Republicans hijacking an attempt to help Americans who are starving or seconds away from being thrown in the streets to harass, demonize, and needlessly attack trans people is just a perfect encapsulation of this dreary, awful moment.
Again. There is no Republican Party. It is not a political party with a coherent ideology or any plan or intention to make anything better for anyone besides the wealthiest white few. Everything else is theater, performative, strategic theater.
The GOP has reached its ideological conclusion and only exists now as a festering fascistic movement that serves as the public face and organizer for the wealthy and powerful. There is no plan beyond dismantling government and targeting vulnerable populations.
This vapid, divisive, bad faith, sweaty aggrievement politics is all the GOP has, and that, coupled with weaponized conspiracy theories designed to misdirect anger from them and the people they serve, creates a toxic, poisonous, fascist stew.
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There is no Republican Party. The GOP has no principles beyond the pursuit of power, profit, and the dismantling of government for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.
They have reached the end of their ideological line.
I know a lot of people are desperately hoping Republicans will find their consciences, but there’s no *there* there.
This is a mass of boiling contradictions that seeks only power and can only communicate via rage and bloody oppression.
What we’ve witnessed, over the past few years, is the reveal of the GOP as a fascist movement to protect the white, wealthy, and powerful, an angry and violent rejection of democracy and human dignity. There is no saving them, there is no unity, there’s only avoiding tragedy.
If you find yourself incapable of criticizing any politician or any party or incapable of reading any criticism of any politician or party without turning to threats or accusations of conspiracy theories, you might need to step back, take a breath, and reconsider things.
I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but nobody is perfect. No political party is perfect. These aren't saints, they're people, powerful people, and speaking truth to power is absolutely essential.
This factionalism is extremely dangerous and counterproductive.
The Democratic Party is not perfect, and neither is Joe Biden. They come up short. And settling for that and aggressively defending them in the interest of "unity" or whatever trench-warfare nonsense is only helping to continue human suffering and tragedies.
What I've always found is that the assassination and dismembering of an American resident and journalist requires the release of a report that names the killer everyone knew was responsible and then do nothing else because you want to sell that killer weapons to use for killing.
I mean, really top-notch stuff. Posturing with the release of a report that just confirms what everyone already knows and what the previous administration just casually admitted and then being like, well, that's really all we can do. Good work, everyone.
Honestly, the last few years of American politics, domestic and foreign, has just completely pulled back the curtain and revealed just how inept, cruel, and craven the whole enterprise is. Rotten, down to the foundation.
It’s not a coincidence that our culture is just reboots and reimaginings, nostalgia acts and retreads, that all these entertainments are just recycling as fascism and the Gilded Age replay and we’ve lost the ability to imagine a different future.
There are plenty of malevolent people with visions of a future and designs for technocratic dystopias, neo-fascist states, illiberal sham democracies hiding corporate control, theocracies.
They can’t chart the course. We have to come up with something new and better.
There’s a sinister quality to nostalgia, and in an America that is struggling the act of harvesting it can both be comforting but also damaging. It can inspire fondness for “easier” times where oppression was hidden or focused, and it can be weaponized.
America is awash in conspiracy theories that threaten our safety because of unaddressed white supremacy and a culture that makes us feel powerless, alienated, and keeps us in the dark about the political and economic forces controlling our lives.
Awful tragedies and terrorist attacks in our recent history have been inspired by conspiracy theories and a culture that hides the actual machinations of power that dominate our lives, using simplified, weaponized explanations to redirect anger and cement control.
2.
This modern moment, both in terms of how our cruel, unequal economy works, and how our govt has been dismantled, has its roots in the 1980's, when figures like Reagan and Thatcher radically changed our cultures to make the wealthy and powerful even more wealthy and powerful