Author: jcjordan

The governor of Texas has pardoned a man who was tried and convicted of murder. That in itself is not that unusual, as things happen and the pardoning process can sometimes rectify these situations. But no, that’s not what happened. It appears that Gov. Abbot has pardoned him because he killed the right people. He was convicted of killing a BLM protestor in Austin, Texas. The measure he is sending is clear: “If you kill the right people, we will not hold you responsible for those killings.” This is something that if you told Americans even ten years ago, they wouldn’t believe, but now is a reality. And soon they will start suggesting capital punishment to women and their care providers who will not act as brood mares for the state.

The future looks dystopic if you venture into the South.

And of course, it won’t be enough to please the American hard right. Already, the comments are “too little, too late”, but that is rich considering there was a bipartisan immigration bill before Congress that extreme MAGA rejected, and Biden is forced to do this because of their recalcitrance.

It’s frankly amazing how much Biden has done to appease the right, essentially everything they asked for that is not culture-war based. He lowered gas prices. He increased American energy independence so that now the US is a net energy exporter. He signed a huge “roads and bridges” infrastructure bill that was rejected by every R in Congress (who still are going home to their districts and claiming credit for it). He has brought down inflation. He helped us recover from a disastrous COVID response from the last president. He brought the troops home from Afghanistan at great political cost.

Those are all so-called conservative talking points! And mind you, the last administration did NONE of those things. And yet, right wingers still seem to be unhappy, while their candidate just got convicted on 34 felony counts and was proven in court to be an adulterer and a liar. A person that can now not legally travel to 37 other countries because of that. And on top of all that, the conservatives are now attacking law & order itself, because that system is holding one of their liars to account. What a precarious time to be an American. Let’s hope there are enough rational people out there who can see the world beyond their little bubble and prevent the collapse of America that would surely happen if any R gets elected President. Especially this one.

Do you never, ever want an increase to the minimum wage, for any reason? Vote GOP.

Do you want women to be forced to give birth to dead fetuses and the babies from incest and rape, nationwide? Vote GOP.

Do you want to have female contraception made illegal? (Don’t worry guys, condoms and Viagra will never be made illegal.) Vote GOP.

Do you want family reproductive decisions to be decided by elected officials in your state capital as opposed to between the family and their doctor? Vote GOP.

Do you want to have the voting and constitutional rights of you and your fellow citizens further eroded? Vote GOP.

Do you want to give up the chore of choosing and just let someone else tell you what to do for the rest of your life? Vote GOP.

Do you want all levels of government to be corrupt and criminal? Vote GOP.

Do you want the government to continue wasting time passing completely worthless bills while doing nothing to help everyday Americans? Vote GOP.

Do you want the government to completely ignore major issues, like the housing, opioid, and climate crises, while doing everything in their power to distract from these issues with culture-war stuff that very few people actually care about? Vote GOP.

Do you want your elected government officials to lie about almost everything there is to lie about while at the same time gaslighting you? Vote GOP.

Do you want your politicians to completely ignore what you want and do what they want anyway, like when Ohio’s citizens legalized weed, but their elected officials have been slow-walking it ever since? Vote GOP.

Do you want state-sponsored religion Christianity American Protestantism shoved down your throat in every public aspect of society, from school to government, without any consideration for other religions or atheists? Vote GOP.

Do you want your government to not only ignore, downplay, and politicize the gun violence epidemic, but actively introduce policies that make it worse? Vote GOP.

Do you want the divorce / child marriage / domestic violence laws changed so that they again go back to protecting only the men? Vote GOP.

Do you want your elected officials to interfere in the choices you make about who you become romantic with, i.e., do you want the government in your bedroom? Vote GOP.

Do you want public education to continue to be attacked, setting our kids further and further back from the rest of the world, rendering them unable to function in the real world? Vote GOP.

Do you want to continue to be forced to go into a lifetime of debt in order to pay simple medical bills for you and your family? Vote GOP.

Would you like people to die simply because they are denied coverage by an insurance company or simply don’t have the money for treatment? Vote GOP.

Do you want your political leaders to talk all the time about immigration, but when bipartisan Republican legislation appears to address the issues, they reject it? Vote GOP.

