THE COMING CONFLAGRATION

1. He got Trump’s endorsement because the disgraced former President said he’s ‘handsome’ and has a ‘beautiful’ golf swing.
2. He’s in the pocket of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, and even has the full support of his $15 million super PAC.
3. He left Ohio to go make millions working for big investment firms—and now pretends to understand the challenges facing working families.
4. He’s anti-choice and anti-democracy—he wants to outlaw all abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, and he wants to make it more difficult for people to vote.
5. He has absolutely no plan to help working families—he will say and do anything in order to win, all so that he can help make his rich buddies and corporate backers even richer.” (Team Ryan, May 6, 2022)

This last item is both utterly ridiculous and at the same time not at all far-fetched in today’s NFP.  MEDIAite reports: “Andrew Wilhoite won a Republican primary in Indiana on Tuesday night after being arrested in the murder of his wife Nikki Wilhoite, who had just finished her last round of chemotherapy.  In March, police said the couple had a heated argument that ended with Andrew hitting Nikki in the head ‘with a blunt object’ before dumping her in a creek, according to Law&Crime.  Her body was discovered in the early hours of March 26, partially submerged.

“‘She just finished chemo and stuff,’ a neighbor told WXIN of the late 41-year-old.  ‘She was trying to get well and for him to do something like that to her it’s not right.’

“Andrew Wilhoite, 40, received 60 votes and will appear on November ballot for the Clinton Township Board.  There were two other winners in the primary to fill the three available seats.  He will remain in jail until his trial—at the very least.  A trial date has not been set.

“‘There is no legal reason he can’t be a candidate,’ an Indiana election official told the Tribune Star.  ‘Under our system you are innocent until you are proven guilty.  If a person is convicted of a felony, then they are no longer eligible to be a candidate and are ineligible to hold office.’” (Michael Luciano, MEDIAite, May 5, 2022)

Keep this last point in mind as Trump’s legal troubles escalate.

The primary election in May is an ominous portent of what to expect in November.  People for the American Way reports: “‘NEW YORK TIMES: ‘The chilling amalgam of Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiratorial zeal—from QAnon to the ‘stolen’ 2020 election—has attracted a substantial constituency in the United States, thanks in large part to the efforts of Donald Trump and his advisers.’

“Tuesday’s primary election results made clear that, in many states, far-right extremists and proto-fascists are firmly in control of one of America’s major political parties—and if they’re successful in November’s general elections, these candidates pose a direct threat to our cherished rights and every shred of social progress that we’ve fought for decades to achieve.  Look no further than Pennsylvania, where State Senator Doug Mastriano just won the primary election to become the Republican nominee for Governor.  Mastriano built his statewide campaign with the support of Christian nationalists, Big Lie supporters, and QAnon conspiracy theorists.  He’s denounced what he calls ‘this myth of separation of church and state,’ used campaign money to bus people into the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally on January 6, and was actually one of the insurrectionists who breached police lines that day at the U.S. Capitol.

“Mastriano has in fact been one of the most aggressive proponents of Trump’s false stolen-election claims in Pennsylvania, pushing for Arizona-style partisan ‘audits’ in several counties and supporting schemes to overturn the will of voters with fraudulent electors chosen by state legislators.  As governor, he would be the top official in charge of elections in this critical battleground state, including getting to appoint the secretary of state, which is not an elected position in Pennsylvania.

“Unfortunately there’s a very real chance that this November, the Far Right seizes control of not only the Governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania—and perhaps in other swing states—but also one or both chambers of Congress.  This would mean an end to any congressional efforts to seek accountability for the insurrection of last January 6…and the full-throated pursuit of a policy agenda that includes a nationwide ban on abortion, ending Social Security and Medicare, and doing away with the separation of church and state.” (Ben Jealous, People for the American Way, May 19, 2022)

Mastriano is truly undemocratic, un-American, and supremely dangerous.  MoveOn reports on the Pennsylvania primary: “Last Tuesday night, Donald Trump took a huge step toward being able to steal the 2024 presidential election and regain the White House.  January 6 insurrectionist and radical Trump loyalist Doug Mastriano won the Republican nomination for governor of Pennsylvania.

“We cannot overstate how dangerous this situation is.  Mastriano has openly signaled that if he’s elected governor, he will use his office to award Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to the Republicans, no matter who actually wins the state.

“In fact, as a state senator in 2020, Mastriano attempted to engineer a coup for Trump by awarding Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to him, despite the fact that Trump lost the state by 81,660 votes. As governor, Mastriano would have the power to appoint Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, the person who oversees elections and the counting of votes.  And as governor, he will personally be responsible for certifying the results.

“Bottom line: If Mastriano wins the general election, there is almost no chance that he will certify any Democratic presidential candidate as the winner, no matter the results.” (MoveOn, May 22, 2022)

The article continues: “Pennsylvania is just one of several battleground states where Trump and his allies are working to install loyalists in the key positions that oversee our elections, like governor, secretary of state, and attorney general.  According to an analysis by The Washington Post, at least 163 Republicans who have embraced Trump’s Big Lie of a stolen election are running for positions that would give them authority over the administration of elections, from governor to secretary of state.  That includes candidates in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, New Mexico, and more.

“Their plan is simple: secure the power to throw out votes, certify the election results they want, and finish what Trump started in 2020 by installing him to another term—no matter the results of the vote.

“In Pennsylvania, the secretary of state isn’t elected but rather appointed by the governor.  And Doug Mastriano, if elected in November, would give Trump and his coup planners control over the fourth-largest state in the country and a critical election battleground.  Mastriano believes that, rather than voters deciding elections, ‘the state legislature has the sole authority to direct the manner of selecting delegates to the Electoral College,’ and that the mere allegation of election fraud is sufficient to throw out the votes and appoint new electors.  If there were any doubt about his intention, a video went viral of Mastriano and one of his allies bragging on Tuesday night about how they will steal the state’s 20 electoral votes in 2024.”

The bottom line is this: The NFP knows it cannot win elections honestly; too many Americans oppose them.  Mastriano’s statement that he will award his state’s electoral votes to the NFP, no matter who actually wins the state, proves he is as dishonest and corrupt as anyone.  But then, what else can we expect from the NFP?

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MORE EVIL FANATICS ON THE RIGHT

The insane stances and policies of the NFP would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous.  In this chapter, we will focus on a few more of the absurd characters that are the face of today’s New Fascist Party.

Let’s begin with a man I have already discussed in detail in earlier articles, Senator Ron Johnson.  The man is so audaciously dangerous and stupid that it is almost impossible to keep up with his antics.  Still, the six months I am covering herein contain a huge amount of new material and demands an update. 

To begin, Crazy Eight PAC quotes the Milwaukee Journal which lists some of his most ludicrous antics: “The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke down some of Ron Johnson’s wackiest quotes of the year: “Johnson accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of ‘overhyping’ both COVID-19 and AIDS, which have killed millions worldwide.  Then he tried to tell us, in his expert medical opinion, that, ‘Standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus.’  Johnson also said the January 6th coup ‘didn’t seem like an armed insurrection’, praising the rioters as ‘people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, and would never do anything to break the law.’  Let’s not forget, Ron Johnson said he thinks climate change is ‘bull&%$@’, called Social Security a ‘Ponzi scheme’, and truly believes the top 1% are paying their ‘fair share’ in taxes.” (Crazy Eight PAC, January 16, 2022)

There’s a lot more on Johnson, all of it bad.  He claimed that the rioters on January 6 were individuals “who love this country” and that he would have been more fearful had they been BLM members or members of Antifa.  Equally stupid is his idea that COVID vaccinations are a method of intentionally giving people the AIDS virus.  Clearly, this man is unhinged.  

Johnson is a very rich man.  But not rich enough, so he claims.  Crazy Eight PAC discusses this: “Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson—estimated net worth $51 MILLION—whined in a radio interview that his wealth ‘only doubled’ since he took office in 2011.  Meanwhile, Johnson voted to keep the minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, cut taxes for himself and his millionaire friends, and broke his promise to keep his assets in a blind trust.” (Crazy Eight PAC, February 28, 2022) 

Johnson actually boasted about how he made out due to Trump’s tax scam: “Did my business benefit?  Sure!  Did some of my donors’ businesses?  Sure!”  

In addition to his ridiculous ideas, Johnson is corrupt through and through.  WisDems fills us in: “Between passing legislation that benefits himself and spending our taxpayer dollars to leisurely jet from Florida to DC, Ron Johnson is in the Senate to serve himself, not Wisconsinites. 

“Let’s be real—this isn’t only about jet-setting.  It’s about a pattern of Ron Johnson’s self-serving behavior:

• He held up the GOP’s 2017 Tax Scam long enough to make sure it directly slashed his and his billionaire donors’ taxes.
• He’s fought against Medicare, Social Security, and the Affordable Care Act—all programs millions of working Americans depend on.
• He continues to spread dangerous, hateful and factually unproven conspiracies to score cheap political points with Donald Trump and his far-right base.

