These are typical, sleazy, disingenuous attacks by Republicans and people on the right who know they can't survive politically without lying early and often! This isn't about democracy or the health of our country, this is only about the power they and their donors want and their attempts to destroy our democracy and undermine it with lies to get their way! They have no integrity and they aren't interested in being public servants. They are addicted to money and power and are psychologically and emotionally sick and deranged! Yet the people they manipulate are oblivious to the ring they have put in their noses!

Jim Jordan spearheads 'cynical' and 'wildly partisan' GOP effort to chill anti-disinformation research - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/jim-jordan-2661568445/

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPLies
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPTreason

"A combination of universities and think tanks have been sounding the alarm about disinformation, warning that outright lies could influence the outcome of elections in the United States. But some Republicans, according to the New York Times, are not happy about their work — including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (D-Ohio) and former Donald Trump aide Stephen Miller.

In an article published by the New York Times on June 19, journalists Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel report that Jordan and others GOP lawmakers are claiming that the anti-disinformation efforts are designed to suppress conservative speech online.

"The House Judiciary Committee, which in January came under Republican majority control, has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers — only some of which have been made public," Myers and Frenkel explain. "It has threatened legal action against those who have not responded quickly or fully enough…. Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online."

In Louisiana, Miller, who heads the MAGA group America First Legal, has filed a class-action lawsuit against anti-disinformation researchers — making, Myers and Frenkel report, similar claims to Jordan on the House Intelligence Committee. The Trump ally has described his lawsuit as "striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex," but Miller's critics believe he is the one trying to silence those he disagrees with.

Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, views the GOP attacks on anti-disinformation researchers as disingenuous and misleading.

Hanocck told The Times, "We see it in the media, in the congressional committees and in lawsuits, and it is the same core argument, with a false premise about the government giving some type of direction to the research we do…. We have not only academic freedom as researchers to conduct this research, but freedom of speech to tell Twitter or any other company to look at tweets we might think violate rules."

Jameel Jaffer, who serves was executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at New York City's Columbia University, is critical of the Republican lawmakers as well.

Jaffer told the Times, "I think it's quite obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly partisan — attempt to chill research.""

These supporters have been grifted and lied to by Republicans and their media for decades. They were never the brightest bulbs in the first place! These are the types of voters the GOP has been cultivating with their anti-science and anti-education policies, messaging and their sabotaging of public education through underfunding and voucher programs. A dumb electorate is easier to lie to and snowjob and that's what the GOP and their obscenely wealthy donors want!

'He didn’t mean to': Trump fans tie themselves in knots to explain he didn’t break the law - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/trump-fans-didnt-break-law/

#GOPHatesEducation
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPIsThePartyOfGreed
#GreedKillsDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"Supporters that came out for Donald Trump as he was arraigned in Miami, Florida on Tuesday were interviewed by the comedy group "The Good Liars." They had a lot of questions about the basic facts of the case that many MAGA loyalists didn't know.

One of the videos shows a Trump supporter claiming that the former president declassified everything. When told that Trump was on audio saying he didn't, the supporter refused to believe it.

A loyal Trump supporter told the "Good Liars" that he doesn't believe for a second Trump meant to steal the documents and that he probably didn't know the laws. He didn't explain why Trump refused to give the documents back.

Another video with Davram Stiefler showed a Trump supporter asking about the "Lock her up" chants and a man said Hillary Clinton was never investigated. He was told that the FBI announced the investigation 11 days before the election, and they had no idea.

What became clear to Jason Selvig is that none of the people were getting their news from actual news sources, and they were parroting the messages that Donald Trump has given. Instead of excuses, Trump has deployed the "what about" questions about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

At one point, a woman told Stiefler that Fox News never had to pay any money for lying to their viewers. He kept trying to tell her that Fox admitted to lying to them, and they paid a ton of money because of it. She refused to believe it.

Another woman refused to believe that Donald Trump would keep boxes of documents in his bathroom. She claimed that the bathroom with two chandeliers looked "like Joe Biden's bathroom." She maintained that Trump would never be so "messy." Selvig explained to her that the photos were in the indictment. They were in the court documents.

The Good Liars are known for going to many events. "The Daily Show's" Jordan Klepper was also known for doing the same kind of interviews, but due to the writer's strike, the show has been off the air."

A good one highlighting the hypocrisy of the GOP. They make noise about the deficit when they don't have the white house, but once they have it, they bloat the deficit again in their fawning attempts to please their obscenely wealthy masters/donors!

#GOPHypocrisy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

Congress just cut IRS funding. It costs even more than we thought. - Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/irs-enforcement-costs-congress-funding/

#GOPHatesAvgAmericans
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPIsTheBitchOfTheRich

"The White House and Congress recently agreed to claw back more than $20 billion earmarked for the Internal Revenue Service. This deal was, ostensibly, part of a grand bargain to reduce budget deficits.

Unfortunately, it’s likely to have the opposite effect. Every dollar available for auditing taxpayers generates many times that amount for government coffers — and the rate of return is especially astonishing for audits of the wealthiest Americans, according to new research shared exclusively with The Post.
...
This means that while the upfront costs of auditing the wealthy are usually higher — perhaps suggesting these taxpayers aren’t worth going after — the average return on investment is much better.

Another way to think about this: On average, the direct revenue collected from audits exceed costs by a factor of 2 to 1. But, that payoff varies by income. For money spent auditing the bottom half of taxpayers, the IRS only roughly broke even.

