Last Stand On Earth (The Marjorie Taylor Greene Post.)

I'm convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority. Very simply, they want to be left alone in peace and safety to take care of the family by earning an honest dollar and putting away some savings. This may not sound too exciting, but there is something magnificent about it. On the farm, on the street corner, in the factory and in the kitchen, millions of us ask nothing more, but certainly nothing less than to live our own lives according to our values — at peace with ourselves, our neighbors and the world. ~Ronald Reagan
 

I saw this last night.

The Twitter feed of some presumably-"Conservative"-run coffee company rooting for America to lose the next war because some NCO who was DM'ing dick pics is in the process of being held accountable.

That shit will get you fired from any workplace in the country, especially the military.

Last I checked, sexual harassment has been considered a serious matter in the military since at least 1991. It certainly was in my day. When I served, sexual harassment training was a thing. And guess what? Bigotry, discrimination, sexual harassment and stuff are all bad for military readiness and unit cohesion. I've sat through stuff like that in any job that I ever had long enough to get used to the schedule.

Tell me something, conservatives, when did we go from "Individual liberty, Limited government and Personal Responsibility" as planks of our ideology to "Bigotry, Hate and Unaccountable Power?"

And preferably unaccountable white male power, at that.

And the further "Right" the better...to the point where these people are looking at fascism in the rear-view.

I'm curious. Answer the fucking question.

When did '"Conservatism" take as its only goal "Absolute power over an illiterate, ravening mob and the elimination of everyone and everything else?"

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. Now, I can't say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood. We have government to ensure that we don't each one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves. But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are traveling the same path. ~Ronald Reagan

I find it interesting these days how "Conservatives" want...indeed have an absolute hankering for...a system where " tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood." is the entire basis of everything. And these fucking people's automatic assumption is that person will be themselves.

Like I said before it doesn't work that way.

But you can't tell these fucking people anything.

They seem not to understand that there's people in the world...hell people in the country...who don't know who they are and wouldn't be impressed with their bullshit. Lauren Hoebert doesn't seem to understand that her and the gun bunnies aren't going to be the ones running the neighborhood, or that if the shit ever really does hit the fan she will come face to face with men and women far worse than her most inflated visions of her own toughness. 

I'm a veteran, but I also I spent 25 years working in food service. In both contexts I worked with people from other countries. I've been around a bit myself. I worked with a lot of people who've been to jail in various kitchens too. You figure out, after awhile, who'd make it in the End Of The World or the Purge or the Zombie Apocalypse and who wouldn't. 

Spoiler: It's not the kind of people that "Conservatives" exalt. Being big, bombastic, mean and tough just makes your ass a bigger target for the skinny guy behind you who's holding the knife.

Lauren Blowbert, despite all her tough talk, ain't that person. She couldn't even finish high school for fuck's sake, you're going to try and tell me she has the guts or the follow-through to bring to heel tech companies that will send battalions of lawyers and lobbyists at her and her fellow Congress-people?

We live in a world, for good or ill, where many corporations have just as much money and power as governments do...and I feel like Lauren Q-Bert ain't the Alpha Bitch who'll change that, not for somebody like Donald Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene...and not when Facebook or Twitter can bust out with a platoon of lawyers and public relations people all pointing to longstanding patterns by these people of violations of the platform's rules.

And seriously, what ever happened to the old idea of "My house, my rules" which I was taught was a basic conservative idea? Let alone rule of law?

If you don't have the power to make your own rules in your own company or your own house without cutting a blanket exception for "Conservatives" what exactly do you have?

I'm pretty sure if you walked into McRib-Bert's restaurant, ordered dinner, ate it and then walked out without paying she'd be the first one to object and call the cops...if not go sprinting after you with her gun to take care of it her own damn self. So, why does she think that Twitter should be any goddamn different?

I'm sick of these motherfuckers demanding some sort of blatant hypocrisy loophole for themselves for basically every-damn-thing while demanding absolute power over others for themselves.

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.

I'm fairly sure when Ronald Reagan said that, he wasn't referring to conservative government, and I think he'd be shocked to find out that that's exactly what its turned into.

Modern "Conservatism" looks suspiciously like Communism, just without anything that helps the common person, like, at all.

And I think not just the Gipper but most of the old gray wrinkly-old-balls Republicans who taught the people of my generation what conservatism was would have some issues with a *Checks Notes* gay far-Leftist who lives in Brazil because he doesn't like America...yes, that's explicitly what Glenn Greenwald is and says he is...echoing the same talking points as somebody (Hell, anybody) who claims to be of their ideological lineage. I can tell you for a fact that the old NRA guy who had the "Charlton Heston Is My President" bumper sticker on his truck would have a few things to say about Glenn Greenwald. I would suggest that it would start with a bunch of anti-gay slurs, probably involve the word "Communism" and end with "Well if he likes it so much in Brazil, he can just stay there." 

I'm not saying it's right. Hell no, what I am saying is that's how it was and certain people were not welcome.

And that distinction wasn't based on color. but conduct...and while I never looked at it that way they would have very much lumped in sexuality with other aspects of personal behavior. I don't know if race wasn't as much of a thing back then or it was just under the radar at the time. I mean, shit, these guys loved them some Black Conservatives. My NRA friend thought Colin Powell should've run for President. These old guys, though? They would think Lauren Blowbert was only good for one thing and that thing would not have been being in Congress. 

Again, I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying that's how it was.

I'm also saying that if you were a conservative and you said in 1996 that America should lose a war because the military had sexual harassment regulations or the State allowed...indeed expected, as a rule...corporations to police their own spaces...you'd have got beat up and thrown out of conservatism on your ass.

These fucking people today? They believe that the only purpose of anything should be to amplify their hate, give them unaccountable power and allow them to take what was earned by others.

You don't have to agree with what conservatives were before all this, you don't have to like it, or how those people conducted themselves. But you should at least know...what I was taught was not this kind of garbage.

Modern "Conservatism" is against pretty much everything even guys like Ronald Reagan ever said. Conservatism these days is anti-American and it's becoming explicitly so, it's anti-Capitalism not out of concern for inequality...but because these people feel that things are not shitty or unequal enough.

They want to be able to do whatever they damn well please, Civilization be damned.

And then make sure that you can't.

These people, these so-called "Conservatives" would take what Ronald Reagan called the "Last stand of freedom on the Earth" and burn it down...for nothing more than personal and political profit.

And if some of these people, like the Tories in the UK or the EU's far-right, get what they want "Last stand of freedom on Earth" won't just be something that Ronald Reagan said in 1964, it may be true in 2024.

And again, all current American "Conservatives" seem to want to do is burn America down so that freedom has no home...in spite of literally decades of declaring that America was the exceptional beacon of freedom in the world...they're the ones who want to burn it down. Not the "Communists" Not the "Left" THEM.

And they're telling us this in real time, every day, thinking there will be no consequences.

But they get mad as all hell when one of their own faces even the slightest consequences for lying about a virus for over a year.

These people's only real ideology is Self and Selfishness.

If you can't stand up against that, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Stop granting these people their hypocrisy loophole and start holding them to account, or we're not going to have America for much longer.

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