in our own usually wrong mental image of ourselves relative to our inaccurate mental images of others. The results, quite frankly, have been both farcical and very dangerous. Hundreds of thousands of people have "Owned the Libs" right into their own graves, now.
And all the guns all these people had didn't do them one damned bit of good. You can't shoot petty insecurities, racism or weaponized cultural memes that get people to destroy themselves...and, you'll notice, most of the people most affected by this shit, most of the people still dying are these fucking people's supporters who still believe all the woo woo bullshit.
And they don't care.
Because quite frankly, enough dead bodies can still wreck shit, and don't forget the cruelty is still the point. If you think these sociopaths care who they're being cruel to, you have another thing coming.
The people who thought this shit up, as represented today by Donald Trump, are even trying to use our own inflated national self-image and the multitude of exceptions we as a people like to grant ourselves to exempt our Self from basic decency as weapons to beat the actual freedoms, physical circumstances and standard of living...and in the age of COVID-19 even life itself...out of the average real live American person.
And around a third of us eat that shit up like hotcakes as long as we get to look down on someone else who's consigned to a worse form of peonage.
All too many of us are happy to sacrifice others to the Evil Elder Gods in the hope that we will be eaten last, it's a particularly banal and stupid form of cruelty that the people who are responsible for spreading it laugh about...
All the way to the bank in some foreign tax shelter of a country.
Republicans have basically become the very kind of people that Ronald Reagan, among others, railed against. Modern Republicans are all too happy to serve as the anti-everything puppets and petty satraps of exactly that "little intellectual elite" so long as they get their cut of the money and the power and a little racism doled out like drugs to a fucking street hobo.
And what's worse is this new "little intellectual elite," you know, the people like Peter Thiel and Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin, among others, isn't even American...and hell, neither are a lot of their wannabe petty satraps and warlords, look at Seb Gorka, for example. These people are from Australia and Germany (though holding citizenship in NEW ZEALAND) and Hungary and Russia and they all have designs on America for which they seek ways to avoid having to have the consent of its people, and they have the goddamned bloated perforated green-pus-leaking balls and grotesque purple priapism to fucking rail against "Globalism?"
FUCK YOU, dude, FUCK YOU. Are you fucking kidding me?
The situation we're in is fairly well critical.
But if you think Critical Race Theory is anywhere near the actual fucking problem, you'd best damned well learn what Critical Thinking is, and do some of it.
'Cause at this point, these people simply aren't going to get
all of America, too much has slipped away from them or was never theirs to start with, but they will almost certainly get somewhere. 1/6 failed, but if they try it again in some State capital where most people already vote their way?
It will almost certainly happen, and be followed by death, destruction, and war.
And when that happens, if you think the amount of anti-military shit being spewed out by Fox News and Tucker Carlson, or Newsmax or OAN is too much...you ain't seen
nothing yet. They will drag out every skeevy thing the US military ever did from Wounded Knee to Abu Ghraib and back again with detours to My Lai and Operation Ratline and you'd best be prepared for it. You think Tucker's smarmy mug is insufferable now?
I'm here to tell you these fucking people will positively radiate savage glee as they trash talk the United States Army National Guard and whatever active forces are supporting them, denying or minimizing their victories while showering the enemy with endless praise and sympathy, and anybody who's held accountable for this becomes an instant martyr as the Right is suddenly all about press freedom.
And they'll sing the praises of the Trump Lost Cause when they say it all could have been prevented, even as Russian-built T-72 Tanks sporting Confederate flags duke it out with Abrams and Strykers in the Kentucky horse country.
Right now there's wannabe-insurrectionists plotting the next op and, if caught, they'll try and say it was a joke like Blowbert did.
But this is a deadly serious matter, brought to you by people for whom history (their view of it, anyway) is likewise a deadly serious thing...because that's how they justified Segregation, and White Supremacy, and all the evils that went with them. It's how they still justify the white superiority that is the legacy of all of the above.
I know people, people whose ancestors were not even in this country when the Civil War was fought, people who aren't even all the way white their own damn selves (although, for the record, they ain't Black either) who know every local story of this or that local firefight between Confederate and Union troops that happened near where they live and all the atrocities that went with that war, and they will throw that shit at you like they hold a grudge about it personally.
Because they do, because they buy into Good Old Fashioned Prosperity Gospel Calvinism (or its more Unga Bunga and inconveniently mixed* bastard great-grandchild, Pentecostalism) or Movement Conservatism or Southern culture or some other such hoohah and ALL that shit has decided that America Is Inconvenient.
*Note: Pentecostalism, functionally, is a fusion of African Traditional Religion and Christianity no less than Haitian Voodoo is. Let's see some America First, racist White Jesus-following Redcap try and rationalize that shit!
(And they will!!)
[Yes, I get it, we're dealing with idiots here.]
From personal experience having had this conversation before and the only defense they have is just straight-up denial.
Shortly after that discussion, I gave this dude that I used to know my book about the Azusa Street Revival...which had a glowing Forward by Russell Moore, of the Southern Baptist Convention and anti-Trump fame...and he didn't talk to me for about a month after that, it was glorious. Should add that at the time, me and a whole bunch of his fellow Fundamentalist Christians had all ended up on the dude's shit list because we questioned some things, and that's the way it's gonna go for anybody who actually tries to reach or reason with these people on any level.
I did it for years. At best, it kinda worked, with some people. For the record, none of the ones it worked on were the rednecks who bought the whole narrative to start with.
A lot of people sit in the breakroom at their work reading the Bible, looking all serious not because they're really studying God's Word, let alone internalizing or memorizing its passages, but simply to be seen doing so, because that's what they think Righteousness looks like.
And that's what we're up against, people who deny even the basic purposes of the Bible even as they sit there looking so righteous pretending to read it. You think they haven't been doing the same with America and the Constitution and all that for all this time?
We got some real problems, and Critical Race Theory ain't one of 'em.
Part Six.
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