Scandal after scandal, it’s clear: Ron Johnson doesn’t care about our country.  Wisconsinites need to hear this message loud and clear, so they’ll vote him out this November.” (WisDems, May 27, 2022)
In earlier times, a man like Johnson would justifiably been laughed out of the room.  In today’s pro-fascist political environment, he is taken seriously, and the mainstream media makes no effort to expose him as the lying charlatan he is.  The same is true of all the other leaders of the NFP: Nothing they say is too far-fetched or extreme to merit media criticism.   

In January 2022, the FBI raided the home of Rep. Henry Cuellar and campaign office.  This came about as concerns were justifiably raised about his shady business relations with oil executives in Azerbaijan.  The Intercept reported: “After forging ties with Azerbaijan oil executives, Rep. Henry Cuellar pushed nation’s agenda in Congress.”

Cuellar is a Democrat in name only.  He is the only House Democrat that opposes a woman’s right to choose.  He voted with Trump 69% of the time.  He has an “A” rating from the NRA.  He lines his pockets with millions donated by Big Oil, Wall Street, Big Pharma, and other corporate PACs.  With Democrats like this, who needs the NFP?  Justice Democrats adds: “Now, reports say that Cuellar sent nearly $100,000 of campaign cash between 2004 and 2010 to a company HE registered.  There’s a cloud of corruption investigations hanging over Cuellar, BUT he has a huge $2 million war chest…” (Justice Democrats, February 25, 2022)

Big Oil is taking in astronomical profits; gas prices have risen to their highest levels ever, as Stand.earth reports: “As people in the U.S. struggle to make ends meet and cope with sky-high gas costs, Big Oil is making record profits.  The industry is using the war in Ukraine as a pretext to raise gasoline prices and gouge customers—and because we’re locked into the fossil fuel economy, many of us have no choice but to dig deeper into our pockets and forgo other essentials just to get by.

“You better believe that Members of Congress are hearing from their constituents that something needs to be done about high gas prices, and it’s crucial that the solutions they land on move us away from fossil fuels.  A windfall profits tax that specifically targets oil companies’ ill-begotten gains because of the Ukraine crisis is a huge step in the right direction.  Not only will this disincentivize the oil industry from keeping prices artificially high, it will help people deal with higher energy prices.” (Todd Paglia, Stand.earth, March 29, 2022)

Another Democrat in name only is Kurt Schrader.  Here is the ad that Other 98 ran exposing Schrader: “Kurt is one of the biggest corporate Democrats in the US House.  He’s taken millions from corporations including $650K from Big Pharma and $300K from Big Oil and Gas.  Kurt loves voting with Republicans to block bills for lower drug prices, a $15 minimum wage, and COVID stimulus checks.  The Koch brothers love Kurt for sabotaging bills to save the climate and hold Big Oil accountable.  Kurt tried to protect Trump after his coup attempt saying a 2nd impeachment ‘would be a lynching.’  Kurt is the problem with the Democratic party.”

The number of conservatives who are not buying into the NFP’s agenda is extremely small.  One of these is Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee for president.  As the NFP viciously attacks Liz Chaney for putting country above politics, Romney was virtually alone in defending her: “Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol.  Honor attaches to Liz Cheney for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal risk.”  

Romney has a history of detesting Donald Trump, calling him “a phony, a fraud” prior to Trump’s selection as the NFP party’s 2016 candidate for president.  In 2020 he became the first Republican leader to march alongside Black Lives Matter protesters.  Unfortunately Romney’s stances are virtually unique in today’s fascist NFP environment.  

I have already covered Lauren Boebert in previous articles but, as with Johnson, an update is needed.  Let me begin with a quote from Crazy Eight PAC: “Lauren Boebert is obsessed with guns.  She owns a restaurant called ‘Shooters’ where the waitstaff carry firearms, posted a holiday card with her entire family (children included) posing with assault rifles, and had a haphazard display of improperly stored guns behind her during virtual committee meetings.

“…On January 6th, Lauren Boebert took to Twitter to not only disclose Nancy Pelosi’s location to the mob of insurrectionists but she helped incite the riot in the first place, saying: ‘today is 1776.’

“She has made extremely xenophobic remarks about her Muslim colleague, implying that she was a terrorist.  And shortly after, she asked a group of Orthodox Jewish visitors to the Capitol if they were doing ‘reconnaissance.’

“And when people called her out, she likened herself to none other than Jesus.” (Crazy Eight Pac, February 16, 2022)

Like Ted Cruz, Boebert made the ridiculous comment that cancelling the Keystone XL Pipeline was a mistake that somehow encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine.  Crazy Eight PAC adds: “Lauren Boebert claims she’s fighting for energy independence.  But on the House Committee on Natural Resources, she’s introduced multiple amendments in the House to gut investment in renewable energy.  And, Boebert failed to disclose that her husband made nearly $1 million in two years consulting for companies that drill on the public lands that Boebert regulates.  Now, she’s using the tragedy in Ukraine to push her pro fossil-fuel agenda.” (Crazy Eight PAC, February 26, 2022) No conflict of interest here, of course.  

Boebert is, like the majority of NFP leaders, completely lacking in class.  During Biden’s state of the union address, he was talking about the death of his son Beau.  Boebert found this to be an opportune moment to begin heckling him.  This is truly an evil woman.

Just when you think that Boebert can’t get any worse, Blue Amp Action proves otherwise: “Tweeting “Ameirca” yesterday, thereby actually misspelling the name of her own country, may be the dumbest thing Lauren Boebert has done this week, but it’s also the most harmless.  For a long time now, each time I think this bigoted, classless Congresswoman—who heckled President Joe Biden at the State of the Union while he was talking about his son’s death—can’t get any worse, she proves me naive yet again.

“Speaking of sons, we learned this past week that Boebert, two weeks prior to her primary election in 2020, was off-roading in Utah when she crashed her car.  Yet, thinking only of her political race and the potential damage this might do, she fled the scene and ditched her son, her dog and her then sister in law—who was in some distress—in the car.  If you think you misread that sentence, you didn’t.  She didn’t stop to see if her son was hurt, just to beg her sister in law not to tell the cops she was there before running off. 

“If you are asking yourself what kind of parent…what kind of human does that, you are not alone.  But that, arguably, wasn’t even the worst or most bizarre thing we learned about Boebert this week.

“Boebert, who would legislate your sexual behavior and take away women’s bodily autonomy, was allegedly a paid escort, who accompanied wealthy men to parties.  In one case, she went to a Koch Brothers function where Ted Cruz met her and encouraged her to run for Congress.  It was reported that due to her profession she twice got pregnant, and twice availed herself of her legal right to have an abortion.

“This is where we stop to make clear that we are not shaming women who sell sex in the slightest, and we most certainly are not judging Boebert or anyone else for their right to an abortion.  It is the hypocrisy that is sickening here, a woman who judges how others love and wants to take away any right women have to control their own bodies.  Yet, clearly, this only applies to all of us little people.  Only Boebert and her right-wing, hypocrite friends get these rights in the country of ‘Ameirca’ I guess.

“Finally, we found out that the neo-Nazi ‘Proud Boys’ were distributing a manifesto labeled ‘1776 Returns’ which was there organized plan to violently enter and occupy not just the Capitol, but numerous government buildings in Washington on January 6th.  Something you may not remember is that Boebert, who is friends with members of this group and has spent time socializing quite publicly with them, tweeted out, on the morning of the violent January 6th coup attempt, ‘today is 1776.’  She also tweeted out the location of Speaker Pelosi, who the domestic terrorists attacking our Capitol were chanting should to be hanged. 

“There really isn’t a word for how utterly despicable a person Lauren Boebert is, so I guess we’ll just have to go with disgrace.” (Cliff Schecter, Blue Amp Action, June 18, 2022)

Voter suppression is a key tactic in the NFP arsenal.  Knowing full well that their policies are not popular with mainstream America, they are doing all they can to keep certain groups of voters away from casting their votes.  Not surprisingly, minority groups that tend to vote democratic are their main focus.  Many legislators are going even further, as Daily Kos reports: “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Georgia Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp, would stoop so low as to attempt to pass a law, mid-campaign, that would limit their challengers’ ability to fundraise.  This is, after all, the same group of people who purged more than 100,000 people from voter rolls ahead of the 2018 election. 

“Kemp narrowly beat Stacey Abrams in 2018 to become governor.  Kemp was secretary of state at the time and oversaw his own election.  Under his supervision, voter suppression didn’t stop at purging the rolls.  There were too few or malfunctioning voting machines in some precincts and a lack of uniformed standards led to mail-in and provisional ballots to being tossed.” (Amanda McKay, Daily Kos, February 17, 2022)

Not to be outdone, Gov. Rick Scott has a plan to raise taxes on the poorest Americans.  He also wants to force all schoolchildren to recite the pledge of allegiance and to complete Trump’s border wall and name it after him.  His plan has many more noxious ideas.  More on this later.

