Late this afternoon, SCOTUS surprisingly ruled that the National Archives can release TFG’s January 6th records to Congress. TFG lawyers have been throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, in an effort to stop the disclosure. Characteristically, Clarence Thomas dissented. Jesus.
TFG at Mara Lago is probably a real shitshow right now.
Tomorrow is the 1st anniversary of the attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters, but just commemorating that violent event is not enough and doesn’t address the real problem today in America. The problem is much deeper than a couple thousand dumbasses brainwashed by a carnival barker and career liar. Our system of government is now under constant threat. That threat comes from what was once a national party that has morphed into a fascist regime which is striving for permanent power in defiance of the will of Americans. THAT is the problem.
This has been coming for decades, fueled by increasingly radical media that is unconstrained by any regulation, especially the Fairness Doctrine that Reagan destroyed at the behest of Rupert Murdoch who was also provided fast track US citizenship and allowed to monopolize US media by a compliant FCC, also under Reagan. That started the drain of fair journalism, and the rest is history. Murdoch’s empire has rotted American democracy from the inside, moving from ranting about taxes at their historic lows to Bill O’Reilly’s idiotic “War on Christmas” trope to lying about everything not Right Wing Nut Job. Murdoch offered up Fox as the official press office for TFG during his infestation of the Oval office, and still amplifies his lies ’round the clock. The entire goal was to piss off one demographic, and that has succeeded.
We now live in a society where civil discourse and fact based policy decisions no longer exist. Politics is now more than blood sport – it has become a death cult, from the radical gun culture that has successfully injected armed thugs into the political arena to losing candidates who will NEVER concede defeat, no matter how obvious that candidate’s loss is. I recall 2008 when Al Franken beat incumbent Norm Coleman by 312 votes. The votes were counted and counted and counted, and Franken’s win was close, but certain. Coleman never conceded, fighting in court for 8 months until a 3 judge panel declared Franken the winner. Since then, virtually no Republican has conceded defeat. Every election is a battle to the death, and concession speeches from GOP candidates are almost non existent. Trump has now normalized that behavior by lying and lying and lying and lying. The Big Lie has now been embedded into the DNA of Republicans, and all over the country they are taking election administration out of the hands of non-partisans and putting it into the hands of radical partisans, even legislating overruling free and fair elections if they don’t like the results.
The real tragedy is that now both sides of the political spectrum have no confidence in the system. Over 80% of Republicans have lost confidence because they believe The Big Lie and that the system is full of fraud. Over 80% of Democrats have lost confidence because over 80% of Republicans believe The Big Lie and are trying to rig the system in their own favor.
All of this adds up to every election now being contested to the death especially if the Republican candidate loses. Armed goofballs will show up at polls, counting locations, city halls, county seats, state capitols, and, yes, even the US Capitol if the election goes against their candidate. Though TFG is the heartbeat of this massive delusion, it has now grown beyond his own cult of personality. Oh, sure, every right winger will run to Mara Lago to kiss the ring, but The Big Lie is so engrained that it has taken on a life of its own. People who were reasonable folks 10 years ago are now ranting maniacs spouting bullshit and even QAnon conspiracy theories. All reason and critical thinking has all but vanished.
My greatest fear is that this won’t end well, and not until violence and fascism touches most Americans will people wake up and demand accountability from elected leaders. Add the metastasized cancer that is TFG to the political mix, and the patient could easily die. That is the risk that we really face.
This one’s been brewing for a while, but finally rose to the top of my list to talk about. Remember early in the fall when “Let’s Go Brandon!” started circulating through conservatives, signs and bumper stickers started popping up, and the meme starting appearing everywhere? I even saw a baseball cap worn at Game One of the World Series by an otherwise respectable young business man with the slogan emblazoned on it.
What’s the orgin of this meme? Well, Brandon is actually a real person, Brandon Brown. He’s the perfect American story – started racing go-carts when he was 8 years old, and over the past 20 years worked his way all the way up to driving in NASCAR stock car races. But he’s not some fancy schmanzy high paid driver sponsored by Mountain Dew. He has his own car, funded by himself and his father with minor sponsors. He started running out of money this year, and as a final appeal for sponsors, he posted an ad on social media saying “put your name on my rear”, and that landed him two sponsors with enough money to keep racing. With that extra money, he raced at Talladega and brought home the victory. In the excitement of the win, he didn’t notice the event that threatens to wreck everything he’s earned.
In the live post race interview on the track broadcast on national television, some assholes in the stands started chanting, “Fuck Joe Biden!” over and over. As the chant grew, the interviewer tried to make light of the chant, saying the crowd was chanting, “Let’s Go Brandon!” and a meme was born. Like everything else that occurs in the right wing echo machine, the meme took on a life of its own, even being repeated on the US House floor, and by governor Ron DeSantis who rebranded the Biden administration as the “Brandon administration.”