Meanwhile, the agency pulled in $3.18 for each dollar spent auditing the top 1 percent, and $6.29 for the top 0.1 percent.
...
In the years after a taxpayer gets audited, they start paying much more in taxes voluntarily. Maybe, post-audit, they stop taking some dodgy deductions (counting a personal car as a business expense, for example). Or they start reporting income they had previously accepted off the books.
...
These additional taxes equal about three times the revenue raised from the initial audit, on average, over the 14 years of data the researchers had access to. So in other words, the biggest returns from doing more audits come from deterrence effects.
...
That multiplier — three times as much revenue from deterrence effects as from the initial audit — is relatively consistent across the income distribution, with both rich and poor adjusting their post-audit tax habits significantly. Which still means that in raw dollar terms auditing the rich has bigger payoffs.
...
Consequences of the deal to claw back money from the IRS
So what do these numbers tell us about Congress’s decision to claw back money from the IRS? They suggest that existing projections for long-term costs likely underestimate the massive hole this policy will blow into federal budgets.
...
Again, the authors instead find the opposite, that the long-term deterrence effects are huge, much larger than the upfront bounty that comes from the audits themselves.
...
For every additional dollar spent auditing people in the top decile of the income distribution, the government can expect to get 12 times that amount back.

Twelve! As any tax-dodging billionaire can attest: It’s pretty hard to beat that return on investment.

In other words: If the IRS spends more money on audits, and those resources actually target high earners, the payoff could be enormous — far greater than has usually been assumed.
...
Audits of millionaires (and megacorporations) have dramatically declined in recent years, according to data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Certainly Republicans have fearmongered that the IRS will devote all its new money to deploying “armies” of gun-toting IRS agents to hound honest, middle-class taxpayers. So what evidence do we have that the agency will pursue higher-earning, higher-ROI tax-shirkers instead?

For one, President Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and others have pledged to raise audit rates only on households earning more than $400,000 (which is close to the top percentile, in this study’s data). Two, the agency is now equipped with better information about how to spend its dollars most efficiently, thanks to this new research.

“The evidence suggests going after higher-income taxpayers has higher returns, and that’s reassuring given the recent policy focus on auditing wealthy individuals,” says Ben Sprung-Keyser, one of the study’s co-authors
...
In any case, the revenue Congress just agreed to leave on the table by rescinding $20 billion from IRS’s long-term budget could be substantial. Based on that 12 to 1 multiplier found in this study for marginal returns from auditing high earners, that could mean Congress just gave up about $240 billion in revenue, for a net cost to the budget of $220 billion ($240 billion - $20 billion cut from IRS budget = $220 billion).

So much for trying to reduce deficits."

The GOP leaders and elected representatives plot daily to undermine our democracy and turn the country into an authoritarian oligarchy/theocracy. They violate their oaths of office and are antisocial, greedy, power-hungry sociopaths! And, their supporters/base are all on board with this it seems. They are fine with voter suppression, insurrection, discrimination and violence against minorities, gaming the judiciary and installing a gun-worshipping theocracy as long as it maintains their privileges and prejudices. Sad and discouraging but at least they are a minority and we know what we are up against.

The GOP is an anti-America party - Republicans hate America and don’t care about national security -- Salon
https://read.letterhead.email/standing-room-only/letter/16388?

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPHatesTheConstitution

"Republicans hate America and don’t care about national security

In the least surprising results ever, a new poll from CBS shows only 12% of Republican voters think it’s a crime now to steal nuclear secrets and put them in a ballroom for Russian and Chinese spies to thumb through. Trump was right that they’d forgive him if he committed murder. After all, he sent a mob to murder Mike Pence, and they don’t have a problem with that.

This news is still causing centrist pundits to reel, because they believed the lie that Republicans are a “national security” party. If they ever were — a big if! — that time has long passed. This isn’t just about loyalty to Trump. The GOP has become an anti-American party, so of course they don’t really care if foreign adversaries gain knowledge they could use to undermine or even destroy us.

Harsh, I know, but consider this: Trump attempted a coup to overthrow our democracy. His reward has been that he’s fast-tracked to the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. His fellow Republican politicians talk about him like he’s their god. This isn’t because they’re unaware that he’s a fascist. It’s because they agree with him and think he’s still got the best shot at accomplishing the goal of ending the American experiment.

That’s why Republicans don’t care if truly evil actors like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping get some kind of leverage against the U.S. Tearing the U.S. down and replacing it with a fascist government is also the goal of GOP primary voters. In that sense, foreign adversaries are their allies. For the fans of Tucker “I Heart Putin” Carlson, having some outside help as they rip this country apart is a good thing. So of course they shrug at Trump violating the Espionage Act. "

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPHatesAvgAmericans

The GOP couldn't care less about average Americans. They say they want to fix the debt, but really just want to stop any programs that don't benefit the wealthiest. Who has benefitted the most in the U.S. over the last few decades, the wealthiest. They can most afford additional taxes. Yet the GOP is not interested in even thinking about that.

Nothing could make it clearer that they are the party of the rich and don't govern for the country as a whole, but only for their obscenely wealthy donors. The obscenely wealthy and their puppets, the GOP, are all so selfish, no society could function for long if they were in charge or the majority. They are parasites who aren't even remotely interested in what is good for the majority of the country.

Republicans Literally Laugh Off Idea of Taxing the Rich to Fix Budget | The New Republic https://newrepublic.com/post/172782/republicans-literally-laugh-off-idea-taxing-rich-fix-budget

#GOPHatesAvgAmericans
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPIsTheBitchOfTheRich

"Republicans have said they want to reduce government spending and increase U.S. revenue—but not if it inconveniences rich people, apparently.

When a reporter asked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy if he would consider raising taxes on wealthy Americans, he answered with a short “No” before the question was even finished. Republicans standing around him groaned and shook their heads. They then began laughing when McCarthy asked where the reporter was earlier.

McCarthy explained that wealth taxes weren’t necessary because the United States has a revenue of 20 percent of gross domestic product, as opposed to 17 percent in previous years. Instead, inflation was due to the Democrats spending $6 trillion after winning the presidential election in 2020.

McCarthy’s statement about revenue is technically true: The U.S. revenues in 2022 totaled 19.6 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office, compared to the annual average of 17.4 percent in the five decades prior. Most of that revenue comes from income taxes.

