The Definition of Ignorance

What actually is a dictionary? If we go by primary entry at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

1 : a reference source in print or electronic form containing words usually alphabetically arranged along with information about their forms, pronunciations, functions, etymologies, meanings, and syntactic and idiomatic uses.

A dictionary is not a work of fiction. It is not a narrative of personal conflict or derring-do or happy endings.

A dictionary is not an opinion piece, it is not a partisan or biased source of information. A dictionary relies on fact, on word origin history, usage, and common meaning; displaying known varieties of interpretations and even recognizing slang usage when appropriate.

A dictionary is a language tool, which teaches and reminds users of that language - in our case, American English - what we mean when we say and write things to each other.

And now in the state of Florida - where Republicans led by goddamned Ron DeSantis are waging a War Against Woke - the English Dictionary is getting banned in school libraries because God forbid it teaches our kids what the meaning of words like "Woke" and "Racism" and "Sexism" really mean. Via Gloria Oladipo at the Guardian:

A Florida school district is facing a federal lawsuit after it decided to remove copies of dictionaries, encyclopedia and other books because the works included descriptions of “sexual conduct”.

The Escambia county school district, located in Pensacola, Florida, removed several dictionaries and encyclopedias from school libraries after school officials determined that the books violated Florida law HB 1069.

The law, signed by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, last year, restricts access to materials containing “sexual conduct” in Florida classrooms.

During the district’s 2023 summer break, officials removed at least eight encyclopedias and five dictionaries...

Encyclopedias - like World Book and Britannica - are also basic research and reference tools that give summarized information about persons, places, and things. Publishers try to remove as much graphic information - and any kind of political or partisan point-of-view - from those works as possible, and STILL the goddamned GOP book banners went after them.

Alongside removing books like biographies of prominent African-Americans and women, these book-banners are taking away ANY kind of information our children need to learn things like actual language composition and literacy. These censors want to make every child - and soon, every adult - in Florida as book dumb and ignorant as possible.

Ignorant (adjective): 

1) a) : destitute of knowledge or education, an ignorant society

also : lacking knowledge or comprehension of the thing specified

parents ignorant of modern mathematics

b) : resulting from or showing lack of knowledge or intelligence

ignorant errors

2) : UNAWARE, UNINFORMED

The excuse by the book-banners is that they object to "questionable" words in the dictionaries and encyclopedias, as though learning the word "breast" or "penis" would turn eight-year-olds into sex perverts. But what they're really doing is taking away the sources that could teach those kids not only the using of those words but also their meaning, to where kids won't understand the concept of words like "slavery" or "feminism" and thus not consider them. To make our kids - our future adults - UNAWARE and UNINFORMED (and easier to lie to).

Along all the fiction books I read as a kid, when I was around 8 or so I also took the time to thumb through my mom's beat-up college dictionary to better understand the words I was coming across in the higher-level teen books I was getting into (the juvenile-level books kind of bored me at that age). This was when I came across words like "statutory" which described certain legal realities, because it used "statutory rape" as an example (and not in graphic detail). It clued me in to the meaning of the word "consent" and I grokked - yes, that IS now an accepted word, Mr. Heinlein - that certain behaviors were illegal (and morally wrong). THIS is how I learned words, I learned meaning, I learned period.

This is what George Orwell warned us about in 1984 - another banned work by the by - when he delved into how the Big Brother regime attacked language itself to control their nation. Concepts like Newspeak (invention of nonsensical words) to diminish the range of thought, along with Doublethink (self-deception by thinking and believing two contradictory ideas), all of which would lead to Crimethink (believing things heretical - "thoughtcrime" - to what Big Brother wants you to think).

This is DeSantis and his Florida Republican cronies going after ANY form of literary work that would dare give our children - ourselves - the ability to think, to comprehend, to express ourselves in ways HIS Big Brother regime doesn't want us to do.

DeSantis and the Far Right are terrified of those who don't think - and fear, and hate - the same way they think. So they're going out of their way to BAN such thought, to remove the tools we need to be our better selves and honest citizens of our state/nation/world. O'Brien would be proud.

There's only one word to describe DeSantis and his ilk:

Asshole (noun):

1) usually vulgar : ANUS

2) a) usually vulgar : a stupid, annoying, or detestable person

b) usually vulgar : the least attractive or desirable part or area —used in phrases like asshole of the world

We'll go with the number 2a) definition, please and thank you.

Who Run Trumptown?

Over at the Washington Monthly, David Atkins has kind of figured out the same thing I figured out back in 2015: The modern Republican Party is terrified of and yet still panders to the rage and racism of their Far Right voting base.

Trump is not just a danger to the country and an embarrassment to his party. He is also a proven electoral liability, having weighed down Republican fortunes in the last three election cycles. And yet, his legal problems have only elevated his positioning in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the rest of the field. Even though the party leaders know Trump is a liability, they remain silent or vocally defend him.  

A normal, rational political party would jettison Trump and find a more reputable champion for its policies. But today’s Republican Party is not normal. It has seemingly abandoned basic political reasoning and lost its self-preservation instincts. Conventional wisdom in political science says the party decides who its nominees will be. But who makes the decisions in today’s GOP?

One answer is that Trump is in charge, singlehandedly bending the party to his will and putting his self-interest ahead of the party’s. But this explanation fails to explain why most influential conservatives and Republican leaders don’t try to change this dynamic.  

More importantly, it misreads Trump himself. The man has bigotries, manias, and obsessions and has done much to imprint them onto the Republican Party. But he is more a sheep than a shepherd. His fervently held opinions reflect what he last saw on TV or social media. He usually agrees with whomever he spoke to most recently...

It's not so much that donald trump is in control of the GOP: It's that the only type of leadership the GOP voting base will respond to are those who will pander and instigate the same ways trump does. Watch how DeSantis is doing his damnedest to punish immigrants and attack liberals over "Woke" issues. He's doing the best trump impersonation he can, if not to usurp trump's position but to fill the void when trump eventually falls. 

His criminal indictments may eventually doom trump, but the specter of trumpism is now embedded into the Republicans' collective psyche until the party itself crashes and burns. In short: For the Republicans it's now trumps all the way down.

Feeding into that doom is a Far Right media industry that profits immensely from their constant fearmongering to keep the MAGA voters entranced and enraged. But that very pandering makes that media terrified of losing their audiences, which drives them into self-inflicted damage like the Dominion defamation lawsuit:

Fox News and other conservative media outlets are often credited with being the real leaders. There is something to this: Republican politicians are far more afraid of Fox News personalities than vice versa.  

However, one interesting result of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit was the revelation that Fox News is terrified of its own viewers. Fox News executives feared that if they failed to toe the line on Trump’s lies about the election and many other issues, their viewers would abandon them for competing far-right TV networks Newsmax and One America News Network...

It doesn't help that Newsmax is facing their own lawsuits on the matter and could well be forced to stop pandering to their viewers... but that would kill off their audience and their profits. They're now stuck in that Catch-22 as well.

Nor are the billionaire GOP donors really in charge. The famed Koch network pulled its support from Trump long ago and has launched a so far unsuccessful campaign to defeat him because they believe he cannot win a general election. Newly empowered MAGA politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are not darlings of the donor class, who prefer less overtly divisive candidates who will cut taxes for the wealthy without disrupting global trade.

The deep-pocket donors are stuck because they have nowhere to go to deny or delay a Democratic Party that would likely end their tax cut cash grabs and regulate their capital gains to - gasp - help the poor. They could afford to start a third party, but they don't have enough gullible candidates to put on the ballots to replace the existing Republican Party, and any splitting of the ballots could either give the Dems more legislative control or worse let trump back in the White House where his misrule would lead to global economic chaos.

As Atkins concludes, the Republican Party leadership created a monster in their lab: An unthinking, ill-informed voter base driven by decades of Culture War insanity to act with malice towards "the Dread Other" to where they can't dial it back. All that fear and hate the Far Right media - pushed by GOP officials to win elections for offices they can't govern - sold in the public forum were like drugs, addicting that voter base. And like any addict, the Far Right voters need stronger and bigger doses to feel the same highs.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the GOP base is in control of the party. Trump succeeds because he appears to be one of them. He vents their rage, watches the same television, shares the same vitriolic personality, and wears the same hatreds. He is less their leader than their reflection. Fox News is expert not at manipulating the base—though its editorial choices do certainly accomplish that to some extent—but at stoking its outrage. Big donors don’t so much generate the passions around which the base revolves as they help provide the financial fuel to turn those passions into electoral victories and legislative action...

It's all one big circle jerk: The billionaire donors keep feeding in the money to the wingnut media who gives trump every outlet to spew outrage and keep the audiences fired up as raging hate machines. It's just the group behind the wheel of this clown car are now the MAGA voter hate addicts. Everyone else in the GOP are hanging on in the back seats for dear life.

The problem is that in our skewed two-party electoral system of Winner-Take-All and partisan epistemic bubbles, we face the dangerous reality that the MAGA voter hate addicts can end up driving the national bus, and drive us all over the cliff.

For the love of GOD, to everyone else NOT in the MAGA bubble, please stop voting Republican. It's the only honest way to end their cycle of self-immolation and even help them recover to some semblance of Eisenhower normalcy.

The Threat of Another War Of The (MAGA) Posers

Update: Thank you again to Batocchio at Crooks & Liars for including this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment here! Also, go back to the Round-Up and leave a tip, y'all.

Now that the House Republicans are entrenched in Congress, the crazy talk has gotten worse. The fearmongers among the MAGA caucus are openly talking "National Divorce" to separate the Red States from the Blue States. Where Marjorie Taylor Greene (aka MTG (or Empty G)) is happily pushing the idea that there should be permanent division between the states, even as we try to pretend to still be a United States of America as a nation.

There are layers to this bullshit. For the most part, this is Greene basically virtue vice signaling to her insurrectionist MAGA allies that their Culture War "owning the libs" is ongoing. Actual secession - as I and others have noted already - is a goddamn pipe dream that could never work.

But on the other hand, Greene is treading on dangerous ground: She is openly calling for an act of national division that historically leads to violence - every civil war that humanity ever inflicted on itself regardless of nation - and will likely trigger bloodshed no matter how she and her cohorts try to shill this.

Tom Sullivan over at Hullaballoo references what David French at the New York Times thinks of what Greene is calling for, and Sullivan takes a closer look to what the Far Right wingnuts are doing with their rhetoric of division:

French critiques Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s proposed “national divorce” in light of the last attempt at one in the 19th century. Yes, it’s unworkable. And yes, it’s insane. But what’s sanity got to do with it...?

Sullivan quotes French directly:

I’m haunted by James McPherson’s account of the prewar period in his seminal work, “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.” Describing the South in the run-up to secession and war, he says it was possessed by an “unreasoning fury.” The immediate cause was Northern celebration of John Brown, the abolitionist who attempted to provoke a slave rebellion by seizing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.

In McPherson’s account, Northern support for Brown’s cause “provoked a paroxysm of anger more intense than the original reaction to the raid.” Southern paranoia was so profound that Texas’ secession declaration even included claims that Northern “emissaries” were distributing “poison” to slaves for the purpose of killing white citizens.

The South separated from the North and started a ruinous and futile war not because of calm deliberation, but rather because of hysteria and fear — including hysteria and fear whipped up by the partisan press.

So my question is not “Is divorce reasonable?” but rather, “Are we susceptible to the unreason that triggered war once before?”

This is where the decades of Far Right Media - hello, Fox Not-News! - actively misinforming and fearmongering towards their conservative audiences, building up the mindset not only that Americans are divided by Left and Right but also the divisions are unreconcilable. Back to Sullivan:

The fever that spawned the Jan. 6 insurrection has not ebbed, French writes. CPAC may be a shadow of its former self, but the froth of the authoritarian fanboys remains. The demographic shifts fueling their hatreds is not going away. Greene may be clownish, but the audience for her nonsense is serious...

Animosity is so entrenched (stoked daily by right-wing media) that I wonder if even an alien invasion could mend our fences...

Just look at how our nation is responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most Americans actually support Ukrainians' efforts to repel Putin's war of empire-building; but the Far Right leadership and media outlets in America are siding with Russia, claiming Ukraine is at fault, and accusing Biden and Western Europe (NATO) of using the conflict as a proxy war to push global liberalism. If the aliens from Independence Day 1996 showed up, the Far Right media would likely call on the aliens to blow up the White House while Biden was still inside it.

This Republican-pushed Culture War is one not based on facts: It is a war based on grievance of privileges lost (or about to lose), based on fear determined by racism and sexism towards ethnic minorities and women. It's a war based on fantasies derived from Atlas Shrugged and Turner Diaries, where "manly Christian men" rise up against emasculating Godless librul elites to destroy the corrupt world in order to build a new Utopia on the ashes of the old.

You can see it in the "Alpha Male" social media bullshit, in the never-ending ragefests at their conservative confabs, in the nightly railings of Far Right pundits shilling nightmare stories based on rumor and conjecture and not a lick of fact.

If there's any good news, it's that a majority of Americans - regardless of the Red or Blue states where they reside - will not succumb to the calls of violence and secession that the Far Right are making. Whatever fantasy MTG has about a "National Divorce," it will not be a clean split by state because even the deepest Red State (okay, maybe not Wyoming) has a Blue urban metropolis (Texas and Florida have several) that would resist and secede themselves to stay with a Blue United States (Think what will happen when Texas tries to leave only to have Houston, San Antonio/Austin, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and El Paso - four of their major tax bases - refuse and demand their own statehoods with the USA).

As the recent poor showing at the CPAC convention this weekend proves, there's not a sustainable audience for Far Right outrage (It didn't help that scandal with the organizers scared half the GOP leadership away). While millions may have voted for donald trump in 2020, only mere thousands showed up for his January 6th Insurrection. Most Americans do not have the desire to inflict violence against their neighbors.

That's the good news. The bad news is that there ARE enough Americans among us who ARE willing to be violent towards their neighbors. As every mass shooting teaches us - almost every day now - all it takes is one wingnut Angry Guy with a military-grade assault rifle to break (or worse, destroy) a community.

This is not going to end well. At best, we need to remove the insurrectionists and secessionists from office as soon as possible. We still need to prepare ourselves for the violence that's sure to follow when those secessionist decide to make their bloody fantasy their reality.

Gods help us.

Escalation and Evasion

Over the weekend, the Republican War on Everybody escalated when a deranged man - prodded on by years of Far Right demagoguery - broke into the California home of U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and physically attacked Nancy's husband. The details are not pretty. Quoting from Nicole Narea's reporting at Vox:

It’s now clear the speaker was the target of Friday’s attack. The assailant broke into the home looking for her, reportedly shouting, “Where is Nancy?” — echoing what insurrectionists called out when they breached the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 — and saying that he would wait “until Nancy got home” as he confronted Paul Pelosi. The speaker’s husband suffered a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands that required surgery after the assailant bludgeoned him with a hammer. The attacker faces federal assault and attempted kidnapping charges.

It gets worse, because the bastards who pushed the violent rhetoric are now (of course) evading their accountability, blaming it all on the victim, blaming it on "urban crime," blaming it on everything but themselves:

Republicans have dismissed any connection between their rhetoric and the attack. Instead, they’ve blamed Democratic policies on crime and suggested that growing political violence may be the result of general anxiety around election legitimacy. Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO who was cheered by Republicans when he bought Twitter last week, has advanced a right-wing anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory around the circumstances of the attack. Though he deleted his post, it remained on Twitter long enough to be amplified and repeated by many on the Right...

The conspiracy rumors hinged on the Far Right's homophobia, and was utterly unproven, and yet for days the Republican Party leadership and their Congressional candidates made jokes and insults at the Pelosi family's expense.

Never mind the reality of what investigators got out of the attacker's statements to the police. Via Julia Jacabo at ABC News:

The suspect accused of attacking Paul Pelosi told authorities he wanted to break Nancy Pelosi's kneecaps to show members of Congress that there are "consequences to actions," according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court Monday.

The new revelation came Monday as the Department of Justice filed federal charges of assault and attempted kidnapping against the man suspected of attacking Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, last week...

(The accused David) DePape was charged with one count of assault of an immediate family member of a United States official with the intent to retaliate against the official on account of the performance of official duties, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. He is also charged with one count of attempted kidnapping of a United States official on account of the performance of official duties, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison...

The attacker reportedly broke into the house - it remains a huge question why the Speaker's home didn't have tighter security - and confronted Paul Pelosi with the same threats and challenges that the Insurrection rioters on January 6th were chanting. DePape was caught with the same zip ties the rioters carried with them in case they caught themselves any congresscritters that day, and DePape had even bigger plans than just assaulting Speaker Pelosi (back to Jacabo's report):

DePape allegedly later told officers "that he was going to hold Nancy hostage and talk to her" and that he wanted to use the House speaker to lure another unnamed individual, the affidavit states.

The suspect also allegedly told investigators that he intended to break Nancy Pelosi's kneecaps if she didn't tell him the "truth" about "lies told by the Democratic Party" and said she would have to be wheeled into Congress, therefore showing other members of Congress that there are "consequences to actions," according to the criminal complaint...

DePape's agenda was to intimidate and injure a sitting Congressperson, especially the House Speaker who is technically the third-most powerful person in the federal government. He was motivated by the anger and ambitions that the Far Right have been openly screaming - to hunt liberals, to punish Democrats - for almost 20 years. And he hoped to target someone else higher on the GOP's Hit List than Pelosi herself.

This is where we are in the violent rhetoric constantly drummed and shouted through the televisions and video clips of the Far Right media. The George Tiller Effect in full display, where the demagogues on Fox Not-News push their Narrative of "Evil Democrats" that deserve punishment, and who then sit back and let their foot soldiers among their audiences do their dirty work for them.

And when presented with the evidence, those same demagogues laugh it off, claim "it wasn't us," and nowadays even joke about the damage done in their name.

Gods help us. This is a clear example of stochastic terrorism - the violence of extremism - and the Far Right fearmongers are going to keep escalating even as they evade accountability.

It won't be just the congresscritters next time. The goddamn wingnuts of the Fox-watching Proud Boys/Oath Keepers brigades are going to target ordinary Americans on a bigger scale than before, all because they were told to. And all because they can.

Imposing Silence Against Racism And Our Nation's White Boy Sins (w/ Update)

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this article on Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment - I know the security is a hassle but I need to filter out the Chinese spammers...)

Saying this up front: The Republicans are doing this out of fear.

It's been an issue simmering for some time but ever since the George Floyd verdict and the ongoing struggle of the Far Right to rail against anything that paints them in a bad light, the Republicans have declared WAR on Critical Race Theory and are banning its teachings in public schools. Especially here in goddamned Florida under the faint-hearted eye of Gov. DeSantis (via Julia Craven at Slate (paywall warning)):

On Thursday, Florida’s State Board of Education voted unanimously, at the behest of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, to ban lessons that employ critical race theory (CRT) or the New York Times’ 1619 Project from schools. The vote aligns with initiatives in several other states such as Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Iowa. 

Florida’s amendment takes an existing rule saying instruction “may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holcaust” and adds “slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country...”

While that reads as though the Board is protecting teachers to teach on those matters, the ruling actually bans them from using any materials from the award-winning 1619 Project, which had studied the impact of racial slavery since the British colonial era.

Even as it bans specific themes and texts, though, Florida’s amendment doesn’t define exactly which historical or factual claims are off-limits.

CRT is a decades-old set of ideas from the legal academy, which began to be a low-grade source of right-wing panic about racism during the Obama administration. Since the anti-racism protests of 2020 and the end of the Trump administration, though, it has rapidly become an all-purpose term to attack any sort of discussion of the history or current conditions of racial inequity in America.

Nothing academically recognizable as critical race theory is currently being taught anywhere in Florida, according to officials who spoke with the Miami Herald. Yet DeSantis has continued his campaign against it anyway, telling reporters last month: “You teach the facts. You teach everything that has happened. But critical race theory is basically race essentialism. It teaches people to view that as the most important characteristic and obviously, if you are of certain races—Caucasian or whatnot—they view that in a negative light.”

It's not even being taught at the public school level - it's primarily discussed in law schools - but DeSantis and other Republicans are still acting terrified that something like it will trickle down into the regular history classes as more studies on racism's impact on our history become commonplace.

As the Florida law demonstrates, the goal of the anti-CRT effort is put the analysis of ongoing racism out of bounds—to treat any inquiry into the material inequities that define the color line in America as something equivalent to Holocaust denial, and to reframe discussion of ongoing injustice as an insult to “white persons.” Other campaigners go as far to equate CRT with Marxism, as if a true accounting of racism in America were somehow going to upend capitalism. Such intentional misreadings allow conservatives to create a dichotomy where considering how racism shaped the country is unpatriotic and anti-American...

What is REALLY happening here is that DeSantis - by forcing the state to impose these restrictions on our schools - is setting the foundation for ANY parent aggrieved and upset about Whites being labeled "racist" can sue to stop ANY class discussion about racism in our nation's (and Florida's) history. The matter may not directly be Critical Race Theory, but if the parent gets one whiff of "oh my God this makes my White ancestors look bad" they will go ballistic and use this ruling to shut it down.

What DeSantis is doing is literally whitewashing our history to make it look clean and happy and "oh, don't you mind about the decades of lynchings and centuries of abuse" and every other thing Proud White Boys don't want to worry about. The excuse that "making Whites look racist is a Marxist attack on THE GOOD OLE USA" just also happens to be the same damn excuse throughout the 20th Century for racists - from the Dixiecrats of yesteryear to the trumpian GOP of today - to ignore the damage they've done and are still doing. 

If you follow my blog, you got to have read Ta-Nehisi Coates at some point. His tenure at The Atlantic covered a lot of ground in researching the impact racism had to our history well into the modern era. His articles on redlining - the push by banks and realtors to undervalue Black housing and overvalue White neighborhoods - and his argument in favor of reparations to redress that damage are must-reads of the last twenty years. This is the kind of thing DeSantis and other Republicans would be terrified of seeing taught or discussed in our schools, because GOD FORBID Coates' work highlighted how racism was actual policy pushed by Whites in political and financial power.

If you grew up in Florida, you may have heard about Rosewood. Most likely you hadn't, because it's not often taught in our schools here. I didn't learn about it in the state history book I read back in third grade: I read about it in the 1982 St. Pete Times articles instead. It was through the newspapers I learned about the white riot that burned an entire Black town down, killed dozens and drove the survivors to flee halfway across the state... all because a White woman lied about getting assaulted by a Black man.

Do you think if a teacher started teaching Rosewood in a Clearwater high school classroom that DeSantis is going to allow that to even be discussed? It could all bring up stuff about RACISM that will offend the overly sensitive Whites...

Note: Yes, I am White myself. I'm just not a goddamn whiny bitch about it. I know racism exists and I've seen the damage being done right now and we ought to be FIXING THESE DAMN PROBLEMS instead of sweeping it all under the goddamn rug like we've done the last 150 years.

If you watch the history of how history is taught in the United States, you will notice a pattern: the Far Right - the ultra-religious, the ultra-patriotic, the ultra-assholes - will insist that history ALWAYS preach to the greatness of our nation and the proud heritage of what being an American should be. You'll notice those same people will quickly ignore, denounce, decry, or embellish any of the dirtier parts of our nation's start and growth - the chattel slavery of Blacks, the Trail of Tears and other forced relocations of Native tribes into harsh reservations, the anti-Chinese riots, the anti-Mexican animosity - because they don't want to be reminded that their cozy wonderful lives were all built on the pain and suffering of others who just happened to be Black/Latino/Asian/Other.

These are the same people who tried to shut down AP History exams in 2014 because they feared those classes would teach kids to be "Un-American" due to all the racism being discussed. 

The Far Right - the ignorant and ill-informed Republican Party from the lowest member to the fearful Governors right up to trump and Mitch and the Fox Not-News propagandists - don't want anyone to really see the warts and bruises of our American History: Because that might compel our nation to seek repairs, resolve old issues, heal old wounds... the same issues and wounds the Far Right twists into self-victimization of themselves in order to fearmonger to their audiences.

The goddamned Far Right would rather preach mythology than cope with the facts. They would impose silence where they cannot convince, and they will enforce their character by the sword of liars instead of the facts of history.

And that plays into that goddamned adage: Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. But the Republicans WANT that, they want us to repeat the same mistakes because it keeps them in power. They want us to stay racist and broken, because it profits them to leave our nation that way.

We need to learn from our mistakes, we need to learn how racism hurt our nation, we need to comprehend how that racism keeps us weak not proud. We need to rebuild and become the stronger just nation our history bends toward.

We need to tell DeSantis and his fearmongering kind to go away. They're not protecting America, they're defending the soft weak worries of racists. Go away, you hypocrites and ignorant. We got better work to do.

Telling Me I Got to Beware

What a field day for the Heat/
A thousand people in the street/
Singing songs and a-carryin' signs/
Mostly say "Hooray for our side"...

-- Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"

Let me throw up a couple of links here, first from Evan Donovan with WFLA back in April:

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 1 at a 10 a.m. press conference with Florida lawmakers and law enforcement officials at the Polk County Sheriff’s Office’s headquarters in Winter Haven. He did not take questions after the signing.

The law went into effect immediately.

The legislation, nicknamed the “anti-riot bill,” was first filed in the Florida House of Representatives in early January, and passed the Senate on Thursday evening.

The bill, which covers 61 pages, makes several changes to Florida criminal and administrative law, and will:

Make it more difficult for cities and counties to reduce funding for law enforcement, allowing local elected officials to challenge those budget decisions, and giving the state power to approve or amend the local budget

Allow those local governments to be sued if they fail to stop a riot

Define “riot” as a violent public disturbance involving 3 or more people acting with common intent resulting in injury to others, damage to property, or the imminent danger of injury or damage

Enhance penalties for people who commit crimes during a riot

Create a new second-degree felony called an “aggravated riot,” which occurs when the riot has more than 25 participants, causes great bodily harm or more than $5,000 in property damage, uses or threatens to use a deadly weapon, or blocks roadways by force or threat of force...

If you don't see the horror of any of that, try to imagine for example hanging out in a group of three people walking down the street minding your own business until a cop car pulls up and the officers accuse your little group of "acting with imminent intent to cause injury or damage." It'd be your word against the cops, which is too bad for you because you're getting tasered, handcuffed, jailed, and/or shot for it.

Imagine you're a city manager who suddenly has to deal with a street protest because a local cop shot an unarmed Black kid. Now you fear your city getting sued by your business owners even if a window gets busted, so you're pushing your law enforcement to crack down harder than ever to show you've done your job. There's no carrot here, only the stick swung by state Republicans to make sure no city takes the "soft power" approach of resolving a protest.

This isn't even the worst of it. Here's additional details from Steven LeMongello and Gray Rohrer with the Orlando Sentinel:

But opponents say it would make it easier for law enforcement to charge organizers and anyone involved in a protest, even if they had not engaged in any violence.

“The problem with this bill is that the language is so overbroad and vague ... that it captures anybody who is peacefully protesting at a protest that turns violent through no fault of their own,” said Kara Gross, the legislative director at ACLU Florida. “Those individuals who do not engage in any violent conduct under this bill can be arrested and charged with a third-degree felony and face up to five years in prison and loss of voting rights. The whole point of this is to instill fear in Floridians...”

The law, which goes into effect immediately, grants civil legal immunity to people who drive through protesters blocking a road, which Democrats argued might have protected the white nationalist who ran over and killed counter-protester Heather Heyer during the Charlottesville tumult in 2017. It also makes blocking a highway a felony offense...

Hitting protesters with cars is a common tactic for the White Power wingnuts who show up to counter-protest and get their scalps. Florida just gave them all a goddamn hunting license.

So not only are DeSantis and Florida Republicans making it easier to arrest any group of minorities under any circumstances even when there's no riot actually happening, the sadists are going to make it easier for trump-worshipping wingnuts to commit Vehicular Manslaughter if they "fear" three people walking across the street intersection are rioting. This is akin to Stand Your Ground, which is still a terrible law. Only now you can use your goddamned coal roller truck to do so.

/headdesk

None of this is about the safety of the general public. ALL of this is geared towards stomping on the powerless who have only public protests as a means to address problems and demands that our governments do something to fix things.

This is a straight-up attack on the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

DeSantis claims this is about shutting down violent riots. It's not. This is about turning every protest especially the peaceful ones into a riot so he and his law enforcement buddies can throw everybody into jail.

Republicans don't want to hear from you if you got a problem. Florida Republicans don't think any protest is a peaceful assembly (unless it's their own side staging an insurrection in trump's unholy name). These godless wingnuts want to shut down the freedom of speech of those who have every reason to speak out against injustice.

There is nothing legal in these anti-riot laws. Because these laws turn everything into a riot in the Police State's point of view.

Gods help us.

The Republican War On America Isn't Over Yet

(Update 3/5: Batocchio has once again offered this article on Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Welcome to all new visitors, please leave a Comment)

I am seeing of late various post-mortems about the evermore-Right-Wing Republican Party, either in their death throes or close to it. For example, this bit in the Atlantic (behind a paywall) from Tom Nichols:

Ironically, the GOP is indeed replicating another political party in another time, but not as the heroes they imagine themselves to be. The Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.

I can already hear the howls about invidious comparisons. I do not mean that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes...

The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be whatever Comrade—excuse me, President—Donald Trump said it was.

Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among his supporters. If the Republicans could create the rank of “Marshal of the American Republic” and strike a medal for a “Hero of American Culture,” Trump would have them both by now...

The Republican Party is, for now, more of a danger to the United States than to the world. But like the last Soviet-era holdouts in the Kremlin, its cadres are growing more aggressive and paranoid. They blame spies and provocateurs for the Capitol riot, and they are obsessed with last summer’s protests (indeed, they are fixated on all criminals and rioters other than their own) to a point that now echoes the old Soviet lingo about “antisocial elements” and “hooligans.” They blame their failures at the ballot box not on their own shortcomings, but on fraud and sabotage as the justification for a redoubled crackdown on democracy.

Another lesson from all this history is that the Republicans have no path to reform. Like their Soviet counterparts, their party is too far gone. Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Communist Party, and he remains reviled among the Soviet faithful to this day. Similar efforts by the remaining handful of reasonable Republicans are unlikely to fare any better. The Republican Party, to take a phrase from the early Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, should now be deposited where it belongs: in the “dustbin of history.”

Or this from David Atkins as he covers the CPAC wingnut-cosplay convention for the Washington Monthly:

But CPAC isn’t a sideshow. It’s the main stage of the conservative movement, predicting its future behavior in an era of widening asymmetric polarization.  CPAC presaged the rise of the Party of Reagan over that of Gerald Ford and Dwight Eisenhower. It heralded the scorched-earth confrontational politics of Newt Gingrich in the Bill Clinton era. It elevated George W. Bush at a time when the mainstream GOP still saw itself more in the mold of John McCain. It celebrated the Tea Party before GOP legislators had fully embraced it. And it promoted openly racist birthers and conspiracy theorists like Donald Trump at a time when the the mainline GOP was producing superficially anti-racist autopsies and promoting candidates like Marco Rubio and Spanish-speaking Jeb Bush.

So if we want to know where the Republican Party is heading today, we should pay close attention to CPAC. So what’s the theme now? Where is it going?

The answer seems to be doubling down on Donald Trump, white supremacy, insurrection and conspiracy theories...

Trump himself is set to headline the conference, whining about insufficiently groveling members of his own party and playing up his usual fantastical claims, even as a ridiculous golden statue of Trump (made in Mexico, by the way) wheels its way through the halls like a blasphemous idol...

Shared via Vox, video captured by William Turton

Oh Dear Lord. Yes indeed: The so-called Christian fundamentalist-led Far Right Conservatives brought in a literal Golden Calf (or Shitgibbon in this case) in violation of Deuteronomy (Deut 13 for example), as well as the Commandment forbidding the worship of other gods and idols (Exodus 20:3-5). I may be Unitarian, but I was raised with Christian values and even *I* find this offensive to Faith in the One Graceful God.

This is how hypocritical, if not outright false, those conservative religious leaders in the GOP really are. This isn't even tone-deaf. They had to know what that idol symbolized and they did not care how religiously offensive it would be.

To build on Atkins' coverage, one of the common descriptives I've seen on social media is comparing this year's CPAC to an unhinged, borderline-violent comic-con convention filled with militia cosplayers and hucksters galore. To which I note, as a regular attendee of comic-cons, our cosplayers and vendors have far more dignity than CPAC attendees, sheesh.

To get back to Atkins' final thoughts:

It’s unconfirmed yet whether it was intentional or an unfortunate coincidence, but it seems at least symbolic that even the CPAC stage itself is shaped like a symbol adopted by Nazis and subsequent white supremacist movements.

All of it points to a grim future for the country if the movement currently animating the conservative movement holds majority power over the next decade. Defeat has not chastened the movement, but rather emboldened it. And if CPAC is the predictor it normally is, the next incarnation of Republican power will be even more aggressively racist and authoritarian than its predecessor.

In this, he has a point. The Republican Party may be bereft of values or integrity anymore, but it's still here and still a danger. 

It's a danger that's not going anywhere anytime soon. Above all, the Republicans are still here because they're too entrenched into too many elected, executive, and judicial offices to just disappear overnight. The GOP still has political control at the state level, holding governorships and legislatures standing opposed to any ideal of bipartisanship or acceptance of Democrats in control at the federal level.

The second reason the Republicans are still here is due to our Winner-Take-All system of voting: It encourages two major parties and keeps any other viable third option out of contention. You can vote for a Third Party candidate but the major ones (D and R) are such behemoths that too many on-the-fence voters worry that third choice won't win. Even WITH two major parties, the voting bloc that's most likely to swing between the two - the Moderate/Centrist voters who can avoid partisan fealty - are still stuck choosing partisan candidates. If there were a functioning Moderate Third Party (Libertarians and Greens don't count) then maybe the extremism in either Democrat or Republican parties would doom the party that slides too far... But there isn't an organized Moderate Party to begin with.

This is the third reason why the Republicans won't go away: They got deep pocket fundraisers keeping them alive. As the official "Party of Big Business," the GOP is the favorite go-to for the billionaires in finance and industry who want to keep their wonderful tax cuts going. Even though those billionaires and businesses aren't thrilled with the overt racism/sexism/pretty much open acts of evil that the modern Republican Party now promotes, you don't see any of them going to the mattresses with a plan to build a Moderate pro-Business rival party to compete against the corrupt Republican party. Those billionaires will likely keep their mouths shut and their wallets open to fund the one major party that will keep them rolling in their untaxed capital gains.

Nobody is coming to rescue the nation from the racist corrupt trump-led Republicans.

It's only up to the voters, any of them with any level of sanity left to them, to see how far gone into zombie decay the Republicans are now, and walk away from that. It's a lot, asking for millions of registered voters across America to make the effort to quit their party alignment to the GOP, even if it's to get them to flip to Independent/No Party Affiliate. People identify to their teams, their tribes, who they root for. It's like asking millions of Americans to give up their personal sports team, or quitting on their favorite musical artist from their teen years.

But it's the only way to beat the Republicans. Don't give those Far Right wingnuts any power, don't give them your money, and sure as hell don't give them your vote.

Look at them. With an unbiased, open eye, look at those Far Right conservatives bouncing around at that CPAC convention. Look at their hypocrisy, look at what they are happily, openly worshiping.

The Republicans are not celebrating America. They're burning it.

For the Love of God, they are waging war against their fellow citizens, their neighbors, all of humanity, in the service of their greed and hate.

Please don't join that. Fight it. 

That monstrosity is not going away until ALL OF US make it go away.

No Requiem For A Wrathful Soul

Rush Limbaugh died today.

I know there's a saying "If you can't say anything nice about someone you shouldn't say anything at all."

Thing is, Rush never lived by that rule of public courtesy.

Limbaugh insulted anybody and everybody if he thought it would get him attention and score him points among his conservative allies.

Here's just a partial list:

Hillary Clinton. Christ. All Rush ever did was attack her. Even when he supported her (!) in 2008 it was because he wanted Hillary to out-primary Obama because he knew he could attack Hillary later in the general election.

Rush attacked then-college student Sandra Fluke over a woman's right to birth control, calling her a 'slut' even when Fluke was talking about the benefits of managing ovarian cysts and other menstrual issues.

Rush mocked Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease when the actor made an advocacy ad to improve treatments and searches for a cure.

Rush crossed the line constantly regarding racism, attacking Black protestors, downplaying the toxic role slavery had in American history, deriding Obama and other Black American leaders.

I never had a positive view of Rush Limbaugh: My studies in college in Journalism taught me the ethical lines of media broadcasting that Rush ignored and violated on a daily basis. On top of that was Rush's open disdain for others he did not treat as equals, his vulgar and crass views, his lack of empathy, absolutely no sign of grace or charity that we ought to be sharing towards others.

One of my earliest rants against Rush was back in 2009 after he had dismissed Moderates (I count myself as one even though I know I approve of a lot of Progressive issues). What I wrote then:

I am not a fan of Rush Limbaugh.

Which seems to be mutual. He's not a fan of Moderates.

Rush seems to think that moderates "cannot be governed by principle. They can't be. Moderates don't have principles. If they had principles, they'd be one thing or the other..."

Dear Rush: Here's a list of moderates' principles.

1) Moderates support competency. We support things THAT WORK. If it doesn't work (example: THE WHOLE BUSH ADMINISTRATION) we don't support it. So there...

I wrapped it up with

7) Moderates are perfectly capable of being as rude and vulgar as you wingnuts.

So I finish with the immortals words of Harry Truman: Fuck you, Rush.

Hope that clarifies things for you.

Thing about Rush Limbaugh was that he spent most of his adult life working a radio show designed to promote a Far Right Conservative agenda, selling it as wisdom but offering instead the sour vileness of rage and fear. To my knowledge, he never join a discussion panel, he never entered into a broadcast booth or studio with anyone who could challenge his opinion. He stayed hidden in a broom closet with a microphone in his face, where his Narrative would never be questioned or denied, like the coward that he was.

I have nothing nice to say about Rush Limbaugh. Everything he did and said does not deserve respectful silence, everything he did deserves - even on the day of his death - open scorn and ridicule. It was exactly what he offered to us, and that's all the rest of us should give back.

End of story.

 

The Bad News

This Sunday, looking back at all the madness of the past week, past month, past year... past decade... Hell, pretty much everything since 1992... sigh.

There are more people who died during Wednesday's seditious coup attempt by trumpian Brownshirts at the U.S. Capitol. The woman I mentioned getting shot and killed was a QAnon believer attacking one of the officers defending a barricade. About three other protesters died during the riot, some of them in darkly karmic ways we shouldn't laugh about. Another was a Capitol police officer caught defending one of the doorways, beaten upon by the mob, reportedly his head crushed in with a fire extinguisher. There's video from the security cameras, it is not healthy to watch.

People may not understand just how close we came Wednesday to trump's rioters staging a successful insurrection. There are pictures of rioters running around with police-grade zip ties used to bind people: The rioters were planning on capturing people, possibly Congresspersons they wanted to harm. There is credible witness testimony that some of trump's rioters were plotting to seize his own VP Pence (because Pence has "betrayed" trump's call to overturn the election results). The rioters had built gallows outside the Capitol, at best to intimidate people and at worst to actually hang anyone they caught. (If you ever research the Far Right militia culture and their mindset, you will come across their Bible The Turner Diaries and find out how this insurrection was the closest they've ever come to cosplaying their bloody fantasies)

The COVID-19 pandemic is spiraling out of control, still, as has been since Thanksgiving. The holiday travel and family gathering were NOT GOOD IDEAS, Americans.

It does not help that there is a mutated strain of COVID - more infectious, more lethal - spreading just as fast as COVID-19 spread in January 2020.

At my state level, Governor DeSantis is still mismanaging things, failing to grasp the severity of the pandemic, desperate to avoid another lockdown because he's more concerned with revenues and happy businesses than with public safety and healthy families.

The overall vaccine rollout that's been happening for the past month has been haphazard at best nationwide. Stocks are not being deployed properly in certain states and metros. There has been almost no leadership at the national level on managing the deployment, which have left the states to struggle making their own guidelines (as in who gets priority treatment, essential workers obviously but then who?), which haven't been explained or enforced properly at the hospital/health provider level. This is what happens when you let trump dismantle the commission designed to coordinate all this stuff back in 2018.

Getting back to the political crises at hand, trump is still in the Oval Office winding down his days as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice). His online ranting and calls to riot have become so threatening that the social media outlets - not just Twitter and Facebook but also Pinerest and Shopify! - have finally suspended or banned his accounts because he was violating their User Agreements. You might think this is Good News, but cutting off trump's supply of outrage to his fanbase is going to create a negative feedback implosion in whatever persists as trump's damaged soul. trump will well lash out in other ways.

With all of the public backlash at trump for his open call to insurrection at his riot audience on Wednesday, you would think most other elected Republicans would distance themselves at least, openly denounce the violence at best. But far too many Congressional Republicans in the House and Senate have doubled down on supporting trump and his messages of rage and conspiracy. Far too many Far Right pundits are refusing to admit their rhetoric and rage are responsible for the divided state our nation is in today. The madness will not go away when trump is dragged out of the White House.

Also, I think the cost of the Wendy's Baconator went up a nickel.

So there's the Bad News...

Now the Savage Days Are Here

Washington heads in the toilet bowl/
Don't see supremacist hate/
Right wing dicks in their boiler suits/
Picking out who to annihilate

Toxic jungle of Uzi trails/
Tribesmen just wouldn't live here/
Fascist flare is fashion cool/
Well, you're dead, you just ain't buried yet

Under the God
Under the God

As the walls came tumbling down/
So, the secrets that we shared
I believed you by the palace gates
Now the savage days are here

Under the God...
- "Under the God," David Bowie/Tin Machine

I would prefer my days of Epiphany to be focused on religious piety, blessings, and Greek food, but trump and his Proud Boys army is making that unlikely for tomorrow. They've already arrested the leader of the Proud Boys before the street protests in DC take place (via Elena Moore at NPR.org):

Enrique Tarrio, 36, was taken into police custody and charged with destruction of property, according to a statement from the Metropolitan Police Department.

The charge is related to his actions during last month's pro-Trump demonstration in D.C. that turned violent. Tarrio admitted to removing and burning a Black Lives Matter banner from a historically Black church, an action the Proud Boys are now being sued over.

According to the police statement, Tarrio is also being charged with possession of a high-capacity feeding device. Officers found two high-capacity firearm magazines with him when he was arrested.

The FBI says the Proud Boys have "ties to white nationalism," and the organization has previously been associated with acts of violence...

One thing to note is that Washington DC has very strict gun-carrying laws on the books, and there's every likelihood the Far Right wingnuts marching - in protest of the Certification count in Congress that would confirm Biden won the 2020 Presidential Election - on January 6 are going to be testing those laws early and often to where even the local cops are going to push back hard.

Meanwhile, city leaders are preparing for possible violence, especially as reports show members of the Proud Boys are planning to attend the march dressed incognito...

What the plan seems to be - and they're being so obvious about it - is to have enough of their own cosplay as "Antifa" (the catch-all Far Right insult of anti-fascists) and have those cosplayers instigate the violence, and then claim afterward that the Far Left are terrorists causing enough violence to justify trump declaring emergency martial law.

It'll sell well on NewsMax and even Fox Not-News (which has been trying, honestly enough, to walk away from trump's narcissism... and failing), but nobody else will be convinced. All it's going to do is get innocent people harmed, likely hurt some cops and other law enforcement types, and drive the wedge of madness deeper into the nation's existing schisms.

What they're hoping to do is bully enough people in Congress - especially any wavering Republicans who haven't signed onto trump's suicide pact - into nullifying the 2020 election results: Specifically, getting VP Pence as the Senate President to toss out the certified Electoral Votes and declare trump the winner in spite of everything.

If we're lucky, the violence will be minimal to various acts of vandalism and car burnings. trump will try to bully Congress to his whims, but the procedural count - which is baked into the system and mostly for ceremony - will likely be as expected, a Biden victory.

But we can't rely on luck, not in a Darkest Timeline where trump can NEVER accept a loss and where he's pumped up his fanbase to "Stand By and Stand Up" at his call.

Everyone in DC that I know of, stay safe tomorrow.

To the rest of the nation, here's hoping sanity and legality prevail.

Rush Limbaugh Wants His Bloody War

The man wants blood spilled in his honor before he shuffles off this mortal coil. Via Media Matters:

I thought you were asking me something else when you said, “Can we win?” I thought you meant, “Can we win the culture, can we dominate the culture.” I actually think -- and I’ve referenced this, I’ve alluded to this a couple of times because I’ve seen others allude to this -- I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York? What is there that makes us believe that there is enough of us there to even have a chance at winning New York? Especially if you’re talking about votes.

I see a lot of bloggers -- I can’t think of names right now -- a lot of bloggers have written extensively about how distant and separated and how much more separated our culture is becoming politically and that it can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way...

Limbaugh has actually been saying this for years. He's talked up the divisions between Republicans and Democrats as part of his Culture War Narrative, drumming into his listeners and from there into every elected Republican that there can be no peace between the opposing viewpoints directing the American way of life.

We've seen the effects of Limbaugh's shtick since the 1990s: a gradual and then grave polarization between the various populations that make up the United States. White vs. Ethnic. Men vs. Women. Old vs. Young. Urban cities vs. Rural towns. College educated vs. Non-college. With little room for compromise on the divisive issues and a refusal by Limbaugh's side to make honest effort to do so.

The United States has been in this moment of division before. Not just the obvious stuff that stick out in our high school textbooks - the fight over slavery and its spread from the 1830s up to the Civil War itself, and the bloody countering to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-1960s - but other moments that get glossed over like the strife regarding the New Deal in the 1930s (there was a surprising amount of seditious behavior by conservatives back then).

The brokenness of the nation got repaired - not always cleanly, oft-times papered over until the cracks pulled further apart - during such tumultuous moments because of varying reasons. The fighting over the New Deal ended when the external pressure of World War II emerged. The struggles of the Civil Rights era ended in positive gains for minorities and women thanks to the Cold War forcing the U.S. to improve its global image as a beacon of freedom and democracy.

The one time the division couldn't get fixed - the Civil War - was the bloodiest moment in our nation's existence, and in many ways the damage from that era continued to rot away at our collective soul. What made that division easy to understand was the simple geographic way the fight was set up: A clear separation between Northern and Midwest Free States against Southern Slave States that refused to accept a fair election in 1860 and openly seceded. Granted, the split wasn't clean: There remained in the North a sizable pro-slavery opposition in Democrat Copperheads, and the South was riddled with pro-Union (not all anti-slavery though) regions/counties that hampered the Home Front efforts throughout the war (South Carolina was the only Confederate State that did not have any home-raised Union troops fight for the North).

In our current troubles - this second Civil War our nation sees itself racing towards - there is a similar split between sides: Far Right Conservative Republicans vs. Far Left-to-Centrist Progressive-Liberal Democrats. Thanks to the likes of Limbaugh - and Fox Not-News, and Mitch McConnell, and the Tea Party extremists, and thousands of other Far Right influencers - the split is as deep as the divide we suffered back in 1860.

The horrifying thing is, there is no way a separation between the massive demographics of the United States will be an amicable, friendly parting of the ways. No matter how Rush and other proponents of a permanent separation sells it to America, we are looking at a fight brewing.

A lot of it has to do with the demographic divide: It is not cleanly geographic this time. While Blue States and Red States clearly exist - with battleground Purple-ish States scattered across the regions - there are pockets of resistance within each state. The cultural, economic, and political divides are clearly urban (with suburban areas shifting that way) versus rural (with exurb enclaves). 

If a split does occur, if the United States divides between Red and Blue, the split will not be even. Blue states that are dominated by one or more super-metropolis will cope in their own way with their outlying conservative (and less-populated) rural counties and most likely continue on. The Red states however - blinded by their gerrymandering that negated the political might of their cities - will run into the reality that their major population centers will not be thrilled about the secession and openly oppose their conservative state leadership. States like Texas and Florida will find out that pissing off the liberal voters of Houston, San Antonio, Tampa, Orlando, and the tri-county South Florida is not a good idea. Economic turmoil in some form - most likely from a "brain drain" of middle and upper-income residents fleeing for Blue states - is unavoidable. That turmoil can lead to conflict.

One thing liberals love to point out is how the Left-leaning Blue states are paying in taxes towards keeping Red states budgets afloat. If the Red states believe they can afford to secede, they are going to find it hard to live without the revenues that would flow in from California and New York. The largest economic-powered Red states - Texas and Florida - are going to be taxed (pun intended) keeping the likes of Mississippi and Kentucky solvent. It costs money - not to mention avoiding pitfalls like hyperinflation - to start a new nation in ANY age. Under such conditions, the stress of nation-building can give way to calls for war (as the ultimate distraction from the woes at home).

The fight is inevitable also because one side - the Far Right extremists - are eager to make it that way. Much in the same way the pro-slavery forces in 1860 believed they could easily win in a fight against the "softer" abolitionist/Union side, the modern Far Right are mentally pumped up by imagining themselves as patriotic gun-toting Rambos in their fantasy-film daydreams.

Look to the Far Right wingnut behavior in Oregon back in 2016. Look to the militia gun-nuts in Michigan who plotted to kidnap/kill Michigan's governor. Keep up with years' worth of research into the extremist militia mindset. Read up the fantasies of these guys who think they can raid against and engage in battle with actual U.S. troops in a straight-up fight. These guys (it's mostly men, although a number of women are part of the craziness as well) picture themselves well-trained weapons of war who'll get their own Michael Bay bio-epic made about them five years from now.

They want a civil war because their cynical, violent world-view demands it. They believe they can whip out their murder-sticks and going hunting on libruls and no one will push back. And then on the bones of their enemies they can build their Utopia.

The scary thing isn't that they'll win. They can't. Their own numbers are in the thousands not millions, as many Republican voters won't cross that line into violence. If they think a conservative-leaning U.S. military will side with them, they'll be wrong (the military will uphold and abide by the Constitution, which means they'll side with the lawfully-elected Democrat Biden), and they will find themselves outgunned and outclassed in every way. Also, these gun-nuts turn on each other as much as they hate on liberals, any nation they'll build will fall apart faster than a libertarian community incapable of fighting off bears.

The scary thing is how they can cause enough damage and death within an hour with the weapons they currently have - hello, AR-15s modified to shoot entire schools - on any unarmed public anywhere. The militia wingnuts may talk about taking on an army, but like every terrorist group on the planet they'll likely hit the softest safest targets - shopping malls, parks, neighborhoods - within driving distance. All it will take is just one trumpshirt wingnut per city ruining everyone's day.

All it will take is just one bloodied street in America in the name of Far Right extremism against the Democrats, and Rush Limbaugh will have his blood before his cancer claims him.

The Incoming Wingnut Storm

(Update 10/12: Thanks again to Batocchio, who linked this to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round Up! Please stay, I baked a cake somewhere...)

I was hoping to blog today about a fly that garnered more political support than Mike Pence, but instead halfway through the day a HOLY SHIT bomb dropped in Michigan. Some very enthusiastic Angry White Guys With Guns decided to kick 2020 up a notch, via Bill Chappell at NPR:

The FBI says it has thwarted a plot by militia members to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and six people are facing federal charges. In a coordinated move, Michigan is pursuing state felony charges against seven people with ties to a militia called the Wolverine Watchmen.

In a statement early Thursday, Whitmer said two militia groups "were preparing to kidnap and possibly kill me."

But in a later interview on NPR's All Things Considered, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said that "multiple white supremacy groups and militia groups have been acting in accordance with one another."

Whitmer thanked law enforcement officer on Thursday afternoon for foiling the alleged conspiracy. "I'll be honest, I never could have imagined anything like this," she said.

Michigan has been a hot spot for disagreements over shutdowns and other restrictions Whitmer ordered to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus — actions that allegedly sparked the plot against her. The governor noted those disagreements on Thursday and called for unity.

You might recall back in April there were a number of anti-mask protestors who stormed state buildings to scream their outrage and intimidate the politicians who were, you know, working to stop a deadly pandemic from spreading. Michigan was where some of the loudest protests were, and where the Far Right had a target in Whitmer - Democratic figure, librul, woman, all the things they hate - that upped their rage even more.

The FBI said the Michigan militia group had already been on its radar because its members had attempted in March to acquire the home addresses of local law enforcement officers with the goal of attacking or killing them...

Psst: To all the cops who play nice with the Far Right wingnuts as though you're on the same side, you might want to wake up to the reality that these wingnuts will shoot you too.

The agency said it collected information about the kidnapping plot from informants and undercover agents. Over the summer, the conspirators allegedly began training for a potential attack on Whitmer's vacation home or the governor's official summer residence, according to a criminal complaint released Thursday.

A federal charge of conspiracy to commit kidnapping has been filed against six people: Adam Fox, Barry Croft, Ty Garbin, Kaleb Franks, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta. All are Michigan residents except for Croft, who is a resident of Delaware.

Fox discussed the kidnapping in a recording from late July, the complaint says: "Snatch and grab, man. Grab the f*****' Governor. Just grab the b****. Because at that point, we do that, dude — it's over."

After abducting Whitmer, Fox allegedly said, the governor would be taken to a secure location in Wisconsin for "trial," according to the complaint...

Some of the things you need to understand about these wingnuts: They view themselves as outside our laws and compliant only to their own (SEE: Sovereign Citizen Movement). To them, everyone else is guilty - of either being the dreaded Other or else being Race Traitors - and that all it will take is a show trial in front of a kangaroo court to force the actual constitutionally-empowered forces of law and order to bow to their will.

It's not an idle fantasy though. They've got historical precedence like breaking Reconstruction after 1877, and the Wilmington Insurrection in 1898. There's been a build-up of these acts of violence in our streets during the Black Lives Matter protests. These Turner Diaries fanboys believe they can raise up an army, blow up some shit, kidnap elected officials, and fulfill their White Supremacist destinies.

But if these jokers thought kidnapping Whitmer would bring them victory, all it would really do is highlight their viciousness and stupidity... because the next thing that would have happened after their attack would have been the Lt. Governor of Michigan - Garland Gilchrist, by the by - getting promoted to Governor, and then ordering every real cop and National Guard soldier in the state with hunting you down before you numbnuts decide to repeat your stunt on him. Wingnuts don't really think this shit through, do they. All that happens with these attacks is: Innocent people get killed in the crossfire of their schemes.

Not that these wingnuts care about innocent lives.

This is just one more day of escalation of violence in the United States, as the division stirred up by trump - "LIBERATE MICHIGAN" anyone? - and his Republican allies - hi, Fox Not-News - is working to get the Far Right angry enough to cause chaos in the face of a looming Biden popular vote blowout. 

Let's go to an expert on international - and domestic - terrorism, Mister Adam L Silverman at Balloon Juice:

This is thwarted domestic stochastic terrorism. You have a group of people who are illegally conspiring under several Michigan state statutes and the Michigan constitution to undertake what would clearly be illegal violent actions against persons and property. They had tested improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They had planned several types of actions that would have resulted in mass casualties.

DHS finally released their October 2020 domestic threat assessment, that they tried to bury until a whistleblower made that impossible. The assessment makes it very, very, very clear that the predominant terrorism threat to Americans in the US are white supremacists and other right wing domestic extremists and that one of Russia’s major influence operations to disrupt the 2020 elections is to incite terroristic violence by these groups against visible racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.

We've been in the middle of a Second Civil War for a good while now, a culture war between the Center-Left and Progressive tendencies of the nation against the more extreme Far Right who would rather rule or ruin. It's been escalating since 9/11 when the anti-Muslim ire fueled the rage still aimed towards Blacks, Jews, Feminists, Latinos, and Immigrants, and it's been getting crazier since the self-ordained militias began standoffs with federal agencies.

It's going to escalate even more, as a sick and addled and desperate trump tries to bully and intimidate his way out of an electoral bloodbath. He's relying on these armed angry guys to show up at the polls on November 3, he's expecting these trumpshirts to be his Brownshirts when the time comes to bloody the streets and drive Democratic voters away from the ballot boxes.

He's already given them the order to "Stand Back and Stand By," a call to get them ready for the violence he expects to keep him in office to save his own ass from a future in a jail cell.

This is not going to end well for the nation. trump has made sure there is enough anger out there to erupt in violence that would harm too many innocent lives.

Not that trump ever cared about innocent lives.

Nullifying 2020

(Update 9/16/20: Thanks again to Tengrain at Crooks&Liars to share this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Wish me luck with the FWA Royal Palm Literary Award for Non-Fiction: Blogging)

It's getting more obvious by the day: trump wants to nullify the 2020 Elections. Via Cameron Peters at Vox:

It’s not a new talking point for Trump, who has already mounted a sustained campaign against mail-in voting and the US Postal Service — and who continues to claim there was widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election, when there was not.

But in an election where as many as six in 10 Americans say they plan to vote early and a historic number of ballots are likely to be cast by mail, such rhetoric takes on a dangerous new dimension. There’s a fair chance we won’t know who won on election night as ballots are counted — many states accept ballots postmarked on Election Day for days afterward — and Trump is already sending up a signal that he plans to dispute the results or even prematurely claim victory on Election Day if early returns show him ahead...

...Trump also suggested Saturday that his supporters should turn out as poll watchers, “because with you people watching the polls it’s going to be pretty hard to cheat. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t want to be a cheater.”

The suggestion is a concerning one, however. There is a history of GOP poll watchers engaging in voter intimidation — one that led to a since-expired federal consent decree curbing such activity. With instances of armed Trump supporters engaging in pseudo-law enforcement vigilantism, there’s reason for concern that poll watching could lead to further voter intimidation in November...

there are several things at play here. trump above all is projecting, accusing the other party of being the cheaters when it's been him and the Republicans caught cheating both in 2016 and now. trump is also trying to create a Narrative to sell to the Beltway media, as a means of beating it into their heads early and often to the point they will parrot it as fact.

Above all, trump is sowing chaos, creating an environment where he can abuse the powers of the office and refuse to accept a possible outcome of not only losing the popular vote to Biden, but also enough states to lose the Electoral College as well.

This is an attempt by trump to intimidate voters into not even trying to vote, of depressing turnout so that only his true believers show up and skew the results again like in 2016.

There is a solution to this, Democrats.

TURN THE VOTE OUT. Everyone registered to vote, get the fck to the polling booths. Mail in your ballots. Show up for Early Voting, show up in such numbers that trump can't claim early leads.

VOTING MATTERS. You have the numbers, Democrats. You have allies among Independent voters sick of trump's incompetence. You need to counter trump's lies with a clarion call to every voter who supports you to get the ballots in and make every person count.

But the Suburbs Have No Charms to Soothe

Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight
Somewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights

Subdivisions
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
Subdivisions
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out

Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth

- "Subdivisions" Rush

Okay, to be honest, this quick little rant about donald "Fearmongering Shitgibbon" trump trying to scare White Suburbanites into fleeing from Biden and Democrats is mostly so I can quote from a song I grew up to since the 1980s.

Which is kind of a thing for me, being a Generation Xer who grew up in the suburbs, in the north Pinellas County region of Tampa Bay Florida where I literally watched entire neighborhoods spring up from the paved remnants of orange groves and dirt hills. Florida's population boom of the Eighties? I was there, and it was all 3-4 bedrooms houses with manicured lawns and pink (excuse me, that color is CORAL, thank you very much) painted exteriors.

So if anything I speak from experience. So with this, I question trump's attempt to appeal to what he called the Suburban Lifestyle Dream.

He's attempting to appeal to those who, when the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s gave Blacks more political freedom (but not economic equality), fled from places due to be desegregated - cities - outward to planned and deed-restricted neighborhoods where the obsessions over property values would encourage segregation in ways that couldn't be called out. It was called White Flight and you shouldn't be surprised to meet a lot of White folk who won't talk about it or claim it never happened that way. (Ask White folk about Redlining and watch their heads explode)

trump's appeal is based on the view of the suburbs being traditionally White Conservative enclaves, home to thousands of middle-class workers who habitually vote in favor of the world of Ronald Reagan's Eagleland, a place where people work hard play hard obey the traffic laws and worship an Evangelical-approved Deity every Sunday.

There's a problem with that image of Suburbia. It's a little out of date.

A lot has changed since the 1980s. The economic makeup of suburban communities have shifted away from the Blue Collar manufacturing conservatism that made up the neighborhoods from the Sixties through the Eighties. If anything - and from what I've seen - the suburbs has seen a rise in White Collar professionals - due to the loss of manufacturing jobs since the Seventies - made up of technology, health care, education, office-oriented work forces... which have more diverse and more educated demographics.

The racial shift of the suburbs has also taken place since the Nineties. Hispanic population growth in various states - not just in the South - has filled in a void where White residents kept fleeing from encroaching metropolitan politics. Another element has been "Black Flight" where the rise of educated White Collar workers in that demographic allowed them to flee cities much the way Whites fled decades earlier. (Yeah, we uh don't talk about that either, except for the part where hip young White couples are moving back into the cities to gentrify everything... ugh another Starbucks?)

As a result, it's not that the suburbs are now White enclaves... it's that the suburbs are now White Collar enclaves, filled with professional-level, college-educated home owners of varying ethnicity. And all of them eager to enforce that NO SOLICITING sign in front of the main entrance to their walled-off subdivisions.

We're talking teachers, doctors and nurses, computer/technology workers, lawyers, public service (city/county) employees, financial experts, store managers, warehouse supervisors, anything that requires a 4-year degree minimum. All of them living the Suburban Lifestyle Dream.

Supposedly.

Because there's also another thing that trump is overlooking about the suburbs: Those neighborhoods are getting hit HARD during trump's own regime, especially in trump's failure to handle the Conoravirus pandemic. I just listed the professions above, nearly every one of them affected negatively - especially those in the medical/health care fields - by trump's continued inability to answer the challenges of leadership needed to keep the nation quarantined and reducing the risks of infection. As a result, it's also affecting those professionals in businesses and workplaces that are being forced to exposure, especially the teachers and educators facing the risks of COVID exposure at school.

As a result, I am not imaging a high number of suburbanites who view trump with any level of favorability or support. trump had been bleeding off suburban types throughout his tenure, especially among women, but lately that leak has turned into a gusher. And the polls are backing me up on this.

trump can't appeal to a broad range of educated, ethnically-diverse Americans. he's been too busy appealing to racist Whites to keep his voting base happy.

and trump can't comprehend how his ineptitude and failures have turned the Suburban Lifestyle Dream into a nightmare. Which is why he's going to make things worse for American suburbanites.

For the LOVE OF GOD, Suburban America, wake up and vote trump out.