The Supreme Court has become a legitimizing force for the NFP.  Moscow Mitch McConnell was successful in packing the court with right-wing extremists who have no intention of serving the people.  Daily Kos gives us a portrait of Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni: “One of the arguments back in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton was over the kind of people she would nominate for the Supreme Court.  We’ve had a hard lesson in what ignoring that has led to: a Supreme Court stacked with a lasting extremist conservative majority that will be around for decades.

“While The New York Times has not exactly been a paragon of journalism for some time now, it still puts out the occasional piece that demonstrates what it can do when it makes the effort.  The New York Times Magazine has a very long article about: The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas. 

“Danny Hakim and Jo Becker have put together a detailed look at the long journey of the Thomases and how they are putting their conservative agenda into practice through both the Supreme Court and outside of it.  It raises many troubling questions about the Justice and his wife.  Thomas has a history of involving himself with groups and people that raise questions about his impartiality and whether or not he should recuse himself from certain cases.  (Spoiler: he doesn’t.) His wife as the article documents has been playing a very active role in radicalizing the Republican Party, and working hand in hand with some of the worst elements to be found on the right these days, including efforts to install really terrible people in government and steal the election for Trump.

“One of things that comes through is their absolute certainty about the righteousness of their cause.  They have an agenda and they have no doubts about putting it into practice.  They are convinced liberals are destroying America—Justice Thomas has made no secret of his views on things like affirmative action, abortion, the right to privacy, and the ‘originalist’ interpretation of the constitution.  Ginni Thomas has attracted less attention until recently, but she has been extremely active in building hard right conservative action groups and working the wing nut welfare money network.  As the article makes clear, they are a team.”

“But more than any other sitting justice, Thomas has stoked concerns of a hyperpartisan court.  He has frequently appeared at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court.  He and his wife sometimes appear together at such events, and their appeal is apparent: He fulfills the hard right’s longing for a judge—and especially a Black judge—oblivious to the howls of the left, while she serves up the red meat the base wants to hear in her speeches.  They often portray themselves as standing in the breach amid a crumbling society.  ’It’s very exciting,’ Ginni Thomas said during a 2018 Council for National Policy meeting, ‘the fact that there’s a resistance on our side to their side.’

“For the three decades he has sat on the Supreme Court, they have worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at targets like Roe v. Wade and affirmative action.  Together they believe that ‘America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,’ as Ginni Thomas has put it.  Her views, once seen as on the fringe, have come to dominate the Republican Party.  And with Trump’s three appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, her husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law.  In a nation freighted with division and upheaval, the Thomases have found their moment.” (Daily Kos, February 22, 2022)

Clarence Thomas and his wife are as corrupt as they come.  Common Cause makes the case against them crystal clear: “Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been refusing to recuse himself from cases about the 2020 election—even as new evidence reveals that his wife Ginni Thomas was involved at the highest levels in the Trump White House’s attempt to overturn the results.  This is shocking—and it’s a major, clear-cut conflict of interest for Justice Thomas.  How can the public trust him to rule impartially on matters related to the election and the insurrection when these cases could very well implicate his wife?

“The answer: we can’t.

“Thanks to the work of the bipartisan January 6th Select Committee, we now know that Ginni Thomas repeatedly urged Trump’s chief of staff to overturn the election.  But in spite of that, Justice Thomas has already deliberated on two 2020 election-related Supreme Court cases.  Notably, he was the only justice to side with Trump in his attempt to block congressional investigators from obtaining White House communications related to Trump’s failed plot to stay in office.  These records potentially included the text messages that Thomas’ wife sent to Trump’s chief of staff, encouraging him to ‘release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.’ 

“If we don’t speak out NOW, this supremely conflicted justice will be in a position to possibly decide multiple cases that cut to the very heart of our democracy.  The truth is: we never should have gotten here.  Supreme Court justices are the only judges in the country who aren’t officially bound by a code of ethics—even though their decisions make by far the greatest impact on our rights and our lives.

“That’s outrageous.  Like all other federal judges, the Supreme Court must abide by an airtight and transparent code of ethics to stop conflicts like this from threatening the institution’s legitimacy.  Congress should pass one as soon as possible, but that shouldn’t stop the Court from doing so voluntarily.  If it weren’t for the exceptional investigative work done by the House Select Committee, we may never have discovered Ginni Thomas’ direct involvement in the so-called ‘Stop the Steal’ efforts.

“We need to make sure that the Committee’s work can continue without obstruction—and that the Supreme Court takes concrete steps to ensure its rulings are just and impartial.” (Devon Nir, Common Cause, April 1, 2022)

Inequality Media Civic Action reports just how corrupt the Thomas’ are by listing some of Ginni Thomas’ texts: “It’s difficult to find the words to describe how bizarre—and frightening—the Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas text messages revealed by the January 6 committee are.  You simply have to read them for yourself:

• Nov. 5, 2020: ‘Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators …are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.’
• Nov. 6: ‘Do not concede.  It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.’
• Nov. 10: ‘Help This Great President stand firm’…'[this is] the greatest Heist of our History.’
• Nov. 14: ‘This war is psychological.  PSYOP.’
• Nov. 24: ‘I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud…the whole coup and now this…we just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed?’
• Nov. 19: ‘Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.’
• Jan. 10, 2021: ‘We are living through what feels like the end of America.  Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams.’

“This is the wife of a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice and a participant in the events of January 6 urging the White House chief of staff to steal an election.  And these are just a sampling of the messages.

“Republicans want to sweep all of this under the rug and pretend that Ginni Thomas is just some random political spouse firing off nutty text messages.

“But that’s a lie.

“Ginni Thomas is a major player in the far-right movement.  She helped lead a group that actively pressed lawmakers to promote alternate slates of electors.  She attended the January 6 rally in Washington, D.C.  And she is the longtime partner and a close adviser to Clarence Thomas.

“Is it any wonder Justice Thomas was the only dissenter in the Supreme Court’s ruling that Donald Trump must surrender official documents to the committee investigating January 6?

“Obviously, Ginni Thomas has a right to free speech, and she’s entitled to her opinions.  But conspiring to overthrow a lawful election is a crime.  Legal and ethics experts say this is not a close call.  However, Justice Thomas has already failed to withdraw from one case concerning January 6, so Inequality Media Civic Action has devised a multi-pronged strategy to help demand his recusal in future cases and draw attention to the court’s profound crisis of legitimacy.

“First, we’re calling on Chief Justice John Roberts to press Thomas to recuse himself.  At the same time, we’re using our vast reach on social media—with videos, TikToks, and the like—to make sure this ticking time bomb of a constitutional crisis doesn’t recede from public consciousness.  And finally, we’ll work with allies in Congress to ensure the Supreme Court finally adopts a code of ethics requiring justices to recuse themselves in cases like this.” (Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, April 4, 2022)

When Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated for the Supreme Court, the NFP went ballistic.  People for the American Way provides us with a few examples: “…It was evident right away that Judge Jackson will bring a much-needed perspective to the court—as a Black woman, as a former public defender, and as someone who has demonstrated a deep commitment to upholding constitutional rights and values.

“We also saw dangerous demagoguery from certain far-right Senators on the Judiciary Committee—some of whom have clear presidential aspirations—aimed at riling up the far-right base, from naked appeals to racism, to red meat for the Radical Right on abortion and same-sex marriage.

“Some of the lowlights included:

• Senator Josh Hawley’s ugly attempts to smear Judge Jackson for her rulings in certain sex offender cases, even though the criticisms had been widely and thoroughly debunked well before the hearings.
• Senator Blackburn all but calling Judge Jackson a terrorist, in leveling smears against her pro-bono habeas corpus advocacy involving prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay…and nearly everything Sen. Blackburn said, really, as she tried to drag Judge Jackson’s name through the mud, accusing her of having a ‘hidden agenda.’
• Senator Ted Cruz taking Judge Jackson to task for books on anti-racism available in the library at a school where she serves as a trustee.  Never mind that the same books are available at the school that Cruz’s own daughters attend in Texas, or that as a trustee Judge Jackson has nothing to do with the school’s curriculum—it was simply a chance for Cruz to trot out the Far Right’s new favorite election year boogeyman. 

“Those are just a few shameful examples, but there were certainly plenty more. The good news is that Judge Jackson did as well as any nominee ever has in her answers, maintaining her composure against the personal attacks and over-the-top partisan grandstanding.” (Ben Jealous, People for the American Way, March 25, 2022)

Not to be outdone, Marjorie Taylor Greene once again demonstrated her ignorance and hatred of anyone daring not to agree with her on everything. People for the American Way reports: “  On Monday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) reached a new low—from her official Congressional Twitter account—when she tweeted out the ludicrous assertion that three of her fellow Republicans are ‘pro-pedophile’ for saying they’ll vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.