Do you want your representatives to shout “FREEDOM” all the time while simultaneously limiting your reproductive, financial, and entertainment choices? Vote GOP.

Do you want to end “wokeness,” at the expense of all of the above, regardless of the consequences? Vote GOP. But, you’ll first need to define what “wokeness” is for you, and after you’ve done that, ask your representatives if their version of “wokeness” aligns with yours. Because “woke” is a very vague word and concept, and it means different things to different people. So if your main motivation to vote is to “end wokeness” without seeing what type of “woke” your representatives want to end, you may be surprised when their definition of “woke” includes you.

This time, I’m not going to talk about how a state just passed an unconstitutional law that requires placing the 10 commandments in every classroom. Rather than talk about all the problems with this, including that they must now also display the 7 Rubricks of Baphomet or whatever, let’s talk about the good things that could come out of this.

First, God explicitly mentions the existence of other Gods, and only asks that you worship him more than the others. I think a good question a child might ask is “Why is God mentioning other Gods? What Gods is he talking about?” Five of the ten commandments are just about how to worship this particular God. Don’t do what the other Gods ask you to do, do what I ask you to do, it seems to be saying.

Next, how about teaching a seven year old what adultery is? “Mommy, what is adultery and is that why Daddy doesn’t live with us?” A conversation I’m sure parents can’t wait to have as early as possible. And then explain to them why it’s wrong but people still seem to do it all the time. And then ask why is that the church seems to go after LGBT much harder than adulterers, especially since LGBT isn’t even mentioned anywhere in the commandments.

Of course, you can’t forget about the explicit approval of slavery or that a world could even exist that didn’t include slaves. “Daddy, why does it talk about having slaves but we don’t have slaves anymore?”

I know the parents will love to talk about the fifth commandment, “honor they father and mother”, and of course the kill, steal, and lie ones will also be popular, the “thou shalt not covet” one will be hard to explain, since that word is completely unused in modern language and I would guess it might even be difficult to explain to a kid what that means.

I do recall it being the first place that I read the word “ass” as a child though, growing up, and I’m pretty sure I asked what that word meant when I was a kid. If only I would be so lucky as the translation that was used in the classrooms had both “manservant” and “ass” in it.

Watching what the left and right in America are boycotting has been very illuminating.

On the right, they recently boycotted a company because they made a small promotion featuring a trans person. That’s it. They boycotted them merely for acknowledging their existence and influence. No one was killed, injured, or even harmed.

On the left, the boycotts have been coming from two main directions: The most recent one, to force companies to stop supporting a genocide with their actions and the other one is to fight against companies using their monopolistic power to raise prices and shrink sizes of products while wages continue to stagnate, and then suggesting outrageous solutions to keep the profits in those companies rising forever, like when the CEO of Kellogg’s suggested that people eat cereal for dinner.

See any differences? It appears to me that the people who boycott over a culture war issue don’t realize how incredibly privileged they are that they don’t even think about the genocide that is happening while at the same time saying that a trans person existing is the end of the world. Imagine these two protests side-by-side: on one, they are complaining that a company hired a trans person. On the other, they’re complaining that companies are supporting a genocide and using vulture capital schemes to continually feed a never-ending, always-hungry, capitalistic monster at the expense of hardworking Americans.

A stark difference if you ask me.

It has been pretty fun to watch the conservatives on the Fox propaganda network, religious conservatives, the paid maga-sphere, and your regular run-of-the-mill conservatives absolutely debase themselves for this guy. Only a cult would act like this. He’s already publicly backing off a nationwide abortion ban because he knows it is an election loser, but his supporters seemingly don’t care that they’re being sold down the river. Their mental knots will become increasingly twisted if he is convicted in the criminal trial he is currently facing. It seems to prove that there is no bottom they will not scrape in their pursuit of power. And the lower they scrape, the more people will leave the churches, the more who will vote against conservatives, and the more people will leave conservatism permanently. And I’m here for it.

Why wouldn’t you go there to drop your anchor fetus? You don’t even have to be there when the baby is born! Just go conceive it there, and your baby has Constitutionally-guaranteed American citizenship. Score!