But raising taxes on the wealthy, even by a little bit, would produce huge amounts of revenue. In 2021, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders proposed charging billionaires a 3 percent wealth tax, and households and trusts worth between $50 million and $1 billion a tax of just 2 percent per year.

This would only apply to a tiny fraction of Americans, but it could produce about $3 trillion in revenue over the next decade, University of Berkeley economists predicted.

In his budget, President Joe Biden proposed increasing taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations and using the revenue to expand health care, childcare assistance, and housing aid. Not only have Republicans fought this plan, but their own budget proposes punishing lower-income Americans to benefit the wealthy.

Republicans’ solution to the debt ceiling crisis is focused on mere pennies in comparison to what a wealth tax would do. The bill calls for work requirements for Medicaid, food stamps, and cash assistance programs—which would barely make a dent in U.S. debt. Work requirements would save the government only about $1 billion per year, according to the CBO, nowhere near how much actually needs to be recouped. And that’s assuming, of course, that such requirements actually work.

The U.S. is just weeks away from defaulting on its debt, but Republicans and Democrats remain at a logjam over how to solve the problem. The GOP seems ready to take it out on the backs of people who can least afford it."

First of all, people who invested enough time and energy into merely acquiring obscene amounts of money, are imbalanced, warped and dysfunctional in some way. Then you see these same emotionally warped people certain that the world would be better if they were in charge and committed to making even more money by gaming control of our political system, and the extent of the problems they are causing for all of us begins to come into focus.

Time to clamp down on all donations/legalized bribery and reduce the excess money they have lying around that they feel they can use to by our system by taxing the hell out of them and their estates!

Clarence Thomas' Citizens United vote enabled billionaire benefactor to boost political power
"The Crows used their fortune to buy access to and curry favor" with elites, one advocate said
https://www.salon.com/2023/05/03/clarence-thomas-citizens-united-vote-enabled-billionaire-benefactor-to-boost-political-power_partner/

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#TheRichBoughtTheGOP
#CampaignFinanceReform
#TheGOPIsTheBitchOfTheRich
#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary

"A report published Monday highlights potential connections between the political influence of Harlan Crow's family and the billionaire GOP megadonor's yearslong endeavor to shower U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with lavish vacations and other undisclosed gifts.
...
In "Travel Rewards: What the Crow Family May Have Bought by Hosting Those Luxury Trips for Justice Thomas," ATF shows how Thomas' vote in the 5-4 decision that effectively legalized unlimited political spending has allowed the Crows to increase their average annual campaign contributions by 862%, from $163,241 pre-Citizens United to $1.57 million post-ruling.
...
"The Crows used their fortune to buy access to and curry favor with one of the most powerful officials in Washington, then benefited from his central role in loosening rules meant to limit the influence of money over politics and policy," said ATF executive director David Kass.

"It's a vicious cycle that can only be short-circuited by restoring meaningful campaign finance rules and by demanding a much fairer share of taxes from billionaires, which, among other good results, will leave them less money to distort our democratic process," Kass added.

"The Crows' influence-buying and political spending are emblematic of a larger problem: the ongoing attempt by billionaires to purchase our democracy."
...
In a report published last summer, the group documented how "billionaires are increasingly using their personal fortunes and the profits of connected corporations to drown out regular voters' voices and elect hand-picked candidates who further rig the nation's economy—especially the tax system."

Not counting dark money contributions, billionaires dumped $1.2 billion into the 2020 elections, 65 times more than the $16 million they donated in 2008, the report found. By last June, a few dozen billionaires had already pumped tens of millions of dollars into the 2022 midterms—mostly to support Republican candidates, including several election deniers—in a bid to ensure that Congress is full of lawmakers willing "to make their wealthy benefactors even richer."

"Billionaires shouldn't be able to buy political access and influence with their enormous fortunes," ATF tweeted Monday. "It's well beyond time for Citizens United to go, and to put real action towards making billionaires pay their fair share in taxes. Our democracy depends on it."
...
For instance, four years after Thomas helped deliver a victory to U.S. oligarchs in Citizens United, Crow purchased a property owned by Thomas for $130,000 and made improvements to it while the judge's mother continued to live there.

Thomas is not alone when it comes to conflicts of interest on the high court. Last week, Politico revealed that just days after his April 2017 confirmation, Justice Neil Gorsuch and his business partners sold a 40-acre Colorado ranch for almost $2 million to an undisclosed person. The buyer, Brian Duffy, is the CEO of a law firm that has since been involved in 22 cases before the court.

Despite growing evidence of possible corruption, Chief Justice John Roberts has refused to accept an invitation to testify at an upcoming Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on potential reforms to the Supreme Court, which is currently controlled by six far-right justices, most of whom were appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote.

Progressives have demanded far-reaching changes to disempower the country's "rogue" justices, including adding seats—a move that has been made seven times throughout U.S. history—and enacting robust ethics rules."

I certainly don't agree with all the things that Biden has done, but by and large, he really has done a very good job and compared to the Republicans and neoliberals who preceded him, he has done a great job! He can do better, but given the failed, fascist, in-bed-with-the-rich and fear mongering of the GOP, he would be a very good president to have for 4 more years.

How Bidenomics Has Finally Defeated Reaganomics
Two years into his presidency, Joe Biden has revolutionized America’s economic policy—both home and abroad.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-bidenomics-has-finally-defeated-reaganomics

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"The last thing many of us expected when Joe Biden became president was that he would be a revolutionary. But just over two years into Biden’s presidency, there is no doubt that he has done more to dramatically transform U.S. policy and thinking in more areas than any of his predecessors since Franklin Roosevelt.

America had failed to adequately invest in its infrastructure for over six decades when Biden made it a priority once again. Biden’s prioritized investment in combating climate change to a degree that no past administration ever did. On foreign policy, he executed the pivot away from a Middle East and terrorism focus to a long-term commitment to placing the Indo-Pacific region and our rivalry with China atop our list of priorities.