“Greene’s personal Twitter account, you may recall, was already suspended in January for repeated violations of the company’s policies regarding COVID-19 misinformation.  The attack on Senators Murkowski, Collins and Romney is just the latest in wild, QAnon-inspired hate from the Far Right, and previews the disgusting smear tactics that they’ll try to use in this fall’s elections to take control of Congress.

“Unfortunately, it also carries real potential to spur violent extremists into action, both against the tweet’s targets—as well as anyone else who shares their position that Judge Jackson should be confirmed.” (Will Easton, People for the American Way, April 6, 2022)

Daily Kos goes into detail about Jackson’s qualifications, calling her “the most qualified nominee to the court in nearly a century” and noting: “She sat calmly and stoically through 20 hours of abuse from foaming-at-the-mouth Republicans.  Contrast that with Brett Kavanaugh, who yelled, insulted, and temper-tantrumed his way through his hearings.  Judge Jackson clearly has the temperament to sit on the court.  And she will, beginning in the October term of the court when Justice Stephen Breyer steps down.” (Joan McCarter, Daily Kos, April 5, 2022)

Of course, Fox “News” played the race card as expected.  Inequality Media Civic Action adds: “The Fox News coverage of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings has been reprehensible. All week Fox News has featured ruthless attacks on Judge Jackson without any regard for the truth.  Tucker Carlson vulgarly claims she is getting an ‘easy pass’ at the hearings because she’s Black—as Republican Senators grilled her for hours, and tried to turn her nomination into a cesspool of racism and partisanship.

“Meanwhile, Fox host Jesse Watters claimed that Judge Jackson sympathizes with child pornographers and a parade of GOP Senators and right-wing ‘analysts’ spouted lies about her judicial record.  There’s no fact-checking or follow-up questioning to these false statements.  In fact, as Talking Points Memo reports, hosts like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity ‘cheered’ in response to Republican senators’ race-baiting line of questioning, and then went on to spread their own disinformation.

“Would the GOP be fixating on critical race theory if Judge Jackson were white?  We all know the answer to that.  And despite her multiple degrees with high honors, Tucker Carlson keeps demanding her LSAT scores.  He never once asked for decades-old test scores from white nominees.

“Regrettably, but perhaps not surprisingly, studies show that Fox News viewers are more racist than the general public.  Tucker Carlson repeatedly supported the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory, a hateful fiction that welcoming immigration policies are a plot designed to replace the political power and culture of white people living in Western countries.  Laura Ingraham has retweeted a white nationalist hate group.  And after Jesse Watters told a woman of color in Philadelphia that racism didn’t exist and mocked Asian-Americans in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Fox News didn’t sanction Watters or even give him a slap on the wrist; they promoted him.  Fox won’t hold their hosts accountable.  So we must.

“Here’s the deal.  Deplatforming works.  Data shows since right-wing race-baiters like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Owen Benjamin have been deplatformed, public discourse itself has become less toxic.

“Pressure on major corporations works, too.  Disney stopped advertising with Fox News in response to their racist coverage of Black Lives Matter protests.  Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and even DirecTV have all dropped purveyors of lies and disinformation from their platforms.” (Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, March 26, 2022)

As always, the NFP couldn’t care less about Justice Brown Jackson’s qualifications: what mattered to them is that she is not an NFP member and as such, subject to ignorant racist attacks.  

Daily Kos tells us of the reaction to Jackson’s confirmation: “After the confirmation vote, every single Democrat stood up and applauded the historic moment of the first Black woman being confirmed to the highest court in the land.  In a juxtaposition, every single Republican except for Mitt Romney walked out of the Senate chamber.” (Amanda McCay, Daily Kos, April 12, 2022)

Mitch McConnell’s blatant hypocrisy was never more obvious than it was during Jackson’s confirmation hearings, as Daily Kos reports: “…even though admitting that Judge Jackson is both ‘very intelligent’ and ‘clearly qualified,’  Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that he will not vote to confirm Judge Jackson.  Why?  Because when asked if she supports expanding the court and applying term-limits to justices, she said she would not take a position on those issues.  Keep in mind this is the same answer that Justice Amy Coney Barrett took and McConnell not only voted for her confirmation, but as Majority Leader at the time, he rushed Barrett through the Senate at breakneck speed.” (Amanda McKay, Daily Kos, March 29, 2022)

By way of comparison, consider the NFP reaction to Kathryn Kimball Mizelle.  She served as Clarence Thomas’ clerk.  She was appointed as a judge by Donald Trump, despite her rating as “not qualified” by the American Bar Association.  It doesn’t matter: She is a far-righter, and that’s enough for the NFP, who had no issues at all confirming her.  Since her confirmation, Mizelle has overturned the CDC’s mask mandate on public transit, including planes, insisting that they don’t have the power to make such demands.  

Michael Bennett, Senator from Colorado tells us about one of his opponents in the upcoming election: “Both of my elections for Senate in Colorado have been close, hard-fought wins, but I’ve never seen anything like what I’m facing this year.  I’m not just talking about the stakes, either—I’m talking about one of my opponents, Republican Ron Hanks.

“Hanks is more than just another far-right Republican.  He was at the Capitol on that dark day on January 6th, going through the police barricades with Trump’s mob as it tried to overthrow our democracy.  Since then, Hanks has continued to promote Trump’s Big Lie, even comparing the 2020 elections to 9/11.  Not even Trump has gone that far, but Ron Hanks has.” (Michael Bennet, May 10, 2022)

There are so many fanatics in the NFP that to cover all of them would be a herculean task.  Daily Kos tells us of one House member from Michigan: “Robert “R.J.” Regan, a Republican who just won a special election to fill the Michigan House seat in District 74, is an election denier.  To make a point about decertifying the 2020 Presidential election in Michigan, he offered some ‘wisdom’ he had shared with his daughters: Having three daughters, I tell my daughters, ‘if rape is inevitable, you should just lay back and enjoy it.’” (Daily Kos, March 7, 2022)

Where was the condemnation from the NFP for this evil statement?  Not surprisingly, nowhere to be found in this party of “family values.”

Tennessee has a new law concerning the homeless.  Daily Kos reports: “Republicans can’t help but handle the problem by trying to punish and criminalize the experience of being homeless.  One example comes to us from Tennessee, which is set to become the first state in the nation to make it a felony to camp in parks and other public property spaces, as reported by the Associated Press.  The law, which goes into effect on July 1, 2022, will serve one purpose: It will make unhoused folks felons.  It will do no good.” (Marissa Higgins, Daily Kos, May 23, 2022)

This is the depth to which the NFP has sunken.  And the mainstream media continues to act as if they are a legitimate political party.

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THE NFP’S PLATFORM: REVENGE AND MORE REVENGE

It should come as no surprise to any thinking American that NFP leaders will defend Donald Trump and his criminal regime and will ignore any facts that prove his corruption.  The two impeachment farces conclusively demonstrate this fact.  The party that calls itself the party of law and order has made a mockery of that term.  Their singular strategy now is do defame, stander, and lie in the hopes that this will create confusion among the electorate.

The NFP will most likely win control of the House of Representatives in the November election.  Should this happen, they will ignore any campaign promises they made and continue to do nothing for their constituents and focus on impeaching Joe Biden and anyone else they think is aligned against them.  

Senator Ted Cruz still insists that Trump committed no crimes and that Democrats are out to get the former president.  The idea that he might be guilty is never considered by him or any other NFP leader.  Salon elaborates on Cruz: “Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, last week predicted that Republicans would impeach President Biden if the party wins control of the House in the 2022 midterms (as is widely expected).  On the latest edition of his ‘Verdict with Ted Cruz’ podcast released last Friday, the senator said he expects House Republicans to retaliate against the Biden administration for the numerous investigations Democrats launched into Donald Trump’s scandal-plagued administration.  ‘If we take the House, which I said is overwhelmingly likely, then I think we will see serious investigations of the Biden administration,’ Cruz said.  He predicted that Republicans may also impeach the president ‘whether it’s justified or not.’

‘They used it for partisan purposes to go after Trump because they disagreed with him,’ Cruz said, referring to Democrats.  ‘One of the real disadvantages of doing that, and it is something you and I talked about at great length, the more you weaponize it and turn it into a partisan cudgel, what is good for the goose is good for the gander.’

