It still seems impossible that the Republican party could be so cruel and irresponsible as to base its domestic agenda on undermining and dismantling government services while enriching the already well-to-do and impoverishing the rest of us with ruined health care and a tattered social safety net.
What’s even more unbelievable is that the Republican party is hoping to get away with this demolition of American institutions by espousing the blatantly unconstitutional values of prejudice and exclusion that motivate so-called Christian nationalists, gun-toting patriarchal haters of women and self-righteous white supremacists.
You don’t have to wonder what the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthyite conservative witch hunters in the 1950s would have thought of such an agenda — they’d have raucously and piously cheered it on.
The very notion of enshrining flagrant unfairness and intolerance as the operating procedures of federal institutions is an anathema to generations of marginalized and disenfranchised Americans who have risked their lives to help create a country that honors diversity, equity and inclusion as the core principals of equal opportunity and equal justice under law.
What could be more unpatriotic than a domestic agenda based on values that empower homophobic, misogynistic, antisemitic, ageist and racist bigotry? It’s an agenda that is so pernicious it proudly persecutes transgender children, women and men just minding their own business and trying to live their own lives. Republicans have put in jeopardy every working woman, every person of color, every older person struggling to make it on their own, and the millions upon millions who depend on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps. It’s a nightmare come true.
When the president addressed a joint session of Congress, fulminating on for two hours last week, he actually said, with triumph in his voice, that “our country will be woke no longer.”
Woke, of course, refers to an intergenerational reawareness across genders and among people of color of the relentless historic and modern efforts by conservative Americans to deny and distort our country’s shameful history of slavery and pervasive prejudice. Woke recognizes that the notion of America as a land of tolerance and acceptance is a cruel illusion for anyone who has suffered the lash of being treated as property, the mind warping of religious intolerance, the horror of antifeminist brutality, and the torturous cruelty of gay bashing in all its vicious intensity.
The ruling figurehead of the Republican party today, let’s call him President Voldemort, is a man who has gone out of his way to attack LGBTQ Americans at every turn. The executive actions against LGBTQ people taken during both of his administrations include, according to BuzzFeed News, orders making it legal to fire people for being transgender or gay, forcing transgender female inmates into male prisons, banishing transgender soldiers from the military, refusing to consider gender identity and sexual preference in census demographics, making it easier to ban transgender students from federally funded schools, discontinuing the practice of the Obama administration to have a LGBTQ liaison in the Whitehouse, creating loopholes in federal guidelines that allow business people and healthcare professionals to discriminate against LGBTQ workers and patients on religious grounds, banning transgender athletes from women’s sports, and “refusing to investigate anti-transgender discrimination in public schools.”
The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) report in 2022 that “Christian nationalism” has created a “stained-glass ceiling” for LGBT political candidates. R. G. Cravens III, writes in PRRI that “LBGT political candidates are viewed by Christian Nationalists as embodiments of deviant behavior and as conduits for policy changes that would undermine the nationalists’ preferred social order.”
A presidential executive order in January further damaged the basic human rights of the LBGT community, and anyone else who could be the target of prejudiced hiring practices in the federal government. The order charged that DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) programs and initiatives were, in themselves, “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.” Federal workers whose job it is to protect the rights of potential victims of bigotry were placed on administrative leave in preparation for their eventual firing.
It’s now become an occupational slur implying “preferential treatment” to be accused of being a “DEI hire” as a federal employee. This is doing nothing less than turning the federal government into an actively bigoted bully.
In her darkly insightful book “Money, Lies, and God,” scholar and reporter Katherine Stewart, cites a far-right polemicist who goes by the moniker Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) as believing gay people to be “the most profound social and political problem” of the modern world. BAP feels that way about women too. Stewart quotes BAP as saying the “‘liberation of women,’ amounts to an ‘infection’ from which the West ‘can’t recover without the most terrible convulsions and the most thorough purgative measures’.”
These are the kind of people who are in charge of the government of the United States at the moment.
They believe it’s perfectly proper to tax the incomes of every single hard-working American, while at the same time viciously discriminating against any American who doesn’t look, believe and think like they do. If a political movement can be said to have lost its mind and gone insane, American democracy in the hands of the Republican party is clearly teetering on the brink of a complete socio-pathologic nervous breakdown that puts all of us who are not exactly like them in grave danger of being persecuted and terrorized by their own government.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Thank you, V. B., for your always wise and pertinent voice. Yes, we thought Republicans, although opposed to many of our democratic values, were capable of thinking for themselves. We now see that they are not. They blindly follow a criminal intent on destroying even what in in their own interests. Trump has abandoned the populist line he used in his campaign in favor of absolute power and defense of a class of billionaires. There is no other word for what we are living with now but fascism. Even McCarthyism pales in comparison. And McCarthy was defeated and disgraced because we still had the safeguards of three distinct branches of government, people in power who fought against such abuses and a mass media willing to expose the witch hunt for what it was. It seems we have lost much of that today. I hope we can regain the space for effective struggle and opposition.
Something I read this morning:
“On Friday, President Donald Trump stopped sharing American intelligence with Ukraine, and Russia responded by immediately stepping up its strikes on civilian Ukrainian targets.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk explained the situation succinctly: “This is what happens when someone appeases barbarians. More bombs, more aggression, more victims.” Bill Kristal
We have a Russian Asset in the White House who is motivated by Hatred of the “Other.” I don’t think we can wait until the midterms.