Mask Off (DixiePublicans, Yo.)

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

I wasn't going to write today.

But then, I saw this.

Lauren Hoebert literally calling Pro-choice protests an "Insurrection." Yes, this is exactly how much contempt Republicans have for you and your Constitutional Rights under the First Amendment.

Yet Republicans can try to literally overthrow our government and that's a "Protest?"

Seriously, fuck these bad-faith motherfuckers.

And then it got worse.

John Cornyn, literally trying to argue to Barack Obama that Brown Vs. Board of Education was a wrongly-decided case that somehow stripped rights from people. Mind you, that and the Civil Rights Act were what undid Southern Segregation.

What? The right of Black people to be treated badly by society and have to go to substandard schools, etc. etc. ???

That's not a right. That's not what rights are.

Cornyn just gave away the fucking game, he believes that he has, or should have, a right to discriminate against other people.

If you wonder why...why all this anti-abortion, libertarian, religious-right crap not to mention the constant glorification of the 1950's that's been going on my whole life...that's why. That right there. John Cornyn and most Republicans now living aren't in any mental or ideological space "Conservatives" else they'd have gone with the status quo which, at least for my whole life, has been civil rights.

Cornyn and a lot of those like him are Segregationists, and it's been very uncool to even think that, much less say it, for almost 60 years now.

 But literally everything that's driven Movement Conservatism for the last 60-70 years has been a reaction against not so much Roe Vs. Wade or Civil Rights or any of the stuff that's come up since...but a visceral, emotional reaction to the Brown Vs. Board of Education decision...and they have to go after all these other rights, first, because Brown is the plank they all stand on.

Oh, I get it, their excuse is they're just kicking these decisions back to the states.

States that, minus a few large or generally well-intentioned places like the West Coast states or the Northeast...either don't have the resources to do this, that and the other thing because they don't collect shit in taxes or they're actively trying to kill their constituents half the time with malice aforethought because Republicans.

Yeah, that's about how far I trust the chucklefucks in my state legislature and not just the Republicans, some of the Democrats aren't that great either. 

Also, and speaking as a former conservative here, I've never particularly trusted state legislatures with my rights specifically because states have a history of doing very fucked up shit. And not just in the South. Usually, it's the Feds who reign that in.

 This morning I went to the Farmer's Market with my Mom, basic uber-liberal retired social worker who was a Democrat (and specifically a Clintonista) for 15 years before I became one. She doesn't follow politics, she doesn't bring that shit up. She hates it when me and Pat (her partner, your basic conservative "Joe Manchin style" Democrat, an Army Aviation retiree and also a retired social worker) talk about this stuff.

And she brought up the Roe Vs. Wade thing, not me. She brought up that next Republicans will go after LGBT rights, People of Color, civil rights and things like Social Security. And she...knowing that I used to be a Republican...a source of cheerful disagreement in earlier times...said "Don't vote Republican."

And she sure as hell ain't wrong.

We went to the Farmer's Market...a space full of hippies and weird people selling baked goods, produce and various other stuff, and it was of course a happy, diverse space filled with all kinds of people, Capitalism, in its modern incarnation, yo.

But there was this one guy in a Trump shirt walking around with his dog and doing nothing but glaring at everybody...

Like how dare we even exist.

And that's the thing, as bad as the religious nuts or the segregationists are or would make things, you could go somewhere else and get out from under their power. That's what the Great Migration and all that stuff even was. That's why Chicago is so hated by These Fucking People, because it was a mecca for Blacks who left the South and a source of both information and resistance. The Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, was the paper of record for Black people in a wide swath of Southern states.

And there's those who would happily do worse that people like Clarence Thomas, John Cornyn or Sam Alito, because they won't bother with legal process, they'll just murder people.

Stuff like this is precisely why the Founders enumerated all these rights for us in the first place and set up our government the way they did. You may not like the way things are going, or have been for awhile, but our Federalized system prevents one major problem, as the Trump years and bungled COVID-19 responses showed it dilutes authoritarian horseshit: Autocracies, dictatorships and monarchies are very, very efficient at getting things done, especially killing people.

There's fucking people out there who are literally itching for just any old excuse to kill people, who literally do see any opposition to their evil bullshit as some kind of "rebellion" and anybody who disagrees with their fanaticism of the moment and their murderous hatred as an enemy to be enslaved or murdered, and increasingly these fucking people are just going completely mask-off and not even bothering with their shitty selfish religion and other assorted justifications.

And anybody who falls outside of that is expected to just meekly shuffle off and die quietly in the Outer Darkness. Time will come, I'm warning you, when that includes most conservatives, too.

And when these fucking people meet too much resistance to own the whole country, and break off a piece of America for themselves, that's who's going to dominate that space, the fucking wannabe murderers.

Because once these fucking people get their own space, nobody's going to have the guts to stand up to those who want to be killers.

But remember, it was basic Republicans who gave these fucking people and their racist hate a goddamned national platform in the first place...because they thought they could control these people and they'd crawl back under their rocks after they were done voting Republican.

But as you can see, those people didn't do that, instead they became Senators. And now people who think the Senators don't go far enough are actively going after *Republicans.*

And it will get worse.

Vote these fucking people out, all of them. And then be prepared to defend yourself.

It will come to that.

Either we all have rights, or none of us do. That's the whole damned point.

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen.

Слава Україна!

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.
I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran