After 9 years of incendiary rhetoric, inciting actual violence, and personally threatening dozens of perceived enemies, TFG has certainly demonstrated that he can dish it out, but sure can’t take it.  He has spent years vilifiying everyone from Haitian immigrants to Dems to Taylor Swift, but when someone starts shooting at him, he’s shocked and appalled when the tables are turned.

Let’s be clear – violence is NEVER appropriate in any instance, political or otherwise.  But this monster of escalating violence has been wholy created by TFG and his sycophants repeating his vicious lies about everything from “the deep state”, to immigrants, and to anyone who happens to disagree with him.  He’s even inciting violence against schoolkids in Springfield, Ohio, FFS.  His social media accounts drip with hate, authoritarian declarations, threats, and lies against millions of people and entire classes of society, fabricated from whole cloth.  He even incited thousands of knuckleheads to attack the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the US government.

I find it pretty rich that TFG and Vance are now denouncing the very violence they’ve been inciting, but only because that violence has been turned on him.  If they want a reduction in violence they need to start that at home and turn down the heat, but I’m not expecting any of that.  A little self-awareness would be useful right now.

The U. S. House of Representatives has voted on bills to make lynching a federal hate crime over 200 times in the last 122 years. Today, for the only the second time, they’ve passed one. The first was passed in 2020, but didn’t pass the Senate.

The Emmett Till Antilynching Act passed almost unanimously. 422-3 was the final vote, with only three Republican senators – all white men from the south – voting nay.

Of course, one of the racist nincompoops calls himself a Texan. Chip Roy, former Chief of Staff to Senator Ted Cruz, stayed “true to form” and made sure that southern white men could have as many loopholes as possible to get away with any murder of a black person. By rope. Anywhere in the country.

In fact, Roy has been very clear that he is pro-lynching. “There’s old sayings in Texas about ‘find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree,’” Roy said. “You know, we take justice very seriously, and we ought to do that. Round up the bad guys. That’s what we believe.” He isn’t wrong. There are over 600 documented lynchings in Texas history, and those are just the ones we know about.

Please take some time to visit Lynching In Texas. Then, send the link to Chip Roy at chip.roy@mail.house.gov, reminding him he’s making $174,000 a year and needs to stop playing stupid games because Texas does not need any more stupid prizes. We’re full.

Roy, as a Texas lawmaker, knows that vigilante justice is against the law. Unless it’s done by a white person? I guess? Yay for vigilantes!

But wait! When a black man in Minneapolis was convicted of arson during a protest about the injustice of George Floyd’s death, Roy was really upset that the man wasn’t given the maximum sentence. Some people are saying that the man was just out seeking justice. Still, Roy objected. “This is a man that clearly has no respect for our laws,” he said. Well, now I’m confused. Does he care for justice or not?

As usual, Roy is full of bullpoop. Roy is a disgusting white supremacist and, as we say here at the salon, full of gleeful cruelty and dickishness.

The bill will advance to the Senate, where Republicans will once again do whatever they can to kill it.

Today marks 0 days that Texas Republicans have not made a fool of themselves.

“Moms for Liberty”.  It’s the latest result of the poisoning of millions of American minds through continuous dosing of toxic disinformation and outright lying.  Founded by a Florida women, co-founder Tina Descovich is calling on its 56,000 members to disrupt school board meetings all over the country to protest not only mask mandates and disease mitigation, but also curriculum content including which words to learn how to spell and pictures in science books.  She also calls on children to rip the masks off of other children.

Tactics used by this group include not only shouting and jeering during school board meetings but also harassing school board members in their homes, filing false police reports, and doxxing, the same tactics used by gun nuts all over the country against those who call for common sense gun laws.

As long as law enforcement and the courts look the other way on right wing terrorists, these tactics will continue.  These terrorists, inspired by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th won’t stop until they see a large group of these domestic terrorists go to jail for years, not months.   Local police must also stop their nonsense at meetings and prosecute menacing and personal threats.  If we are to have any chance of saving our democracy, groups like Moms for Liberty must be met with strong opposition and prosecution for their tactics.

Phil Valentine; Jimmy DeYoung; Dick Farrel; Marc Bernier.  These four guys have several things in common – Syndicated hate radio talkers, anti-vaxxers, anti-science, racists, climate-deniers, religionists, and all dead.  Marc Bernier, who had dubbed himself “Mr. Anti-Vax” was the latest hate talker to have died after spreading disinformation on vaccines and conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus pandemic. His death, along with the others, not only demonstrates in real time the dangers of playing Russian Roulette with a deadly virus, but also lays bare the cesspool of disinformation they helped create and perpetuate.

Rush Limbaugh was the most significant figure in the rise of modern hate radio in the 90s, casting the Clintons as objects of hyper partisan hate, conspiracy theories, and grievance.  Remember the list of people that the Clintons supposedly murdered?  That vicious lie was so pervasive that it is now embedded in the DNA of political conservatives and formed the foundation of the idiotic Q Anon conspiracy theory culminating in a violent attack on the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the US government.

These four deplorables, included in a much larger group of deplorables like Alex Jones, feed a steady diet of anger, lies, distortions, gross exaggerations, conspiracy theories, and right wing red meat into a counterculture drowning in obsession and devotion to self-destruction.  Trump is one of the most successful politicians to tap into this counterculture which has formed the core of his base, dominating all of rightwing politics today and destroying what’s left of the Republican Party.  The ecosystem they enable has sickened millions, caused untold deaths, and is holding back the entire country from recovery from the pandemic.  These low budget hate talkers are the heartbeat of this ecosystem, pumping toxic disinformation into syndicated networks that is literally getting people killed including those doing the pumping.

I wish no harm to anyone, but it’s almost impossible for me personally to have any empathy for the self-inflicted death these hate talkers caused themselves and untold others, not to mention the financial burden of huge hospital bills left to their families to carry.  Is this the way nature cleans the gene pool?  That judgment is above my pay grade, but my observation is that this is exactly what’s happening; unfortunately they’re taking untold numbers of innocents with them, and that is nothing but tragedy in its purest form.  Perhaps all this senseless ignorance and death will drive at least some of their adherents to rethink their devotion.  We can only hope.

The Texas legislature, over long opposition by Democrats and the majority of Texans, passed the most radical voter suppression law of 2021, making Texas the worst state in the union to exercise the Constitutional right to vote.  The GOP knuckle draggers rammed through a bill that wiped out very popular voting alternatives such as drive through voting, extended voting hours, and easy vote by mail rules.  They also empowered partisan goons to intimidate voters at the polls, and criminalized mistakes an honest voter might innocently make.  In short, GOP Fuckheads pushed us back to the days of poll taxes, arbitrary voter tests, and Jim Crow laws with Jim Crow 2.0.

Zero days since Texas was a National Embarrassment, racing other Red States to the bottom.

This is the second excerpt from “I Alone Can Fix It”: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, by Phillip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig, published in the Washington Post this week.  This excerpt is the account of events leading up to and including the insurrection on January 6, and it is chilling to the bone just how close we came to Trump and his goons taking down the government.  This is a must read.

Trust me.