In this fateful election year, the Republican party is choosing to offer American voters nothing but NO.
No to treating the homeless like human beings. No to stopping greenhouse emissions and battling climate change. No to federal workers. No to unions. No to teachers. No to public education. No to opposing racism. No to civil rights and voting rights. No to the LGBTQ community. No to women’s reproductive health. No to the federal government. No to robust funding for Medicaid. No to free school lunches. No to Head Start. No to professional law enforcement. No to the Constitution. No to diversity, equity, and inclusion. No to respectful political discourse. No to the First Amendment and religious freedom, and freedom from religion. No to social welfare. No to food stamps and the health of children. No to tolerance. And no to compassion. NO. NO. NO.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Republican Party is so intellectually bankrupt and so solipsistic that it cannot offer up a single idea of how to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. It cares about nothing but its own prejudices, its own property, its own privilege, its own religious dogma. It has weaponized conservatism and its fundamentalist roots. And it promises to give Americans not more freedom, but the tyranny of a religious and political police state that’s powered by institutionalized malign neglect.
Republicans in Grants Pass, Oregon, have passed a law that makes homelessness a crime, according to The Urbanist. Criminalizing destitution and misfortune makes being poor an offense against the state that’s punishable by arrest and detention, and probably a kangaroo trial.
Republicans in Wisconsin are “withholding $125 million designated for cleanup of widespread PFAS [forever chemical] contamination in drinking water” until legislation is passed that would, in effect, give immunity to the polluters, according to CleanTechnica.
Conservatives who control the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that “a 160-year-old near-total abortion ban still on the books in the state is enforceable,” according to NBC News. The old law makes “abortion a felony punishable by two to five years in prison for anyone who performs one or helps a woman obtain one,” NBC News said.
In 2012, conservative Arizona passed a law that “authorized state and local law enforcement to arrest individuals without a warrant under ‘reasonable suspicion’” if they looked like they were “illegal immigrants,” or, in other words, if they were people of color. According the Library of Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down most of the law, but not the “show me your papers” provision which allows police “to inspect the immigration status of individuals” stopped without a warrant under “reasonable suspicion.”
This year, we’re confronted Project 2025, a product of the right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation. It’s a blueprint for a fundamentalist dictatorship.
Media Matters for America says Project 2025 “aims to put Christianity at the center of American government and society by turning a biblical worldview into federal law, often employing Christian nationalist talking points,” while gutting the federal bureaucracy, including the Justice Department, the FBI and the EPA.
Project 2025 recommends, according to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, that the next Republican administration erase any mention of abortion, reproductive health, and reproductive rights from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation and piece of legislation that exists.”
Project 2025 proposes a massive assault on “so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion” measures that it accuses of having “enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects” of state and local government, higher education and corporations.
Project 2025 also “takes extreme positions against LGBTQ rights, seeking to eliminate federal protections for queer people and pursue research into conversion therapies in order to encourage gender and sexual conformity,” reports Media Matters.
Project 2025’s policies would turn our country into an American Iran, powered by the bullying tyranny of a fundamentalist political order driven by privilege, propaganda, caste, misogyny and vast corporate wealth.
Is that what we really want, a sanctimoniously negative, hate everyone, hate everything administration that dismantles tried and true institutions that have long histories of making life better for all Americans from all walks of life, no matter their faith, wealth, gender or skin color? Would we really let something like that happen in our country?
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Margaret Atwood was prophetic with her “Handmaid’s Tale”, except the Republicans aren’t only targeting women. Orwell warned us in “1984.” We need robust and effective resistance before it’s too late.
The Negativity of the GOP and religiosity already have advanced the US well on the road toward a theocratic dictatorship. Loss of bodily control, prosecution and travel restrictions for women seeking abortion are part of this fascist takeover. Forcing nuclear weapon production in New Mexico is more death and disease imposed here without even a full, responsible cleanup for the Manhattan Project decades ago.
This newsletter pulls together into a concise and very valuable document
the horrors of negativity that we pick up on from scattered sources.
This is exactly the powerful statement that is needed at this time.
Sincere thanks.