“…Republicans are not even waiting for a legitimate chance to impeach Biden. Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, and three other House Republicans filed articles of impeachment in September, seeking to remove Biden from office over his border policies, his withdrawal from Afghanistan and his extension of the pandemic eviction ban.  Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., filed similar articles of impeachment last summer.  Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., went further in September, introducing articles of impeachment against both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing them of ‘giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies and colluding with the Taliban’ by going through with Trump’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan.” (Igor Derysh, Salon, January 4, 2022)

The key phrase here is Cruz’s statement that the NFP will try to impeach Biden “whether it’s justified or not.”  This conclusively proves that Cruz and the other fascists in the NFP aren’t concerned about wrongdoing; it’s only about revenge.  The law means nothing to them; all they want is to eliminate their perceived enemies and set up a totalitarian dictatorship with themselves in charge and no opposing voices being heard.  What further proof is needed that the NFP wants to destroy our constitutional republic and replace it with a one-party fascist regime?

So what does the NFP actually stand for?  Daily Kos ran an excellent article laying it all out for everyone to see: “Since the Party stopped publishing a Platform or clear positions on issues after the 2016 election, we pretty much have to look at their behaviors, but those, at least, have been consistent.  Here’s what’s obvious, based on ‘what they do.’

• ‘Free and fair elections’ are for suckers.
• White men should run the country and the world.
• Violence is a legitimate tool in politics.
• Conspiracy theories like the one suggesting Democrats drink children’s blood as an ‘elixir of youth’ are probably real.
• Rich people and their kids shouldn’t have to pay taxes.
• More guns means less crime and fewer deaths.
• The darker your skin, the more likely you’re a criminal.
• Leadership is about instilling fear, not vision.
• Women are men’s property.
• Climate change and evolution are tricks to take away our freedoms and ruin religion.
• Education makes people stupid.
• Going into politics is the ticket to riches and fame.
• Rich people should make a buck off everything the government does through privatization.
• Helping people who’re going through a rough patch is a waste of time.
• The ‘rule of law’ only applies to minorities and the poor.
• Money and power are the only truly important things in life.
• Teaching the true racial history of America is a plot to make white children feel sad.
• LGBTQ people don’t deserve respect or rights.
• Wealth is proof of goodness; poverty is proof of moral failure.
• ‘Giving’ citizens things like healthcare, education, family leave, etc. are all ‘socialism’ and will destroy ‘the American way of life.’
• Government has no right to regulate pollution or protect consumers.
• ‘Fiscal responsibility’ is a phrase that can justify just about anything.” (Thomhartmann, Daily Kos, January 10, 2022)

Showing his disdain for the rule of law, Jim Jordan said that Trump was “right on target” when he said operatives tied to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign should have been executed.  Nothing about having a trial—only about murder. This is the face of today’s NFP.

Moscow Mitch McConnell is well aware of the fact that the NFP has become a full-blown fascist organization.  Daily Kos describes their frightening plans for the future: “GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has decided that the best way for Republicans to prevail in the midterms, and thus regain Congress, is to simply run against President Joe Biden and use inflation, mask wars, vaccine wars, and gas prices to defeat him.  McConnell has decided not to release a competing Republican agenda—to have a plan Republicans will run on.  Too bad, because that gives the guy he picked to head up the Senate Republicans 2022 effort, Florida Sen. Rick Scott, all the room he needed to go full-on fascist with his vision for America.

“Politico got its hands on the Scott plan, and it is a chilling vision for the end of America as we know it.  He calls it a plan to ‘rescue America.’  It’s 11 points with 128 action items to fight the ‘militant left,’ which ‘now controls the entire federal government, the news media, academia, Hollywood, and most corporate boardrooms.’  Here’s what he says we militants are out to ‘change or destroy: American history, patriotism, border security, the nuclear family, gender, traditional morality, capitalism, fiscal responsibility, opportunity, rugged individualism, Judeo-Christian values, dissent, free speech, color blindness, law enforcement, religious liberty, parental involvement in public schools, and private ownership of firearms.’  That’s just him warming up.

“His 11-point plan is beyond radical and terrifying in its embrace of white supremacist, eliminationist principles and policy.  It is also ridiculous.  No. 1 is public education, where the Department of Education will be abolished and schools will ‘focus on the 3 R’s [sic], not indoctrination children with critical race theory or any other political ideology,’ and where parents will ‘choose the school that best fits.’  So that’s public funding of private, segregated, and preferably for Scott, Christian schools.

“With that comes ‘color blind equality,’ or Point 2.  Because ‘we are all made in the image of God’ and ‘dividing people by race, skin color, ethnicity, or country of origin’ is ‘an immoral and corrosive habit of the woke crowd.’  However, the brown people whose country of origin is not the U.S. can’t come through the southern border.  Scott wants to not only build that wall, but to name it for Trump.  Because of course he does.  And he has no problem dividing out LGTBQ people, declaring: ‘Humans are born male and female, there are two genders, and to deny that is to deny science.’  To that end, ‘No government forms will include questions about ‘gender identity’ or ‘sexual preference.’

“Poor people are going to have to fend for themselves, by the way.  ‘No government assistance unless you are disabled or aggressively seeking work,’ Scott declares, leaving retired people hanging.  Does that mean an end to Social Security?  Also, in a nod to Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s infamous 47% of Americans are moochers rant, Scott declares: ‘All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount.  Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.’  Elderly, disabled?  Tough.

“Having declared all Democrats ‘socialists,’ Scott has a plan for us. ‘Socialism will be treated as a foreign combatant which aims to destroy our prosperity and freedom,’ which is pretty much a threat to imprison and/or execute a huge swath of the population based on their political beliefs. 

“Also, he’s got some pretty wild plans for government.  First of all, what’s left of the IRS will be halved, both in funding and in staff.  Everyone in government, elected and civil services, will be limited to 12 years in service.  Just to make everything that much more chaotic, ‘All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years.’  From the party that can’t manage to fund government from year to year.  Also, he would: ‘Sell off all non-essential government assets, buildings, and land.’  Bye bye National Parks.

“Also, they’ll destroy the national and global economy.  ‘Prohibit debt ceiling increases absent a declaration of war,’ and ‘stop spending money on non-essential state and local projects until the budget is balanced.’

“And of course, ‘we will protect the integrity of American Democracy [sic] and stop left-wing efforts to rig elections.’

“Scott’s ideas are an amalgam of standard Republican economic principles—keep taxes low for the rich, punish the olds and poor—and bat&*$% Fox News, MAGA culture warrior propaganda fueled by conspiracy theories.  It’s a fun—albeit terrifying—gift for Democrats.  There it all is: what Republicans really think about the majority of Americans and how they intend to suppress us.

“No wonder McConnell didn’t want to put out an agenda; he knew it was going to be full of this kind of stuff.  Too late, though.  It’s been embraced by the Republican National Committee (RNC)—you know, the official Republican Party that said the Jan. 6 insurrection was ‘ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.’

“Yeah, that RNC.” (Joan McCarter, Daily Kos, February 22, 2022)

More Perfect Union elaborates: “Mitch McConnell is desperate to hide the Republican Party’s governing agenda if they re-take Congress in November.  But Senator Rick Scott, who is the chair of the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC)—which is in charge of recruiting and fundraising for candidates like J.D Vance and Dr. Oz as well as incumbent Senators like Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson—released a campaign document called ‘The 11 Point Plan to Rescue America’ that outlines exactly what the GOP would do if they win the majority in 2022: raise taxes on working-class Americans and destroy the last American institutions left that were built to help them.  President Biden referred to it last week as the ‘ultra-MAGA agenda.’

“Rick Scott’s destructive plan has won praise from Senators Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio, even as Mitch McConnell has tried to cover it up.  So we teamed up with political pundit Brian Tyler Cohen to deconstruct it step-by-step.  The Class Room focuses on a few main points in Scott’s GOP plan that will most affect America’s working people:

• A minimum income tax: According to Scott, ‘All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if it is a small amount.  Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.’  This will apply even for people with little or no income, rather than taxing people at the top income brackets.  All in all 80% of the hike would be shouldered by households making $54k or less, and almost all of it would be paid by people making less than $100k (85% of Americans fall into that category).
• Gutting tax enforcement to help billionaires: Scott’s plan ‘will immediately cut the IRS funding and workforce by 50%.’  A weaker IRS almost wholly helps corporations and the ultra-wealthy to avoid paying what they owe in taxes.  A ProPublica report shows that as the IRS loses resources, they stop audits and investigations on the rich more than the poor, even though most tax evasion is done by the rich.
• Getting rid of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid: ‘All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years.  If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.’  McConnell tacitly admitted that Republicans would not provide the votes to reauthorize these programs.  Gutting these programs would be devastating to millions of working people. 
• Letting the fossil fuel industry worsen climate change: Scott says, ‘The weather is always changing.  We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically.  We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.’  Scott has already introduced a bill in the Senate called the ‘FREE American Energy Act’ to roll back energy protections: it would give states authority over drilling licenses on federal lands, rescind President Biden’s 2021 climate executive order, and severely inhibit environmental agencies’ regulatory power. 

