January 6th is burned into the memories of billions of people around the world where thousands of angry white guys, enraged by bullshit fed them by the president of the United States and his cronies, violently stormed the US Capitol with the intent of halting  the certification of an election, the result of which they didn’t like.  They stormed both chambers of Congress with the intent of making “citizens’ arrests” of duly elected representatives who they also didn’t like.

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The notion of vigilantes “arresting” people they don’t like or disagree with is not just silly fantasy; it’s an extremely dangerous behavior, coddled in many states like Texas, Georgia, and Arizona where gun nuts and goofballs control the politics.  Said gun nuts and goofballs, fed a continuous stream of nonsense about their “rights” on rightwing social media and television, actually believe they are somehow deputized to enforce non-existent laws they unilaterally have decided violate their absolute right to do what they want.  Law enforcement and elected officials have let them get away with it, and that’s how you get dozens of “militias” marching into cities to “provide security” during racist demonstrations and brainwashed extremists storming the Capitol with zip tie handcuffs to “arrest” elected officials.

It happened again last week when a father and two of his friends showed up at an elementary school in Arizona brandishing zip tie handcuffs to “arrest” the principal for “breaking the law”.  The supposed law she broke was asking the father to quarantine his son after he was exposed to a COVID positive classmate at the school.  The brainwashed father was outraged by public health policy established to protect citizens, and in his libertarian fever dream believed he had the authority to stop that public policy by “arresting” the principal.  Lord knows what would have happened to her had they accomplished their self appointed task.  The principal stood up to them and when they refused to leave, called police.  The man had one of his friends stream the confrontation on Instagram, stupidly incriminating himself and his pals.  He was later arrested, and charges were being prepared for the other two goons.

This latest episode of brainwashed extremists acting as vigilantes is yet another example of the danger of disinformation and cynical use of propaganda to achieve political success.  Republicans in Congress are actually attempting to conceal the conspiracy with Trump to overturn the election, and others are using non-existent voter fraud, disinformation about public health policy, and the divisive abortion issue to keep the base in a froth and as an excuse to enact cruel public policy to serve their own political ends.

I keep waiting for the political pendulum to begin swinging back the other way, but it keeps its inexorable climb on the far right end of the arc towards more insanity and cruelty.  Short of a complete collapse of the GOP, I fear this won’t end well as violence seems to be the default response to sane public policy.

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.

John Pierce is an attorney and defender of RWNJs, including 17 Capitol Hill insurrectionists, the Kenosha Wisconsin shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, and…wait for it…Rudy Giuliani.  He disappeared last week, and an associate from his law firm, the so called National Constitutional Law Union, lied to one judge that he’d been in an accident and then admitted to another judge that Pierce is hospitalized for COVID, on a ventilator, and unresponsive.  Pierce is well known as an advocate of right wing weirdos, has denigrated vaccines and protested against masking and social distancing.

Yet another rightwing weirdo is felled by his/her own stupidity.  This time, though, a lot of guys who also bought into The Big Lie are also unrepresented in federal court on charges related to the insurrection on January 6th.

Irony or Karma.  The answer to both inquiries is YES.

This photo has been circulating on social media this last week:

This is the cover of the July 1983 Moral Majority Report, a newsletter conceived and published by Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, a Reagan era mouthpiece of what has now morphed into the American Taliban.  At that time, the HIV crisis was arising, and predictably, right-wingers were judgmental about the outbreak, but worse, even then they got the virology wrong, donning masks in an effort to scare the shit out of people about a virus that didn’t transmit through the air, but by bodily fluids.

Back then, the mask was used as a weapon against science and one of their targets, the gay community.  Today, once again masks are being used as a weapon against common sense and science, but in the opposite of the use in 1983.  Back then, right-wingers donned masks to push their message; today they accost people wearing masks and rail against mask mandates to push whatever their message is today. The obvious conclusion is that conservatives are not only totally corrupted; they have been corrupted for decades, moving facts around to fit their narrative.  Add the cancer of Donald Trump, and the corruption is complete, and political conservatism becomes a toxic soup of lies, distortions, disinformation, and cruelty for the pure sake of cruelty.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, but in the case of the American right wing, it gets worse.

Last week we talked about the death of H. Scott Apley, Galveston city council representative and member of the Texas GOP executive committee from Covid-19.  Apley’s death was totally preventable, but the extreme far right activist was a loud voice against vaccines, science, and common decency.  He amplified lies about the virus and the vaccines on social media, and mocked those who wore masks and were relying on public health policy established using guidance from actual scientists.  He, his wife, and infant child all were infected.  He died 3 days after being admitted to a hospital in Galveston.

Apley’s foolishness was deadly.  Worse, his ignorance has very likely caused additional infections and possibly deaths.  The Republican party, led by the Orange Menace, has become mired in lies, reality bending, religiosity, and cruel public policy that has no reason to exist but for inflicting more cruelty.

Yesterday, the Washington Post used Apley as the perfect example of the chasm that has widened between normal people and the insanity of extreme rightwing politics.  It noted that even in the wake of his death, the Galveston County GOP was still posting bullshit about vaccines and didn’t even acknowledge how Apley died.  The madness has so engulfed the GOP that the party itself is a threat to public health and our system of government. It has truly morphed into the American version of the Taliban, and that’s not an exaggeration.