Remarkably, he did this while simultaneously handling the threats associated with Europe’s largest land war since World War II and reinvigorating America’s most important alliance, NATO, in a way few thought possible just years ago.
...
From day one, Biden has profoundly transformed U.S. economic policy—and related social and international policies. Biden is the man who finally slew Reaganomics and the huckster’s brew of “trickle-down” and “the markets know best” policies at its core. He is the one who at last put an end to the “Washington consensus” that has served the rich worldwide and left the poor to struggle with too little support. He, at last, ended the slavish deference of Washington neoliberals to Wall Street, and the consequent grotesque growth in inequality and injustice it has fueled.
...
He has systematically taken steps to prioritize economic approaches that benefited America’s middle class and those who were left behind, approaches that sought fairness in our tax codes and their enforcement, approaches that strengthened the U.S. from within in an effort to better compete and succeed internationally.

Some of the steps he has taken were major but received too little attention, such as the effort (led by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen) to create a minimum tax to be paid by corporations worldwide. Some of the bold changes were revealed in policy choices that made headlines—like his decision to place the concerns of the people working in the real economy ahead of the preferences of Wall Street in his American Rescue Plan, his initiative to invest in our infrastructure in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and his steps to invest in our green economy and combat rising costs for average Americans in the Inflation Reduction Act.
...
In just one illustration of this, Carlos Roa wrote in The National Interest that the National Security Adviser’s “remarks mark a profound shift in American strategic and economic thinking; a confession that much of what the United States has been doing and saying for decades has been wrong, and a recognition that painful and urgent reform is necessary.”

Some old school economists who have been peddling the failed or damaging policies the administration has sought to undo decried the fact that the new approaches represented too much meddling with markets by government officials.

But of course, that is just the point. Biden, Sullivan, Yellen, and their team have finally acknowledged that growth for its own sake—or good performance by markets—are not the only metrics we should have as we make economic policy decisions.

Markets don’t have consciences, neither do they take into consideration the security interests of nations. Companies are by law required to place their bottom line interests ahead of the interests of the rest of society. Therefore, government has an obligation to step in and take steps to ensure that critical social goods are advanced.

Finally, after many decades of deferring to the financial and corporate interests who also happen to be big political donors, a president and his team have come along to say, “enough.” It is time to make economic decisions that serve all the people and address the damage done by the policies of the past."

The GOP doesn't care about gay marriage or trans people, they care about riding their vilification into power so they can entrench themselves and their rich people-first policies. They are, the lowest of the low!

Republicans deny they want to erase trans people — Montana silencing Zooey Zephyr proves otherwise
https://www.salon.com/2023/04/28/montana-proves-wants-to-silence-trans-people/

#GOPLovesPower
#GOPFascism
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#NothingChristianAboutTheGOP

"...They do care very much about doing whatever they can to silence, erase, and yes, eradicate trans people. As Zephyr told NBC News, she is not being "hyperbolic" when she says Republicans are killing people with anti-trans bills. Studies show anywhere from 40-56% of trans and non-binary young people have attempted suicide, with higher rates in red states.
...
Republicans have been shown these statistics again and again, but they keep banning this life-saving care anyway. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Republicans would rather have young people be dead than trans. Sounds harsh, but this is the same party that's more avid about banning books than banning guns, as well. And the same party that is passing draconian abortion bans, even as the evidence piles up that it's maiming and will likely start killing women to do so. Republicans simply don't care who their policies kill, so long as they get to control who you are, how you use your body, and even what you're allowed to think about.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Republicans would rather have young people be dead than trans.

With Gianforte, the cruelty is incredibly personal. His own son, David Gianforte, identifies as non-binary and has publicly pleaded with his father to veto this anti-trans bill, writing that "these bills are immoral, unjust, and frankly a violation of human rights." Yet Gov. Gianforte has publicly demurred when asked if his own child's concerns bother him enough to reconsider signing a bill he has been eagerly supporting so far. I wouldn't hold your breath, however, waiting for Greg "Body Slam" Gianforte to start showing signs of humanity.

Meanwhile, outside of Montana, the genocidal impulse towards LGBTQ people continues to animate the Republican Party.

In Florida, Republicans dramatically expanded the "don't say gay" bill to high school students, in an overt effort to force teenagers back into the closet. They also passed provisions to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors, threatening parents and medical providers with prison if they want to save the lives of trans youth. To make the situation uglier, Florida Republicans have also passed a bill that would make it legal for the state to remove trans children from the homes of parents who support their gender identity.

The United Nations classifies the abduction of children to "re-educate" them as a "grave violation." ...Taking someone's child to brainwash them to hate themselves and/or their family is taken that seriously as a human rights violation, for good reason. Not that Republicans care how much psychological damage they would do to children by going this route. Causing pain to those who they see as "different" is the entire point.

Zephyr, for her part, remains defiant. During her speech before she was officially banned from the floor, she said she refuses "to be complicit in this legislature's eradication of our community."

Republicans simply don't care who their policies kill, so long as they get to control who you are, how you use your body, and even what you're allowed to think about.

Rex Huppke of USA Today argued there is "some good to be found in seeing what the smallness of Republicans in the Montana Legislature did to Zooey Zephyr. By trying to silence her, they made sure she was heard."...Just by being visible, Zephyr is doing the necessary, if basic, work of showing people that may not know much about trans people that she is not a scary figure at all. She's just a woman trying to do her job and live her life. She's not a threat to kids, but she is trying to protect them.

