We live in an age of Republican Party sanctioned and encouraged vigilantism. Kyle Rittenhouse, the murder of Trayvon Martin, “stand your ground “ laws, concealed carry laws, etc are all designed to unleash right wing hyper masculine vigilantes on the nation, targeting black and brown people and black and brown protesters. It’s not just the despicable mentally ill Trump. It’s the white supremacist twisted notion of masculinity - guns, violence, cowboy take the law in your own hands masculinity- John Wayne replaces Jesus “christianity”.
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
There will be blood
Monday, November 22, 2021
When do we get to use the guns?
Two long time conservatives, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, have left Fox News in protest against the network’s top commentator, Tucker Carlson’s, dangerous upcoming propaganda “documentary" that will claim that the January 6 attempt to overthrow the election was actually a “false flag” operation conducted by Lefties to discredit Righties. This is just as preposterously stupid as the claim by Trump, and aided and abetted by the Right, that the election was stolen and the heroic Trump actually won in a landslide. (the Lefties tried to overthrow an election that they won? With the help of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Bobbert, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and a host of deplorables?? A claim that is just too stupid to comprehend)
This is the stuff of authoritarian fascist calls to violence. At a Turning Points USA meeting (pro Trump group) a question arose…
“When do we get to use the guns?”
In America.
In all likelihood the actual motivation of Carlson and the Republican Party with all of this stolen election, false flag nonsense is to justify overturning election results that go against them. And if a few people kill others along the way, and end up in prison for a few lifetimes, well, you know, that’s just the way it goes when you do revolutions.
By the way, since The Former Guy may well end up in prison by 2024, is Carlson running for Right Wing Authoritarian King? He is much smarter than The Former Guy, and is pretty famous, which is all that The Former Guy ever was – famous.
And also by the way, Rittenhouse got to use his gun, didn't he? Protecting property, don't you know.....................................??
Friday, November 19, 2021
Rittenhouse verdict
As has been said by many others, imagine if this had been a 17 year old black kid who came across state lines walking down a chaotic street with that weapon. What would have been his chances of surviving the reactions of the police that night? How about no chance in hell?
Saturday, November 13, 2021
Republican fascist death threats
We are living in a time of the violent rise of fascism. Republican Liz Cheney has had her life threatened because she voted to impeach the Former Guy. The thirteen Republicans who voted for the needed infrastructure bill have been under death threats. It is a lie to say that there are extremist equivalents on both the Left and the Right. There are extremists who are inflexible and didactic on the left. But They did not violently try to overthrow the government. They do not run the Democratic Party. They are not issuing death threats to centrist Democrats.
Liz Cheney- “ We now live in a country where members' votes are are affected because they're worried about their security, they're worried about threats on their lives.”
It has been said that if you wonder what you would have done in Germany in the early thirties, you don’t have to wonder. It is what we are doing now. Pretending it’s not so bad? Ignoring as much as you can and just smell the flowers? Hoping it will just go away? Vote for them anyway because you want tax breaks and deregulation? Shine an exposing light on the horrors trying to rally opposition? Using as much political, spiritual, and metaphysical energy as you can to bring forth the Light to create a decent, inspiring world?
Fascist threats of violence are here. Now. This is unAmerican and unacceptable. Let’s shine a Light and be a Light
Monday, November 8, 2021
Finally America passes a good infrastructure bill
- Roads
- Bridges
- Rail
- Airports and ports
- Transmission power grids
- High speed internet (broadband) in rural and poor areas
- Charging stations
- Water quality
- Environmental cleanup
- Weatherization
Saturday, November 6, 2021
Infrastructure spending is not socialism
When Republicans warn of socialism, they are not talking about actual socialism, which is an economic system in which the means of production, that is, the factories and industries, are owned by the people. In practical terms, that means they are owned by the government.
True socialism has never been popular in America, and virtually no one is talking about it here today. The best it has ever done in a national election was in 1912, when labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, running for president as a Socialist, won a whopping 6% of the vote, coming in behind Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. True socialism isn't a real threat in America.
What politicians mean when they cry “socialism” in America today is something entirely different. It is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when Black men first got the right to vote.
Eager to join the free labor system from which they had previously been excluded, these men joined poor white men to vote for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to work hard and rise.
Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting. But their opposition to Black voting on racial grounds ran headlong into the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, after it was ratified in 1870, gave the U.S. government the power to make sure that no state denied any man the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” When white former Confederates nonetheless tried to force their Black neighbors from the polls, Congress in 1870 created the Department of Justice, which began to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had been terrorizing the South.
With racial discrimination now prohibited by the federal government, elite white southerners changed their approach. They insisted that they objected to Black voting not on racial grounds, but because Black men were voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to Black people, since hospitals and roads would cost tax dollars and white people were the only ones with taxable property in the Reconstruction South. Poor Black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, "Socialism in South Carolina."
This idea that it was dangerous for poor working men to have a say in the government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the new factories. Like their counterparts in the South, they voted for roads and schools, and northern men of wealth too insisted these programs meant a redistribution of wealth through tax dollars.
They got more concerned still when a majority of Americans began to call for regulation to keep businessmen from gouging consumers, polluting the environment, and poisoning the food supply (milk was preserved with formaldehyde, and candy was often painted with lead paint). Wealthy men argued that any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man's liberty, while an army of bureaucrats to enforce regulations would cost tax dollars and thus would mean a redistribution of wealth from men of means to the poor who would benefit from the regulations.
Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers' government to life, Americans who opposed regulation insisted that their economy was under siege by socialists. That conviction did indeed lead to a redistribution of wealth, but as regular Americans were kept from voting, it went dramatically upward, not down.
Regulation of business and promotion of infrastructure is not, in fact, the international socialism today’s Republicans claim. According to Abraham Lincoln, who first articulated the principles of the Republican Party, and under whom the party invented the American income tax, the “legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves---in their separate, and individual capacities.” Those things included, he wrote, “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.”
Thursday, November 4, 2021
Running against the Former Guy only works against the Former Guy
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
The purpose of political lies
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you
believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a
people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is
deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and
to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”