1. something that’s good doesn’t need to be marketed
2. Jesus needs more customers
3. Christianity is a “brand” now
4. You can buy a 15 million dollar ad spot? You can pay taxes too.
5. still conflates prostitution with LGBTQ, as if your orientation is a choice

I’ll add more as I think of them.

Not just anywhere in Tennessee either. This is the state capital.

No, it’s not because people need “conservative thought” or whatever, because what passes for conservative thought these days is just a mix of Christian and White Supremacist dogma.

And that’s not hyperbole–this GOP majority in Congress has passed the least legislation in history. The reason they can’t pass any legislation is because the party, once they allowed those two groups to form their core, has begun to engage in a series of purity tests where only the most extreme members can remain. But the lack of policy isn’t why the fall of the GOP is bad for democracy. Good-faith policy must come from logic and reason, and anyone using these along with facts and evidence, whether liberal or conservative, will end up getting to the same ballpark of ideas for solutions. Thus, the choice between right and left should be just minor choices about how much or how little policymakers should push the needle in a certain direction, based on priorities.

For example, when faced with the real evidence and threat of permanent climate change, the choice IS between how fast and to what new energy sources we change to, not IF we will actually change or not. The modern Republican party has decided that their ideology demands that MORE fossil fuels be extracted and burned. Can you imagine if tobacco science came out in today’s GOP? There would be massive “get-out-the-smoke” campaigns and kids’ “smokeouts” where they gather ans mime smoking the candy cigarettes. It’s just plain crazy at this point, and it’s dangerous, but it’s not why it’s a danger to democracy in America, although it’s related.

The reason this party on the decline is a problem is that many of these people see their political foes as the same thing as America’s real enemies like Russia, and because they often see their politics in religious terms, there is no application of logic. This desperation leads to an embrace of anyone or anything that endorses their ideology, no matter how heinous. Look at Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people and injured a third when he showed up armed to a protest in another state, where the locals were organizing because of another officer-involved killing of a civilian. After being acquitted by reason of self-defense, they then elevated this boy to superstar status within the party, and probably mostly because he got away with killing some liberals. That’s his claim to fame. But because it is so difficult to find people that will drink their Kool-Aid, no matter what’s in it, no questions asked, a person like this becomes a hero to them.

And look at the furor over Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Her crime was encouraging people to vote (in general, not necessarily for Democrats) and he said to take the vaccine. That’s it. But because of these increasingly narrow purity tests, the right-wing grift-o-sphere can’t even celebrate some of their biggest successes because they are now “libtards” infected by the “woke virus”, even though they probably see eye-to-eye on a majority of things. But painting themselves into a stupid corner by their purity tests isn’t even the most dangerous thing about a declining GOP.

It’s that the leaders they elect have been falling more and more to Russian and Chinese state-sponsored propaganda. Members of Congress themselves when questioning government officials have quoted from both countries’ propaganda networks, because whatever was written agreed with their dogma. But most importantly, they are so radicalized, so desperate for someone, ANYONE, to agree with them, that they won’t even check to see if what was written or said is verifiable or true. It doesn’t matter, really. And when you’re that starved for approval, it makes it childishly easy for foreign countries to pass off state propaganda to Americans and THEY THEMSELVES PASS IT ON as true. That also means there are no guardrails on money for them either. Unless the check says from “BIG BAD RUSSIA, LOVE PUTIN” they are not going to do any due diligence on where the money, and influence-peddling, comes from.

In fact, the former leader of the House, who was ousted by far-right of his own party last year, in 2016 claimed that a number of legislators, and even Trump himself, were compromised, and reiterated those sentiments in recent comments, saying it was the only thing that explained his colleagues’ strange decisions. Herein lies the danger — we can not trust that our GOP leaders are not compromised by our enemies, but it’s even worse: we have to conclude that many already are and are acting in the best interests of our enemies. And it’s a scary thought to think that Putin and Xi, or any crackpot with money, are secretly holding the puppet strings of a third or more of our country’s leaders. And look, there is reporting out there that indicates the GOP is straight-up parroting Kremlin talking points.

Because when you’re this desperate, you’ll do anything…and therein lies the true danger of a party in decline.