“Republicans like Scott know their pro-corporate agenda isn’t popular, so they stoke fear and hatred of immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ people to cover up their other intentions.  It’s the same playbook Scott used to paper over his record of having committed what was at the time the largest case of Medicare fraud in American history to win election in Florida.  He’s proposing criminalizing free speech and protest, banning the teaching or study of certain topics related to race, gender, and sexuality, restricting voting rights, and rolling back abortion rights.  The GOP platform would expand freedom only for the wealthy and powerful, and bring more dangerous authoritarianism.” (Faiz Shakir, More Perfect Union, May 10, 2022)

Full-blown fascism.  That is the vision the NFP has for the future of the United States.  Anyone who still thinks these people are “Republicans” needs a healthy dose of reality.  How can they be unaware of the fact that there are no repercussions when “Republicans” attend white nationalist events or refuse to condemn totalitarianism anywhere it appears on the globe?

Further proof of how NFP leaders have embraced fascism is discussed in an excellent article by AZ Dems: “the AZ GOP isn’t even trying to hide behind dog whistles anymore.  Now, they’re openly working with prominent white nationalists.  Several prominent AZ GOP leaders are flying across the country this week to attend a white nationalist conference that was started because the original CPAC conference wasn’t racist enough.  Promotional materials for the conference highlight Kari Lake and Wendy Rogers as speakers, showing that the AZ GOP’s flirtation with white nationalists isn’t just limited to Paul Gosar. 

“Last year, Paul Gosar made history by being the first sitting congressman to speak at AFPAC.  Now, several other AZ Republicans are following in his footsteps.  This shows the extremism in the AZ GOP is growing—and it’s not limited to their insane election conspiracy theories.” (AZ Dems, February 23, 2022)

Gosar has a long history of favoring white supremacy, as Arizona Democrats explains: “it’s no surprise that Paul Gosar is attending a white nationalist group’s event.  He’s been attending said events for years and repeatedly praises white nationalist leaders.  But attending a white nationalist event on Hitler’s birthday is an embarrassing new low. 

“…Gosar said the lack of ramifications from the GOP allows him to stir up more trouble, and Congressional Republicans have promised to elevate him if they take control once again.

“Despite several high-profile moments that should be embarrassing, the reality is that Gosar’s influence is growing in Arizona.  And the AZ GOP just sits quietly, scandal after scandal.” (Arizona Democrats, April 13, 2022)

“Elevating” a white supremacist.  That should tell you how far the NFP has gone in embracing out and out fascism.  The Republican Party would have denounced people like this.  The NFP embraces them.

Consider what Arizona’s Governor Doug Ducey said when a reporter asked him “Do you regret spending $500,000 through your super PAC to elect Wendy Rogers as she promotes white nationalists and speaks to a conference of them in Florida?”  Ducey responded by saying: “Wendy Rogers is still better than her opponent.”  In other words, being a fascist Republican is better than being a Democrat.  Ducey is in effect saying that the party of Hitler is preferable to the Democratic party.  

The NFP has a long history of hatred toward anyone who dares to be different from what they think everyone should be, meaning exactly like them in appearance and action.  Homosexuality in any form is anathema to them.  Florida’s “Don’t say Gay” bill is terrifying for anyone who happens to have an alternative sexual preference.  ParentsTogether Action tells us: “…The bill continues to make its way through both the Florida House and Senate this week—and that is really scary for so many kids and families who live in fear of bullying and discrimination.  The bill would still ban any contextualized classroom discussion of orientation or identity for primary grades—and parents could take legal action against schools for doing so.  So for instance if a student shares that they had a nice Mother’s Day with their two moms that could be cause for disciplinary action.  Or if a boy wears a dress like Elsa or one of his favorite movie characters that could also be legal grounds to punish the student and their family for not sticking to politicians’ definition of how a boy should dress and act.  It’s nonsense.” (ParentsTogether Action, February 23, 2022)

Abortion, of course, has long been the bugaboo of the Republican Party, the NFP has attacked it head-on and they have finally won their long-sought victory when the illegitimate Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.  Daily Kos describes how a ridiculous Texas law has become a blueprint for other states to follow: “The Supreme Court’s refusal to block the Texas abortion vigilante law SB 8 has predictably spawned a series of imitators in other states.  The Texas law is difficult to challenge in court because its extreme abortion ban is enforced not by state officials but by…anyone who wants to.  Literally anyone can sue not just doctors and nurses, but anyone who ‘aids and abets’ an abortion.  No wonder legislators in other states have looked at this precedent and decided to imitate it.

“At least 31 different bills copying the vigilante aspects of the Texas law have been introduced in states across the country, The Washington Post finds.  And while such bills proposed by Democrats tend to get attention—including two of the three examples the Post itself opens with—the majority are from Republicans.  That includes seven direct copycats of the Texas abortion law and more than a dozen focused on the Republican education culture wars, including mask mandates, gender-neutral bathrooms, library books, and curricula on issues like race.” (Laura Clawson, Daily Kos, February 22, 2022)

Rick Scott is about as far right as anyone could be, and in today’s political environment, that is saying something.  Arizona Dems reports on what he wants to do should the NFP regain control of the Senate: “This proposal is truly unbelievable.  Buried within run-on sentences where every GOP buzzword is used is a very, very dangerous proposal to end all federal laws after 5 years.

“That means if Republicans take control of Congress, they will pass a law that sunsets everything not in the Constitution in 2028.  Take a minute and think about what that means Republicans will be repealing. 

“Let’s take a quick look at what the GOP wants to repeal in five short years:

• The Civil Rights Act
• Americans with Disabilities Act
• Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security
• Voting Rights Act
• and too many more to list.

This platform is one of the most extreme proposals the GOP has ever put out.  Rest assured that if they win back control of Congress, they will pass these initiatives.” (Arizona Dems, March 17, 2022)

It should be obvious by now that the NFP is about getting control, keeping it, and eliminating dissent.  

I have covered the issue of net neutrality in earlier articles.  Here is an update thanks to Fight for the Future: “Marsha Blackburn—a US Senator who objectively has one of the absolute worst records when it comes to tech policy and human rights issues—has been actively attacking Fight for the Future.  At a recent hearing Blackburn accused us (without evidence) of ‘inciting violence’ because we helped organize peaceful protests in support of net neutrality.  She then ‘called us out’ for organizing a protest outside a cushy fundraiser held by her buddy Senator Roger Wicker where we showed up with a giant banner that read ‘We’re here to buy a Senator.’  And for crowdfunding a billboard condemning Senator Kirsten Sinema for voting against net neutrality protections.  ‘Those are both true, and we’re proud of it.’

“Senator Blackburn was a top proponent of the Internet censorship bills SOPA and PIPA, led the charge for legislation that allowed Internet providers like Comcast and AT&T to spy on your browsing habits for profit, is a lead sponsor of the EARN IT Act, and has taken enormous amounts of cash from Big Telecom companies whose policies she just happens to always support.  So if Marsha Blackburn is attacking us and spreading lies about Fight for the Future from her podium in Congress, we know that just means we’re doing good work.” (FIght for the Future, March 19, 2022)

Sinema is another Democrat in name only.  Primary Sinema tells us just where her loyalties lie: “What has Kyrsten Sinema done with her first term as a U.S. Senator?  Really, the best we could come up with is…

• Fundraising abroad in Paris (during key Senate negotiations)
• Vacationing in Ecuador (also during key Senate negotiations)
• Courting wealthy donors at events hosted in five-star resorts
• Running marathons

Because we know she’s not…

• Meeting or hosting town halls with the Arizonans who elected her
• Supporting President Biden’s agenda (she’s full-on obstructing it!)
• Fulfilling her promises to support working families or protect voting rights.

“In other words, Sinema’s using her time in office to serve herself, not the American people.” (Primary Sinema, April 26, 2022)

The NFP is certainly not hard to figure out, once one objectively analyzes their statements and the simpering media coverage they receive.  Daily Kos ran a lengthy article, which I am going to quote in its entirety, quoting a former Republican who simplifies the NFP’s agenda in two simple sentences: 1) They want to be able to tell people what to do and, 2) They don’t want anyone telling them what to do.  Everything they try to do is based on these two fundamental facts.  Here is the article: “I read this last week and was amazed at how well this Ethan Grey summed it up.  I asked him for permission to repost it here.  He said: ‘sure!’

“This is a thread on Republican messaging.  The press doesn’t want to have a direct conversation with you about this.  So as a former Republican who is now a consistent Democratic voter, I will.  Thread.
“Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:
1. They can tell people what to do.
2. You cannot tell them what to do.

“This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy, there’s an additional layer of complexity to this (later in the thread), but this is the basic formula.  You’ve watched the Republican Party champion the idea of ‘freedom’ while you have also watched the same party openly assault various freedoms, like the freedom to vote, freedom to choose, freedom to marry who you want and so on.  If this has been a source of confusion, then your assessments of what Republicans mean by ‘freedom’ were likely too generous.  Here’s what they mean:
1. The freedom to tell people what to do. 
2. Freedom from being told what to do.

“When Republicans talk about valuing ‘freedom’, they’re speaking of it in the sense that only people like them should ultimately possess it.  

“So with this in mind, let’s examine some of our political issues with an emphasis on who is telling who what to do.  And hopefully there will be no ambiguity about what the Republican Party message is ever again.

“Let’s start with the COVID-19 pandemic.  We were told by experts in infectious diseases that to control the spread of the pandemic, we had to socially distance, mask, and get vaccinated.  So, in a general sense, we were being told what to do.  Guess who had a big problem with that.  All Republicans saw were certain people trying to tell them what to do, which was enough of a reason to make it their chief priority to insist that they will not be told what to do.  Even though what they were told to do could save lives, including their own.  As you can see, this is a very stunning commitment to refusing to be told what to do.  So much so that it is not in fact ‘pro-life.’  But Republicans will nevertheless claim to be the ‘pro-life’ party.  That is because they recognize ‘pro-life’ can be used to tell people what to do.

“The reason they say they are ‘pro-life’ when they are trying to tell women what to do with their bodies is not out of genuine concern for human life, but because they recognize that in this position, they can tell women what to do with their bodies.

“That’s why when you use that same appeal—‘pro-life’—when you ask Republicans to do something about gun violence in schools, it doesn’t work.  Because you are now in the position of telling Republicans what to do.  That’s precisely why they don’t want to do anything about it.  Anyway, gun violence in schools is not a problem, but their children having to wear masks in schools is.  Because somebody is telling their children what to do.  Dead children don’t bother them, but telling their children what to do?  Only ‘they’ should do that.

“They claim to be for ‘small government’, but that really means a government that tells them what to do should be as small as possible.  But when the Republican Party recognizes it has an opportunity to tell people what to do, the government required for that tends to be large.

“The reason Republicans are so focused on the border isn’t because they care about border security, it’s because they recognize it as the most glaring example of when they can tell other people what to do. That’s why it’s their favorite issue.  You want in?  Too bad.  Get out.

“If Republicans could do this in every social space—tell the people who aren’t like them too bad, get the f&%# out—I’m here to assure that would be something resembling their ideal society.

“Now, there are economic policies that we’ve proposed that we can demonstrate would be of obvious benefit to even Republican voters.  So how do Republicans leaders kill potential support for these policies?  Make the issue about who is telling who what to do.

“They focus on the fact that Democrats may raise taxes.  Even when it’s painfully obvious that Democrats aren’t going to raise taxes on everyone (or on very few people), what’s important here is that Democrats are the people telling certain people what to do.

“If you want to know why Republicans can easily be talked out of proposals from the Democratic Party that are shown to be of benefit to them, it is precisely because they have to entertain the idea of Democrats telling certain people what to do.

“What you didn’t understand from the very beginning is that Democrats should not ultimately be in the position to tell anyone what to do.  Only Republicans should be in the position to tell people what to do.

“On the issue of climate change, a lot of them don’t regard it as a serious issue to the extent that they think it is a hoax.  This is because when you tell Republicans to do something for the sake of the planet, you are still ultimately telling them to what to do.  Furthermore, you are conceiving the planet as a thing that all human beings should have to share.  I am here to assure you that the GOP’s main concern with the planet is to ensure that they don’t have to share it.

“Now here’s where things get interesting: when you explain to Republicans you want them to do something and explain it’s on the basis of benefitting other people.  Now you have really crossed a line.  Not only did you tell them what to do, you told them to consider others.

“The whole point of an arrangement where you can tell people what to do, but you can’t be told what to do, is precisely to avoid having to consider others.  This is why this is their ideal arrangement: so they don’t have to do that.

“As you can see, this is a very toxic relationship with the idea of who can tell who what to do.  So much so that it seems like the entire point is to conceive of a ‘right’ kind of people who can tell other people what to do without being told what to do.  Yep, that’s the point.

“So let’s add one more component to the system for who tells who what to do:
1. There are ‘right’ human beings and there are ‘wrong’ ones. 
2. The ‘right’ ones get to tell the ‘wrong’ ones what to do.
3. The ‘wrong’ ones do not tell the ‘right’ ones what to do.

“As you can see, I’ve just been talking about white male supremacy and the accompanying caste system structure it enforces all along.  And I’m talking about this because the message of the Republican Party is that they quite like it.  But I realize that we are operating in an environment where white male supremacy is so entrenched that the press can’t even conceive of the Republican Party’s agenda of sorting the ‘right’ human beings from the ‘wrong’ ones as maybe presenting a ‘messaging problem.’

“This is because the press has chosen to accommodate the Republican Party in a very specific way: 
1. It normalizes the Republican agenda.   
2. It normalizes framing the responsibility for stopping that agenda as ultimately being on Democrats.  Think about it: white supremacy is not allowed to be viewed as a ‘messaging problem.’  Even when it’s a threat to democracy.  Because if it’s a ‘messaging problem’, to Republicans, that sounds you’re telling them that’s a problem they have to solve.

“Anyway, I made this thread mostly because I realize that the press has a ‘messaging problem.’  Namely, in the sense that they seem extremely averse to explicitly identifying the message of the Republican Party.  It’s called white male supremacy.  Thanks for reading.” (Ethan Gray, quoted in Daily Kos, June 13, 2022)

This excellent article lays bare the underlying idea of the NFP: Our way all the time, on all issues.  Don’t even suggest anything to us.  Again, this is fascism pure and simple.

Until the Democrats recognize the simple fact that the NFP cannot be worked with on any issue whatever because they are viewed as being “wrong”, being the enemy, the party will continue on its slow path to oblivion.  In addition, the NFP recognizes that their followers must accept everything, and I mean everything, that they say and do.  In their view, they are not to be held accountable to anyone, least of all the Democratic party, the Constitution, the people, or even the rule of law.  They are the law, and the law can only be interpreted by them.

The NFP fancies itself to be the American aristocracy and that, as such, they believe that it is their favored place in society that allows them to dominate others.  Democrats on the other hand believe that everyone is of equal social value.  This is why conservatism is the opposite of democracy.  This is not a new fact; it has been a social and societal truism since the beginning of recorded history.  

If anyone disagrees with the hypothesis presented herein, let them ask a Trump supporter one simple question: Have you ever disagreed with anything Trump has done?

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THE HYPOCRISY OF THE NFP LEADERS ON COVID-19

The growth of the COVID-19 pandemic can exclusively be laid at the feet of Donald Trump and his enablers in the NFP.  Daily Kos briefly summarizes why: “Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Republicans across the board have done everything they can to not work productively on a course of action that might succeed in protecting the public and controlling the spread of the virus.  The first step, led by the incompetent Trump administration, was to deny the serious nature of the pandemic.  The second step was to blame China for the pandemic while both denying the seriousness of the event and not doing anything about it.  The third step was to maintain that the virus, which has taken almost 1 million American lives—and claimed the lives of countless others due to the stresses on our health care infrastructure—was not serious, and any attempts at mitigating its spread through public policy were an affront to Americans’ constitutional rights.” (Walter Einenkel, Daily Kos, January 4, 2022)

The NFP then perversely began to insist that the vaccines and boosters were killing people—completely ignoring the fact that over a million Americans have died due to the NFP’s stupid and criminal negligence.  Again, their hostility toward vaccines, boosters and masks arose for one simple reason: Others were telling them to do it.  It is singularly amazing that the NFP supported Trump even though he was responsible for doing nothing to address the pandemic, yet when a vaccine was finally introduced, all of a sudden this became the focus of their outrage.  I have called religions “philosophies of death.”  The NFP’s response to COVID and the vaccine conclusively proves that the NFP is a party of death.  Or, more accurately, a cult of death.  Virtually everything they promote or attack strengthens this conclusion, be it their refusal to install common sense gun laws, their refusal to act as caretakers for the planet, their abandonment of children after they’re born, and so on.  Simply put, the NFP wants people to die.  There is no other explanation.

Further proof of their twisted sense of reality can be seen in the fact that well-over five hundred anti-vaccine bills have been introduced in the first six months of 2022 in State Houses across the country.  Again, their attitude is: Tell us to get vaccinated, will they?  We’ll show them!

The new year opened with another of the countless examples of NFP hypocrisy about the pandemic.  Texas governor Greg Abbott, who throughout the previous year downplayed the danger of the Coronavirus and who oversaw the shutting down of numerous testing sites during the previous year, appealed to the White House for federal funding to open more testing sites.  This despite his statement the previous June that the state was in the process of transitioning away from federal testing sites.  

To add insult to injury, he also requested more monoclonal antibody treatments, while saying: “the Biden administration has cut supplies of monoclonal antibody treatments and testing kits when they are needed most.”  