That visibility terrifies Republicans. It's why they threw a national tantrum over Budweiser sending some beers to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. They see Mulvaney, who has 1.8 million Instagram followers, as a threat simply because she's cute and charming. She reveals the truth they want so badly to hide, which is trans people are fine the way they are and should be allowed to be themselves. Not erased from existence, as Republicans clearly intend with their anti-trans legislation. "

All the GOP wants is power!! They really don't care at all about democracy! They lie, cheat and steal to have power and this woman has been behind this dogged determination to disenfranchise voters and entrench the GOP in power for decades. Why? Could be Christian nationalism, could be fear of liberalism and progress, could be racism, could be she hungers for power and the rewards the obscenely wealthy lavish on her to enact their agenda. She is a traitor to our democracy and she has lots of company there!

"EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: Trump coup attorney Cleta Mitchell wants to "combat" voting on college campuses, citing North Carolina and Wisconsin, and says that when Republicans win the state Senate in Virginia, they can eliminate 45 days of early voting and same day voter registration."

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#ChristianNationalism
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

Here's a link to the audio:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1649075730687352833

The mainstreaming of the Republican effort to suppress the vote. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/republican-effort-to-suppress-the-vote.html

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPFascism
#GOPTreason

"It’s bad enough when a trio of voter suppression groups led by charlatans gets together at an annual secret conference that is sponsored, in part, by a group created by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to talk about all the ways they might make it harder for people to register or vote in future elections. But it is much worse when the participants in that secret conference also include secretaries of state and other top election officials from 13 Republican-led states, plus Don Palmer, a member of the United States Election Assistance Commission, plus counsels to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the House Administration Committee’s Republican staff, and a sitting Texas state senator. The entire conference—whose existence was revealed in a blockbuster report by the Guardian and Documented last week—shows that there is a thriving network of interlocking organizations working with elected and election officials to use unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud to try to mess with fair elections for partisan advantage.
...
Dark money donors capture the courts and the levers of government to make actual vote tallies irrelevant to who holds power. This story didn’t start in Tennessee or the Amarillo district court. For nearly two decades, we have been chronicling the actions of members of the Fraudulent Fraud Squad who have been active in perpetuating claims of voter fraud to make it harder for people to vote.
...
former President Donald Trump’s aborted Voter Fraud Commission. Documents from that commission later revealed a purposeful effort to generate enough smoke around nonexistent election shenanigans to cajole Congress into allowing states to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. In other words, the commission was an elaborate search for a solution to a problem that never existed, but it made a play that has since been repeated elsewhere.
...
All of this voter suppression requires an infrastructure. To help support it, Heritage and PILF have teamed up with Leonard Leo’s Orwellian-named “Honest Elections Project” (HEP), headed by Jason Snead, to run a new conference for election officials and the representatives of Republican lawmakers. Leo, lest we forget, has been in charge of reshaping the federal courts, selecting Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, and figuring out how best to spend gobs of billionaire-donated money to reshape culture and democracy. The chillingly dishonest HEP not only supports these efforts to make voting harder but also the “independent state legislature theory,” ...
The election suppression noises are truly coming from inside the house.
...
this is no longer just a lobbying effort shored up with big, often untraceable money, coming from players outside the system. What’s no longer hidden is the involvement of lawmakers and their staffs, who say the quiet parts out loud. Their enthusiastic participation in these efforts shows that these groups are not offering false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud merely to raise funds or even to delegitimize Democratic electoral victories by convincing the Republican base that when Democrats win elections, it is inevitably by fraud. Instead, the conference is powerful evidence of coordination between the decades-old voter fraud–industrial complex and state and government officials who actually have the power to make rules over how elections are run. To put it in the simplest terms, the election suppression noises are truly coming from inside the house.
...
Finally, the very existence of this conference also highlights the coming together of the fringe elements of the Republican party with its allegedly saner mainstream."

Opinion | At the NRA convention in Indianapolis, nonsense floated on guns - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/16/nra-convention-republicans-guns-democracy/

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GunsBeforeReason

"The nonsense floated in Indianapolis — based on the idea that our national addiction to high-powered weaponry has nothing to do with America’s unique mass shooting problem — speaks to a deep ailment in our democracy. It has both partisan and (perverse) philosophical roots.

The GOP’s conversion to gun absolutism is the heart of the problem. But politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It often follows from cultural and moral innovations.

For roughly four decades, American conservatism has identified firearms as a marker of a manly rejection of urban cosmopolitanism and gun ownership as a right more important than any other. As DeSantis said in his video, the right to bear arms is “the foundation on which all our other rights rest” and essential to Americans’ “ability to rule themselves.”

“Why do Joe Biden and the liberals want our guns?” asked Gov. Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota, another speaker. “Because it will make it easier for them to violate all our other rights.”

It comes down to a variant of the old Maoist slogan: All liberty grows out of the barrel of a gun. When Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told a White House rally before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, “Let’s have trial by combat,” he was speaking for a sentiment that runs deep in the gun rights movement.

A particularly dramatic example of how opposition to gun regulation is increasingly linked to efforts to undermine democracy itself: the Tennessee House Republicans’ recent vote to expel two duly elected legislators for protesting against the body’s inaction on guns after the Nashville school massacre.

It was no accident that the two since-reinstated representatives, Democrats Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, are not only both young and Black but also represent urban areas — Jones is from Nashville, Pearson from Memphis. Republican legislators, in Tennessee as elsewhere, regularly diminish the power of the big metro areas through gerrymandering and state overrides of local control.

Republican legislators may tout states’ rights, but with many cities in red states growing into significant islands of Democratic influence (and support for gun regulation), local control is not part of the GOP’s program.

Undercutting the ability of voters to cast ballots is another habit of those who privilege the Second Amendment over all the others. As Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan reported, Tennessee’s election laws allow gun permits as voter IDs but not college student identifications. There is no waiting time to buy a gun, but citizens have to register at least 30 days before an election. “It is absolutely easier to get a gun than to vote in Tennessee,” Democratic state Sen. Charlane Oliver told Gilsinan.

Our attitudes toward guns are often ascribed to our frontier past and a veneration of the Old West. But in truth, radical opposition to gun regulation is a relatively recent development, even in the NRA. Founded in 1871 by two Union Civil War veterans and a former New York Times reporter, the organization was initially devoted to improving urban marksmanship.

The group was long open to sensible rules around weapons, and the NRA helped Franklin D. Roosevelt draft the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act. It was not until 1977 that the NRA was engulfed by extreme ideologues. Our country, including the Supreme Court, thus embarked on a dangerous new path.

The good news in this story is that radical opposition to sensible gun laws is not embedded in the American character. It’s the product of an ideology that overtook a less dogmatic form of conservatism and seized control of a political party.

With Americans increasingly angry over the violence wrought by weapons of war in our schools, our banks, our shopping centers — pretty much everywhere we gather — the era of gun absolutism could finally be over, if the popular will on guns is allowed to prevail. But this depends on defending the democracy that so many, at the Indianapolis gathering and in Tennessee, deeply mistrust."

The GOP doesn't care about average Americans or the poor, they only care about their wealthy donors. They don't care about the deficit either unless they can use it to cut programs for average Americans so they can give more tax breaks and less regulations to the obscenely wealthy. The GOP don't create economic conditions that generate wealth for most Americans, just for the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. The GOP gives their base culture war issues but little else, yet the base doesn't seem to mind. Crazy!

GOP’s Deficit Plan: Spoil the Rich, Starve the Kids https://www.thedailybeast.com/gops-deficit-plan-spoil-the-rich-starve-the-kids

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPRTheToolsOfTheRich
#GOPHatesAvgAmericans

"Republicans are super-serious about fiscal responsibility. So they’re gutting food stamps and giving the ultra-rich more tax cuts.

I often criticize the modern GOP for its radicalized and weaponized cruelty. In the interest of being fair and balanced, let me pay them a rare pseudo-compliment. I grudgingly admire their relentless consistency around one issue which has the ability to unite both RINOs and MAGAs: They will never miss an opportunity to starve the poor in order to fatten and butter up the rich.
...
Cosplaying as deficit hawks, the GOP seeks to gut SNAP, along with other popular government programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, under the guise of reducing America’s $31 trillion debt they helped create (and which they only show concern over when they’re out of the White House). It doesn’t take much to see through the GOP’s cheap spandex and mask to reveal they’re economic terrorists currently hijacking the debt ceiling, and thereby potentially harming the global economy, just so they can cut popular welfare programs to give tax cuts to the wealthiest one percent.
...
Enter poor families and their children. They have always served as reliable tributes, rarely missed and easily forgotten. The expansion of SNAP benefits, one of the last standing COVID relief programs, serves as a lifeboat for these impoverished Americans who are barely surviving in a difficult economy with low wages, inflation, the lingering damages wrought by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

According to a report from the nonprofit research group, the Urban Institute, SNAP benefits kept 4.2 million people out of poverty and reduced poverty rates for children by 14 percent in the final quarter of 2021. The expanded benefits have already ended in 18 states, negatively affecting nine million people.

In an email to Axios, Moody’s economist Mark Zandi wrote that SNAP benefits have an overall positive impact on the economy, because they give money to families to buy groceries, and cutting them will have only a marginal impact on inflation. Specifically, “every $1 spent on SNAP currently generates about $1.42 in GDP.
...
Surely, the GOP can find something else to trim so our children can eat bread?

Perhaps a small little tuck from the defense budget is in order, considering the U.S. has the world’s most awesome and expansive military? Nope. Last year, Congress passed an $858 billion bill and increased the defense budget by 8 percent.

The “pro-life-as-long-as-you’re-in-the womb” GOP cares little for child poverty and homelessness, insisting that poor kids should pull themselves from their BabyBjorn bootstraps and stop whining and asking for “handouts,” such as the Child Tax Credit, which temporarily helped reduce the child poverty rate by 12 percent until it was iced by Republicans and moderate (obstructionist) Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.

These supposed GOP “deficit hawks,” under the leadership of the spineless House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, are allegedly so zealous about “balancing the budget” that they have no problem adding $3 trillion to the deficit to reward their gilded and privileged donor base—whose wealth has, historically, never “trickled down” but instead stayed at the top for the 1 percent.
...
This utter contempt for the poor is a feature, not a bug, of the GOP which also proclaims itself to be the party of God and uses Jesus as a gun-toting, white nationalist mascot instead of actually following his example of feeding the poor and helping the sick."

It's hard to imagine how Greene's call for secession serves the interests of the oligarch's/obscenely wealthy, but it certainly serves Putin's desire to foment chaos and wreak havoc on our country and democracy. Are the oligarch's pulling her strings or is it Putin? She's not smart enough to accomplish much in the way of policy suggestions on her own. Unfortunately, the entire GOP has now become a disaster for democracy and our country. They are all either insane, in Putin's pocket or puppets for the obscenely wealthy who are making a play for eliminating the federal government as a force that can rebuke them, reign them in or make them not poison or impoverish all of us.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Civil War https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greene-secession-civil-war/673142/

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPArePutinsTools
#GOPRacists
#GOPFascists
#GOPTreason

"It was only a matter of time before Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—a peddler of far-right conspiracy theories, a speaker at white-nationalist rallies, a supporter of political violence, and an all-around unhinged individual—would renew her call for secession.

The temptation of many people, eager to move past America’s political freak show, will be to ignore her comments and dismiss her as an outcast, a fringe figure, deranged but isolated. The less said about her, the better.

That’s unwise.

Greene is not just a member of Congress, not just a member of its Committee on Homeland Security; she has become a confidante of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. He has “forged an ironclad bond” with Greene, according to The New York Times.
...
“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy told the Times. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.” He’ll even stick together with those arguing for secession, apparently.

Greene is not alone in her views. She is giving voice to a widespread and growing sentiment in the Republican Party. Among Republicans in the South, for example, support for secession was 66 percent in June 2021, according to a Bright Line Watch/YouGov poll.
...
Last summer, thousands of Texas Republicans approved a platform that called on the state legislature to authorize a referendum on secession from the United States.
...
The Republican Party, forged a century and a half ago in the fight against secession, now finds the move worth contemplating.