Ha ha. It’s super funny to use someone else’s name as a swear word, right? Brown at first thought it was funny right up to the point where sponsors started backing away from him, not wanting to get embroiled in partisanship, especially when the name of the sponsored person is being used in a phrase substituting his name in an expletive that implied the word “fuck”. Right wingers often ignore the fact that the fully HALF of all Americans who disagree with them also spend money. Sponsors of television shows, sports teams, and yes, NASCAR sell their goods to everyone, not just radical partisans who believe that their political opponents must be denigrated and even eliminated from the public stage. That belief is called eliminationist, and is exactly what bred the violent insurrection that actually attempted to murder those who disagreed with their leader and overthrow the US government. Most responsible companies don’t want to be associated with that kind of hatred because it’s bad for business. Brown is even trying to get ahead of this issue by changing the meme from “Let’s Go Brandon!” to “Let’s Go America!” in an attempt to walk the fine line between not pissing off the NASCAR base and not losing sponsors. It’s not easy, and most likely impossible.
The “Let’s Go Brandon!” meme perfectly encapsulates a key feature of the right wing noise machine – they repeat these kinds of memes so much that it develops callouses in the users’ psyches to the point that hateful and violent rhetoric it is no longer shocking to them. Why do I say that? I say that because it’s true. Think about it – at the beginning of the pandemic that’s now killed almost 1 million Americans, Dan Patrick actually said that old people needed to die for the sake of the economy. Instead of being excoriated for such eliminationist rhetoric, Far right Americans AGREED, screaming, “Right! The economy is more important than old people!” Tucker Carlson feeds a continuous stream of this radical hate speech every night on national television. Hate speech is now embedded in the DNA of the right wing and drives the public policy they espouse.
People repeating this hate speech don’t give a flying shit about the consequences of that hate speech, but the damage is real and gets people hurt and even killed. Brandon Brown is the innocent victim as this massive meme threatens to destroy his sponsorship chances and career just so they can say “Fuck Joe Biden!” in public and get away with it. The real tragedy here is not that this kind of behavior is a flaw of conservatism today, it’s a feature.
Remember back in 2008 when Sarah Palin’s lie about “death panels” in the proposed Obamacare legislation took on a life of its own? How the entire red state noise machine took it and ran with it? Well, irony kicked in this weekend when Palin, talking at the Turning Point USA convention brainwashing, said she’d get a vaccine “…over my dead body“. The crowd of young conservatives fascists cheered, completely missing the irony of her statement. Dana Milbank hit the nail on the head pointing out that Palin was an active participant in what can now only be called a death cult.
The death cult also showed its ugly head when the few people who actually paid for seats to the Traveling Bullshit Tour stop in Dallas booed their Dear Leader, none other than TFG, when he told Bill O’Reilly that he got the booster to protect himself. The Trumpified GOP is now actually getting people killed as the death rate from COVID in Trump counties is 5 times that of the death rate in blue counties.
The Darwin Club is actually a thing.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t have said it better. Trump’s and McConnell’s packing of the SCOTUS has now successfully destroyed all hope of the judicial branch protecting our Constitution and the rights it enshrines for all Americans. Yesterday, the court inexplicably allowed Texas’ game playing with legislation to, as Sotomayor accurately described it,
“…the Court’s dangerous departure from its precedents, which establish that federal courts can and should issue relief when a State enacts a law that chills the exercise of a constitutional right and aims to evade judicial review.” and “…the Court effectively invites other States to refine S.B. 8’s model for nullifying federal rights.”
The court left the law in effect, denying a Constitutionally protected personal right for all women in Texas to control what happens to their own bodies. Gorsuch’s ruling was so badly constructed by his concocted rationalizations that states have now been provided a roadmap for nullifying any Constitutional right they don’t like.
With the court’s ruling, it’s time to now to test this rewriting of US law by turning the tables by legislating private enforcement against other constitutional rights. How about a law against individual gun ownership? Example: anyone caught carrying a firearm, whether licensed or not, can be sued by any individual with a minimum $10,000 award to the plaintiff. How about a law that bans wearing of MAGA hats? How about personal enforcement by lawsuits against those who discriminate against minorities like LGBTQ individuals, African Americans, and other racial minorities? The list is endless where states can simply nullify any federally protected individual right by delegating enforcement of laws against those rights to individuals. Vigilantism can now displace our entire constitutional judicial system and over 200 years of case law that protects it.
The US is inexorably sliding into a post-democracy era where governments are ineffective at protecting personal rights, allowing one class of Americans to force their belief system onto everyone else. With compromise no longer possible in our political system, aided by the complete disassembly of our court system, the exclusive right to make policy will fall to the party in control. Texas is the perfect example of this warping of our political system where the governor, aided by the courts and a single party controlled legislature, is now simply a dictator, nullifying local government’s efforts to protect its own citizens through his arbitrary orders while hiding in the governor’s mansion. He’s now protected not only by non-existence of corruption laws, but by the SCOTUS itself.
Our only hope of blunting this nullification of individual rights is for states like California, New York, Delaware, and others to take advantage of this activist court’s new legislation from the bench by hitting the very people trying to take away our rights by taking away theirs. How about a law that allows individuals to sue Fox News every time Tucker Carlson tells a lie? Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s hit ’em where it hurts.
Several books, published and soon to be published, have reported how Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, fought a full time battle after Trump lost the election to keep him from using the military to attack Americans and even start a war with Iran to stay in power. Even thought Milley hasn’t publicly confirmed this story, enough journalists have, including Susan Glasser of The New Yorker who independently confirmed what others have reported. This story gave me chills down my spine.
Despite his supporters’ delusions and continued support of Trump’s Big Lie, the rest of us have to make sure that he never comes near the White House again.