Strong Delusion (Left Behind Is A Lie, Again, Five.)

 Sunny Day

Sweepin' the clouds away
On my way to where the air is sweet
Can you tell me how to get?
How to get to Sesame Street

Come and play
Everything's A-OK
Friendly neighbors there
That's where we meet
Can you tell me how to get
How to get to Sesame Street/

~Sesame Street theme song.

I saw this in the morning when I was getting ready to go run a couple of errands.

Ted Cruz calling a Tweet by Big Bird "government propaganda" because PBS or whoever is using the Big Bird account to encourage kids and young people to get vaccinated.

As if Ted Cruz...who is probably even more of a fictional character than Big Bird ever was...wasn't an elected official in the same government that partially funds PBS and (less directly) Sesame Street itself.

You know, there's exactly two reasons Republicans have turned anti-vax in the last year.

#1 Republicans couldn't figure out a way to make sure they were the only ones getting vaccinated, nor a way to force other people to pay through the nose for it while getting it for free themselves.

#2 They discovered they could get anti-vax idiots to vote for them by adopting them as a constituency. Of course, this actually worked less well than you'd expect in terms of increasing their voting percentage because a large majority of those people were already Republicans.

And there's another factor:

#3 The majority of Republican elected officials, media personalities and power brokers above a certain level are vaccinated or can afford very expensive alternative treatments. They just want to convince other people to not get vaccinated.

It very much is "Anti-Vax for thee, but not for me" for both and neither of the reasons described above. If they can't be the only ones who are getting vaccinated or make other people pay out the ass for it, they're sure going to convince as many of their own voters as possible to kill themselves with medical woo woo and quackery in the hope that they can make a big enough pile of corpses to bury civilization under it, after which they imagine themselves seizing everything at gunpoint and ruling, effectively, as gods.

Of course the truth is, none of this works that way and not only a majority of the rest of us, but a decent percentage of Republican voters had the sense not to go along with this plan because most of us actually like living in civilization. 

Republicans, even the most pot-bellied suit-wearing soft-handed little shit-weasel who never handled a weapon more dangerous than a fountain pen or a kitchen knife in their lifetime all think if civilization goes down they're going to magically turn into Ahmed Shah Massoud fighting off Soviet divisions in the Panjshir Valley with nothing more than AK-47's, Stinger missiles and their own guts and raw courage while living on only roasted goats, bad water and harsh religious faith. Pro tip, yo. The Mujahids won because they had extensive American, NATO, Pakistani and Saudi support including the provision of some very advanced weapons (The FIM-92 Stinger missile system in particular) and vast sums of money.

None of that exists if the world has ended, at least not for long, anyway.

Ya know, I'd like to take a second here to point out that out of the people in politics who went over there and even got a little bit dirty...well, Charlie Wilson was a Democrat.

And again, Communism hasn't been a thing since 1989.

The average Republican, especially the average well-off Republican, thinks if civilization comes crashing down, they'll be the lord in the manor rather than the serf in the fields...or the catamite tied to the back of the truck living in fear of the next time the local Taliban commander gets a boner.

If civilization collapses they imagine themselves in the role of the Taliban in 1990's Afghanistan (but here, not there) and they absolutely had hopes of using COVID-19 to bring that about.

Didn't work, wasn't going to, and now they're left with using all the same bullshit to murder their own voter base in the hope that the rest of us will trip over the giant pile of corpses.

How somebody like Wendy Rogers squares that with her Air Force training or status as an elected official, not to mention being a woman who isn't chained to home and children...and all of those things require civilization to exist...I'll never understand.

And they consider the expectation of decent conduct, learning, reading, sharing and the simple act of giving a shit about other people to be "Communism." 

Ya know, I absolutely loved Sesame Street as a kid...and I was taught the same values at home and at school. I had ADHD and a learning disability, the former wasn't diagnosed until I was in the 5th Grade, the latter a couple years later and I was never on any medication for the former and accommodation for the latter consisted of "That's nice, do your homework anyway." So yeah, Sesame Street helped me (and a lot of other kids) learn to fucking read. 

My parents were moderate conservatives of the old conservationist sort, my Dad was a hunter and oh Lord he loved his guns and shit. We still listened to people like John Denver, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson and as a kid I got to visit plenty of Civil War battlefields and national parks and learned to care about the environment and nature and shit. I grew up on science fiction, especially Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek and Star Wars. Jacques Cousteau, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Nature, Sesame Street and Wild America...those were our PBS standbys and we watched them just as regular as we went to church on Sunday mornings. It wasn't even a question.

You bet your ass we thought we were gonna get to go to the moon someday our damn selves, and that it'd be no more of a big deal than flying from Detroit to Chicago.

Such beliefs, much less turning them into reality, require civilization and collective effort.

Bet your ass I got all my childhood vaccinations, too, and it wasn't even a question. Hell, I think people would've looked at you like you were nuts for even asking it.

That kind of small-c conservative or Republican is now mostly known as a Democrat, liberal or a political independent.

The average Republican these days sees their neighbors...and other people in general...as the enemy.

But ya know, I'm not going to soft-pedal this, it's actually way worse than that.

For example, take Theophilus here, so-called "Christian Traditionalist" apparently mad that Bert and Ernie are generally, in pop culture terms these days perceived as a gay couple.

Ya know, as I've said before I have a church background. This is neither Christianity nor traditionalism.

And I do in fact have some degree of knowledge concerning both of these subjects. "Traditionalism" these days doesn't mean you want to live according to longstanding traditions and be like maybe your ancestors were. No, it's most often a cover for base misogyny and being a raging dick bag.

And these people have no concept of "Mind your own business" or the Biblical idea of shaking the dust off your shoes and moving on.

Those being things I learned were part of being a Christian and a conservative. You're not going to change the world or make it be more Christian by being an asshole to people, and freedom in a general sense means that you have to live and let live. That's not something these fools understand.

Hell, I remember when the big argument about whether or not Bert and Ernie were gay was a thing back in the Aughts and I quite frankly didn't give a damn. 

But dude just has to use the occasion to get in some kind of a dig against gay people.

See what I mean?

It gets worse.

A brief investigation of this ass bag's timeline revealed there's a whole slew of "Christian traditionalists" supposedly-American monarchists, violently misogynistic assholes and Warhammer 40K fans who know fuck-all about anything but seem to like to dunk on the US military, particularly LGBT folks, POC and women that are serving.

Especially the Air Force, because a female F-35 squadron commander had the nerve to do a little dance and shake her ass a bit in a TikTok video or something.

And much anger about the fact that the USNS Harvey Milk was christened by a transgender person or something.

I lived in California in the 1980's. Who the fuck else did you think was going to crack that bottle of Champagne on the bulbous bow of a ship with that name?

Go ahead, I'll wait.

And all of this garbage is being egged on by fake accounts and obvious Russian bots.

I suppose they think their detailed knowledge of Space Marines vs. say, Eldar or Necrons gives them some sort of an edge? Fuck, I don't know. I can't fit my head far enough up my own ass to see these people's point of view and I'm not even flexible enough to try.

Like, seriously, what the fuck is even wrong with these people?

I'm quite frankly afraid to ask how they'd have humans in general conduct themselves, much less military personnel in particular. I have to wonder how much of it is over-compensation, because frankly the large pink animal on his Twitter bio strikes me as a little suspicious if he is what he says he is.

But with these people, it's always like that. They want to to have their actual perversions, but wish to deny LGBT people and others with normal desires and mindsets the right to do what (and who) they want. They want to have the power, and rub your nose in it. They want to be vaccinated, but then watch you have to die of disease for no better reason than they think they're better than you or me.

"Aristocracy and Monarchy" seriously bro, talk about missing the whole damn point of America. Then in the same bio he has the balls to call himself a nationalist and culturalist.

Not for American culture or nationhood, that's for damn sure.

These idiots don't want Sesame Street, they want the Avenue Of Splendors in World Capital Germania. Never mind that the Nazis fucking lost the war. They want to try again.

Right now, these people are the bleeding-edge, edgelord fringe. By next week, or next year, they won't be. And the simple reason for it is that the never-ending right-wing quest for a superior justification for greed, hate and selfishness will lead people to follow, and eventually to push these assholes out of the way and trample them in a quest to be even worse people.

In the Bible, in the book of Second Thessalonians this is referred to as a strong delusion.

And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:

Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,

And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:

That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

~2nd Thessalonians 2:8-12

And the worst part of this is these morons think it's the rest of us that are going to hell.

Seriously?

Sesame Street represents American values.

These people don't.

And that's what they're really mad about. The current anti-vaccine mania just gives them another excuse to be publicly mad about it.

But Sesame Street as a show was a strong supporter of public health and vaccinations when I was a kid.

What changed?

It sure as hell wasn't Big Bird.

Of course, at the time Republicans were not fascists or desperate to kill people because they think apocalypse or war will give meaning to their boring lives. Now, that's what they've become.

We as a people need to stop tolerating this bullshit.

If you want a better country...don't be these fucking people.

When are we, as a people, going to say enough is enough with this bullshit?

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

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