Civil War–like secession isn’t going to happen in the United States, at least not anytime soon. But all of the emotions that are attached to a desire for secession—seething resentment, existential fear, an unforgiving spirit, contempt and hatred for those who disagree with you—are stoked by the kind of rhetoric employed by Greene and those who see the world as she does. Such language will further destroy America’s political culture and could easily lead to extensive political violence.
...
But I doubt that many Republicans, aside from courageous figures such as Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Liz Cheney, the former chair of the House Republican Conference, will call Greene out. (Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan have shown integrity throughout the MAGA years as well.)
...
What the rest of us learned during the Trump era is that a party led by craven men and women—some of them cynical, others true believers, almost all afraid to speak out—will end up normalizing the transgressive, unethical, and moronic.

Trump did horrifying things at the end of his presidency, including attempting a coup and inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol. The majority of Republicans tolerated what he did, to a degree that simply wouldn’t have happened at the beginning of his presidency. It took time for the corruption to fully take hold, for the party—lawmakers and the right-wing media complex—to fall completely into line.
...
Greene and McCarthy—one crazed, the other cowardly—embody a large swath of the modern-day GOP. Any party that makes room for seditionists and secessionists is sick and dangerous."

Murdoch has damaged the democracies of Australia, the U.K. and America, all for greed, power and god knows what else. He needs to be held accountable! The people who have most benefited from his actions, the obscenely wealthy and their foot servants, politicians, media personalities, lobbyists, etc., want democracy to fail so they can do whatever they want with no oversight or regulations. They would love to siphon all the money out of education, social security and medicare, while they're at it. Rupert has been their go-to guy, helping them destroy democracy and the middle class.

Twitter Foes Call For Rupert Murdoch To Be Deported After Peddling Fox News Lies | HuffPost Latest News https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rupert-murdoch-american-citizenship-deport-twitter_n_63f15168e4b0c87f32f1abd2

#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPLies
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPIsTheToolOfTheRich

"The billionaire's critics are raging on social media to boot him out of the country.

Twitter critics are lining up to demand Australian-born right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch be stripped of his U.S. citizenship and deported after undermining American democracy with a cascade of recently revealed Fox News lies about the 2020 presidential election.

Murdoch, whose media operations frequently rail against immigration, became an American citizen in 1985, which allowed him to circumvent a law barring foreign nationals from owning more than 20% of a U.S. broadcasting license.
...
Despite Murdoch’s lucrative citizenship switch, he’s apparently no big fan of U.S. democracy. He and Fox News continued to peddle Donald Trump’s baseless claim of a fraudulent presidential election that news hosts and executives didn’t believe, according to a bombshell brief filed earlier this week.

Murdoch blasted a memorably unhinged press conference by Trump ally Rudy Giuliani and lawyer Sidney Powell after Trump’s election loss that bizarrely claimed voting machine software had been manipulated in a plot spearheaded by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who had been in the grave for seven years by then.

“Really crazy stuff. And damaging,” Murdoch wrote in a November 2020 text message, revealed in a brief filed Thursday by attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems. The company is suing Fox News and its parent Fox Corporation for $1.6 billion over alleged defamation.

Carlson said in a message obtained by Dominion that Powell was “lying” about having proof of her wild claims and called Trump a “demonic force,” according to the brief. Fox executives were so worried about the danger Trump posed that they refused to allow him on Lou Dobbs’ program on Jan. 6, 2021, deeming that to do so would be “irresponsible,” the brief noted.

Yet despite that, Murdoch’s Fox continued to support Trump and his tale of a rigged election to pander to the former president’s supporters.

Now, his enemies are raging on Twitter to boot him out of the country."

“Republicans think it’s very unfair to blame Republicans for what Republicans do.” -DB

🔵 Cartoon by Darrin Bell for Counterpoint

#GreedKills
#GOPGreedKills
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

Part 4
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people.

Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism

#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"By 2020 almost two-thirds of all Americans would be wiped out by a single $400 unexpected expense, and between foreign imports and the gig economy most people entering the job market were looking at a poverty-grounded lifestyle.

Reaganomics succeeded in accomplishing Russell Kirk’s goal. The white middle class has largely become the white working poor, and the sense of safety their parents and grandparents enjoyed had evaporated.

As Alan Greenspan, in 1989, told the Wall Street Journal and I documented in my book Screwed: the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, he believed his main job as Reagan’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve was to maintain a “necessary” minimum level of “worker insecurity.” (Republican former private equity executive and now Fed chair Jerome Powell has revived this ideology.

Meanwhile, for forty years Republicans from Schlafly to Reagan to Trump told white workers that the enemies who’d “stolen” their good union jobs were not the morbidly rich who’d shipped them overseas: the “bad guys” were liberals, women, Blacks, and Hispanics.

There is a debate about whether fascists are primarily motivated by economics, authoritarianism, or just pure racism. The answer is: “all of the above.”

But the Germans didn’t start looking for Jewish “others” until the Treaty of Versailles wrecked that country with its worst depression in its known history. Out of that grew Hitler, as John Kenneth Galbraith had correctly predicted would happen if the Treaty contained extreme economic punishments for Germany.

And out of Reaganism gutting the middle class grew a Trump wannabe dictatorship that lives on in demagogues like Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, and Rick Scott — all backed up by a massive network, often funded by the morbidly rich, of rightwing talk stations, podcasts, and online publications.

This isn’t experienced just at the level of the individual, of course, but far more deeply and powerfully as a corrosive poison that hollows out an entire society from within.

At the same time the white middle class was being gutted, the Black middle class that grew particularly fast after the Great Society reforms of the mid-1960s took a hit, too. Republicans then reached out to African Americans, arguing that their problems were all caused by Mexicans or Asians, while also telling Hispanics (now on hundreds of Spanish-language rightwing radio stations) that Black people are coming for their jobs.

