If we lose freedom here...

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change. We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check; we've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can. ~Barack Obama

I saw this earlier.

There's a real issue that I have with Trump Supporters, and that is that they seem to believe that everybody who doesn't agree with whatever passes for a Republican party line right now (Read: Before Trump shoots off his mouth later tonight and changes it) is a Republican In Name Only, a traitor, who never really was one of "Us" to start with etc. etc. etc.

You know, first of all I came to an awareness of what conservatism was in the Reagan years. A lot of people in my family, who were Democrats, voted for the Gipper. There was a sense that, whatever our disagreements, we were all Americans and all on the same team. The far-right, the John Birch Society, etc. had all been banished to the fringe, where they would remain for most of my life so far. If somebody came around bitching about "Traitors" especially if they were talking about other Republicans or spouting conspiracy theories, you damned well knew you were talking to a nut.

We defined ourselves by philosophy and religion, variously resisting or cautiously accepting change, as Bill Buckley put it, we were the people standing athwart the flow of history yelling "Stop!" We lived in a world where Communism had been vanquished, where Nationalism had been crushed, where basic small-L liberal Democracy seemed triumphant and the people of the world collectively had American conservatives to thank for it. Sure, we had our problems. Newt Gingrich turned out to be a sack of shit, the apocalypticism of the Religious Right often bordered on ridiculous (and I say that as an End Times Prophecy guy who did his part to beat back a lot of the cockamamie bullshit that the nuts came up with.) And truth be told we were often frustrated with a world where, simply put, it wasn't popular to be a conservative. Hey, all these years later it turns out there was a reason for that.

And as I've written before, where I live was rife with militia bullshit back in the 1990's and frankly nobody who had a brain in their head that I'm aware of thought those people were anything but small-time criminals and terrorists. At the time, people like Newt Gingrich were always trying to brand Democrats as "The Enemy" and ramp up the culture wars but out here in the real world it wasn't like that. Plus I'd seen the end results of excessive ethnic strife, nationalism and right-wing political bullshit. Nobody at the time thought the Bosnian Serbs were the fucking good guys. 

I'm afraid to ask what these people think a loyal Republican should look like, or what they might consider acceptable in terms of debate or ideological disagreement. What are these people even loyal to?

Part of me is afraid I know.

When he was pulled out of hiding and arrested back in 2008, Radovan Karadzic had been making a living peddling alternative medicine woo woo bullshit for years. That should've been a hint of what was coming.

So, in terms of the American experiment, who's the fucking traitors, really? Quoting the Bible, Abraham Lincoln once said a house divided against itself cannot stand. Modern Republicans want nothing more than to divide even their own Party in the name of little more than feeling good about themselves, putting on a mask of smug certainty over shitty choices too many of them know they made.

They just don't care.

What has become of us, and I ask this as a former Republican? I used to be one of these people.

Nowadays, civil war talk, conspiracy theories and far-right extremism, medical woo woo bullshit, outright lies, survivalist woo woo bullshit and various crypto-currency scams are just par for he course if you're what passes for a conservative these days.

Hell, these people are so bitter they've even kicked Jesus and any theological hope of a better world out of their End Times narrative.

And some unnamed "They" supposedly hates somebody or other for it.

Hey, if somebody hates you for all that, maybe there's a damn reason? Maybe, just maybe, the problem is you?

Hmm, me personally I don't hate that, I just think it's pathetic. Josh Mandel was a Marine, he should goddamned well know better than this.

Anybody who's ever been anywhere near a combat zone knows the first thing to get trashed is likely the civilian power grid, there goes the meat in your freezer and your ability to access or use cryptocurrency, unless you're trying to live off the grid or with renewables as backups for when the power goes out. And it will/

Nobody should know better than this crap than a guy like Josh Mandel if he's the person he says he is.

But he doesn't, and he isn't...or wasn't...because his Word was never worth a shit to start with. His oath didn't mean anything when he took it, and he's hell-bent on seeing other Americans as the enemy. Next, he's going to want to go out and fight somebody, for no reason other than that's the end result of thinking you have to have a chip on your shoulder and a gun at the ready and being hellfire sure that somebody hates you for it.

I wonder, in 20 years when some cop pulls this motherfucker and whatever Russian agent he's screwing out of some third-rate safe house in the Central African Republic after he gets the conflict he hankers for and loses, just what kind of woo woo shit he'll be selling to pay the bills? 

I have to wonder how many people will die because of him and people like him wanting to do nothing but go out and fight their fellow citizens for no better reason than pure rage and spite.

I have to wonder who will be on peacekeeping duty on some grim morning in Texas, standing there in the mud and the rain while United Nations workers start to pick through the bones and try to match them to the names and faces of the missing?

And will any of these fucking people care?

Will they care about all the deaths? 

I doubt it. It seems like, to these assholes, three quarters of a million deaths from COVID-19 wasn't enough.

Will they give a shit that they'll have taken some part of the United States Of America or other and turned it into a charnel house and a failed state, while inflicting untold misery on the rest of it as we deal with trying to fix and hold together what they seem intent on breaking? And breaking it on purpose...because they are bound and determined to convince themselves that someone hates them and they want to go out and fight the whole damn world because of it.

How the fuck does any of this make any sense, even in their own heads?

What kind of shitty person do you have to be, to be absolutely goat eager to say "No we can't" because a Black man said "Yes we can." I mean, really?

And as far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what this comes down to, racism and stupidity. There's no damned good reason for it. These people are just mad because the world changed on them...when if you really look at it, they were too bitter, too caught up in their own bullshit, or too plain ass lazy to even bother to suggest a different way.

I think in a lot of cases, they just thought things would never change, that they would always have the power...so they did nothing, and certainly nothing fair or honest, to actually try and keep it.

Or maybe at some point they had the sense to know if they told us what they were really thinking, that they'd get told to shut the fuck up and maybe get somebody's foot broke off in they ass for their trouble. But of course Trump convinced these fucking people that, in effect, good was evil and evil was good. As a lifelong student of the Word of God, I just can't get past how these idiots didn't read the rest of the quote and see how that would turn out for them.

It never fails to amaze me, even in the middle of nowhere where I live now, it's nothing to go to the local small-town grocery store and see Black people, mostly young, true enough. But I can remember when one mixed-race family...a couple who'd met while serving in the Army and their two biracial daughters...was the extent of our local racial diversity in that town. 

And across from the grocery store I go to there's the local outfitter, bedecked with Thin Blue Line flags and Trump slogans where once there was Sierra Club signs and local hiking information to go with the guns and hunting gear. Apparently the place is under new management.

Where I live, for so long its own isolated space, looks pretty damned well exactly like the rest of the world now, for better and worse.

I prefer to face that and think "Yes we can" than try to change it back to some imagined ideal while screaming "No we can't."

If you want a better nation, you have to be a better citizen. Put down the fantasies and the apocalypse LARP bullshit and stupid culture wars and do your job as a fucking citizen to make this country better, and as a human to make this world better...or what the fuck are we even doing here?

I know what I was taught, and this? This ain't it, Republicans, not by a damn mile it ain't.

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