“Divide and conquer” is as old as Julius Caesar.

Today they are funding new networks of Spanish-language “conservative” radio and television programming nationwide, telling mostly-Catholic Hispanics that Democrats are using abortion to produce a Latino genocide and that Democrats want to turn their children into drag queens.

Kirk’s original vision was to produce a more secure and stable America.

Like so many conservatives before him, from Edmund Burke (who opens Kirk’s book) to today’s columnists for major mainstream publications and talking heads on rightwing “News” stations and networks, he argued that when “those people” were simply held down, suppressed, and marginalized — when people knew their place and were kept in it — society would function smoothly.

Oligarchy is a good thing, they said, with white rich people (in constant need of trillions in government subsidies and tax cuts) running the show. They are promoting, essentially, an American version of fascism.

That it would build a middle class here in America instead of an authoritarian police state, as it has throughout history, was a fantasy then and its a fantasy now.

And it’s brought us the dystopian reality of a weakened economy (except for the rich), racial hatred, and now a full-blown fascist anti-democratic anti-republican movement grounded in a bizarre conspiracy cult led by demagogues like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ron DeSantis.

While Black history is under attack in schools across the nation by these same people, white Americans also need to learn their their own history and Reaganism’s role in it."

Part 3
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism.

Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism

#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"In the election of 1980 the Democrats were awash in union money, so didn’t much take advantage of Powell’s twin SCOTUS decisions, but the GOP leaped at the opportunity. Millions flowed from rich individuals and huge corporate behemoths — particularly the fossil fuel industry — into Republican coffers, sweeping Reagan into office that year.

Thus, Reagan set out to make sure the dystopia he and other wealthy white men had glimpsed during the “unrest” of the 1965–1979 era was never repeated:

Unions were crushed and formerly unionized jobs were aggressively offshored; individual states started passing “right to work for less” laws that devastated union membership; an entire union-busting industry was birthed that today makes over $2 billion a year terrifying workers.

Voting rights were circumscribed by Karl Rove’s 1980s invention called “caging” where postcards were sent into minority and union neighborhoods and when they weren’t returned the voters were purged from voter registration lists. The US Supreme Court legalized this just a few years ago in a case involving Governor Mike DeWine and Secretary of State John Husted in Ohio who were throwing hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic voters off the rolls just before elections (as Ken Blackwell had done in Ohio to help Bush win the 2004 election).

Voter ID laws and other criminalizations of normal voting behavior were passed that excluded as many as 20 percent of potential Black and Hispanic voters, as well as college students and elderly Social Security voters, from casting ballots.

Massive antiabortion organizations were funded and mobilized to push back against the women’s rights movement, and white evangelical churches — which had been mostly pro-abortion rights prior to 1980 — cashed in on the movement and further empowered it, leading straight to packing the Supreme Court and the Dobbs decision.

Phyllis Schlafly led a national campaign urging women to stay out of the workplace and be obedient to their husbands, while also working against labor and abortion rights in the media and the courts.

Government programs to provide minorities with “bootstraps” (ranging from civil rights enforcement to affirmative action to basic food, education, and housing subsidies) were gutted. And the cultural demonization of college professors, queer people across the spectrum, and public intellectuals went mainstream.

In 1980 about two-thirds of white workers had either a union job or its equivalent (unions set local wage floors, generally, even in non-union shops) and most of what was consumed in America was manufactured here. Housing, college and healthcare were all affordable.

With just one single wage-earner, about two-thirds of Americans — most of them white— were living the American Dream, buying a home and car, taking an annual vacation, and building up pensions and savings for retirement. In many parts of the country Black Americans were also grabbing a share of the American dream, mostly through government jobs which, since the 60s, had forbidden racial discrimination in hiring.

It was so ubiquitous a lifestyle it was a background story line for shows from The Flintstones (1960–1966) to All In The Family (1971–1979) and The Simpsons (1989-today).

The 1960s show The Jetsons assumed that by the year 2020 a single wage earner just pushing a button a few times a day could support a family including fashion-obsessed teenagers and a charge-card-addicted wife.

Fast forward to the consequence of the first 30 years of Reaganomics: 2010 was the first year in three generations when fewer than 50 percent of Americans could call themselves middle class."

Part 2
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism.

Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism

#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"But when the birth-control pill was legalized in 1961 and the Vietnam War heated up a few years later, those marginalized groups Kirk had warned his wealthy white male followers about began to rise up in protest.

Kids were burning draft cards, women were burning bras, and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a movement for racial justice that the white power structure blamed for American cities burning.

Meanwhile, the Arab Oil Embargos of the 1970s had lit the flame of inflation, and unionized workers were striking all over America for wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living.

The white male power structure freaked out. They became convinced that they were seeing Kirk’s prophecy play out in real time on their television screens every night

Nixon demanded “law and order,” a euphemism for preventing students, women, striking union workers, or people of color from acquiring political and social power and the wealth that usually accompanies it.

He put into place his War on Drugs to, as his right-hand man John Ehrlichman famously noted, overtly criminalize being Black or an anti-war or pro-civil rights hippy.

“You understand what I’m saying?” Ehrlichman told reporter Dan Baum. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

“We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This took us straight to 1971, when Lewis Powell wrote his infamous Memo noting that Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson had kicked off consumer and environmental movements that threatened to cost industry lots of money, and that the student, women’s, union, and civil rights movements were disruptive to society and had to be stopped.

The next year Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and, particularly with the Buckley and Belotti decisions of 1976 and 1978 respectively, the Court put Powell’s doctrine into practice by legalizing political bribery by billionaires and corporations alike. (The Belotti decision legalizing corporate campaign contributions and dark-pool third-party bribery of politicians by industry was written by Powell himself!)"