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is, like most of the other NFP leaders, an avid opponent of common sense measures to combat the pandemic.  NBC News reports his actions, or rather his inaction, as the pandemic ravaged his state: “Gov. Ron DeSantis has been missing in action as Covid cases in the state have spiked to new heights, Florida Democratic officials charge.  ‘Counties are overwhelmed w/ lines that stretch for miles,’ state Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Democrat, tweeted Thursday.  ‘It’s every man/woman for themselves, because leadership is MIA,’ he added.

“DeSantis, a Republican and outspoken opponent of vaccine and mask mandates, last held a Covid press briefing on Dec. 17.  Covid cases have reached new highs in Florida since then, including a record level of more than 58,000 new cases on Wednesday.  The state later reported nearly 78,000 new cases on Thursday.” (Dareh Gregorian, NBC News, December 30, 2021)

Those 78,000 cases are almost twice the number reported in California, which has twice the population as Texas.  

Jim Jordan, along with countless other NFP members, has continued to downplay the severity of COVID-19 and even had the audacity to claim in December 2021 that “real America” is done with COVID-19.  This is further proof that the NFP cares not a whit about the health of American citizens.  

Despite his claim that booster shots don’t work, the facts to the contrary are irrefutable.  Daily Kos notes: “As Jeff Sites (Jordan’s Democratic opponent) pointed out in response to Jordan, there were 6.1 deaths per 100,000 among the unvaccinated, 0.5 deaths among the vaccinated, and only 0.1 deaths among the boosted.” (Community, Daily Kos, December 31, 2021)

The article aptly concludes: “It’s the dimwits who listen to Fox News and Trump and Jim Jordan who are getting sick and dying.”  And these are the same people who claim to be pro-life!

These same “pro-lifers” also have a major issue with the United States feeding undocumented immigrant babies.  Ron Johnson and Texas governor Greg Abbott are both on record saying this.  In other words, babies should be intentionally starved because their parents happen to be undocumented.  Pro-life?  Pro-family?

The question every thinking person should be asking these people is: Why do you want people to die?

Yes, this is the same Jim Jordan who is dealing with accusations that he condoned the sexual abuse of students when he was a wrestling coach and who now stands to be the next chairman of the House Judiciary Committee should the NFP take control of Congress following the November elections.

The most disgusting aspect concerning the pandemic is seen in how NFP members, rather than doing anything positive to help people, instead have actually profited from the misery of others.  Demand Progress reports: “In the last few years Congress has been rocked by numerous scandals involving members of Congress profiting from their insider knowledge.  In 2019, Rep. Chris Collins pleaded guilty to federal charges related to tipping off his son about nonpublic information he had obtained about a pharmaceutical company’s failed drug trial. (Trump later pardoned him.)  Then there was the news that federal prosecutors were investigating whether Senators Kelly Loeffler, Richard Burr, Jim Inhofe, and Dianne Feinstein may have profited from insider information about the coronavirus in February 2020 as the pandemic was unfolding.  Though Trump’s Department of Justice declined to file charges against the four, the SEC is continuing to investigate Burr.

“These are just the scandals we know about.  It’s clear that allowing members of Congress to trade stocks while they’re in office is too big a risk to the integrity of our legislative system.” (Demand Progress, January 25, 2022)

Robert Kennedy Jr., a disgrace to the family name, has jumped right in on the anti-vax movement, as Daily Kos reports: “At an anti-vax rally over the weekend in Washington, D.C., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared the current pandemic safety policies to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.  Except, according to Kennedy, it was easier to escape the Holocaust, saying ‘Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did’ (ignoring the fact that Anne Frank died in a concentration camp).  He followed that up with a tirade about 5G and satellites tracking our every move.(Amanda McCay, Daily Kos, January 24, 2022) Comments like this are a spit in the face of those tortured and murdered by Nazi goons in the Third Reich.  Comments like this are so flagrantly immoral and evil that every thinking American should be outraged.  Fortunately in this case, enough of them were and he was forced to apologize on twitter. 

The pandemic had different effects on different people, depending on their financial status.  Oxfam America Action Fund notes: “The 10 richest men doubled their fortunes during the pandemic, while the incomes of 99% of the population decreased because of COVID-19.  The pandemic has hurt people living in poverty far more than the rich and has had the worst impacts on women, Black, Indigenous and People of Color, and historically marginalized communities around the world.  Meanwhile, billionaires have profited off of the pandemic, continuing to amass wealth amidst global suffering.

“Enough is enough.  It’s time for billionaires to pay their fair share in taxes.  While the average American household paid 14% in federal taxes, America’s 25 richest billionaires paid only 3% in income tax between 2014 and 2018.  Increased taxes on the wealthiest individuals could lift people out of poverty, address the climate crisis, fund childcare, and create well-paying jobs.” (Gina Cummings, Oxfam America Action Fund)

The pandemic affected different communities in different ways.  Not surprisingly, minorities were the hardest hit, as Other98 demonstrates: “Thanks to systemic racism, Black and brown workers continue to be hit the hardest by the pandemic and its economic effects.  The December jobs report revealed that the unemployment rate for Black workers rose to over seven percent, more than double that of white workers at 3.2 percent.  In fact, the Black unemployment rate was the only such statistic to see an increase in December.” (John Sellers, Other98, February 6, 2022)

Keeping in mind that Trump and the NFP have repeatedly insisted that the virus originated in China, it should come as no surprise that anti-Asian hate crimes rose by 339% in 2021.

The End COVID Now Policy Team points out how the United States is failing as a world leader with regard to the pandemic: “President Biden is hosting his Global Covid-19 Summit today—and he’s showing up empty-handed because of Congress.

“Here’s a little backstory: For weeks, Congress indicated that their Ukraine aid package would include Covid relief funds—money we could use to get vaccines to other countries and end this pandemic.  But at the last minute, they pulled Covid aid out of the bill.  Congress’s failure to act is a moral outrage, an international embarrassment, and an invitation to this virus to produce more deadly variants.
“There is no reason why Congress can’t spend $5 billion to get vaccines distributed around the world.  These are the same people who hand Jeff Bezos billions of dollars to wear a cowboy hat in space.  (Not to mention that $5 billion is less than 1% of the U.S. defense budget!)  Vaccinating the world against Covid would do so much good.  It would prevent deaths, cut inflation, restore America’s reputation on the global stage, and give us our lives back.  So why the hell aren’t we doing it?
“Congress is delaying spending money on COVID relief, hoping we’ll forget there’s a pandemic going on.”  (The End COVID Now Policy Team, May 12, 2022)
With regard to the pandemic, the NFP has blood on its hands.  Plus the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

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FOX AND THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA

The immoral antics of the right-wing media has been covered extensively in my previous articles.  However, a new crisis has emerged between Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and the Ukrainian state.  As always, Fox’s preeminent liar Tucker Carlson is on the wrong side of the issue.  Daily Kos explains: “It’s worth looking at what Carlson is saying, what he has said, and how he became an advocate for just letting Russia have what Carlson describes as ‘a pretty small country’ that’s simply of no concern to Americans.  ‘You still have to wonder,’ said Carlson, ‘invasion or not, why is any of this a profound concern of ours?  Why would you even consider risking American lives or sending billions of dollars to stop it?’  For the record, Ukraine is over 230,000 square miles and has a population of 44 million.  That makes it about twice as large, and considerably more populous, than Poland in 1939.

“But even as Carlson is busy telling his viewers to ignore the territorial ambitions of an authoritarian dictator, Fox’s most popular host is readying another message—one about how insidious Jews are secretly controlling the world, and only through fighting them can Western civilization be saved.

“Russia has already invaded and occupied Ukraine’s most lucrative region.  It has funded, equipped, and staffed an ongoing war that has seen the eastern half of Ukraine constantly at war for the better part of a decade.  It has undercut the Ukrainian economy. It has funneled money to politicians to sabotage connections between Ukraine and the E.U. or NATO.  It has constantly engaged in threats of expanded military intervention.

“But somehow, according to Carlson, it’s Ukraine that represents the threat.  Vladimir Putin, he says, ‘just wants to keep his western borders secure.’  As for offering protection from NATO, Carlson claims that the alliance exists simply ‘to torment Vladimir Putin.’

“That’s the message that Carlson has been selling to his Fox audience.  It’s a message that mixes support for Russia with a message of apathy when it comes to what happens to Ukraine and its citizens.  And it’s one that he’s been selling since at least 2018.  That was when Carlson went on his Fox program to say this about growing tensions between Moscow and Kyiv.  ‘Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?  And I’m serious.  Why do I care?  Why shouldn’t I root for Russia  Which I am.’

“Carlson repeated his rhetorical question earlier this week, saying, ‘Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?’  The answer might be because Ukraine is a long-term ally to which the U.S. has made commitments both militarily and diplomatically, and also that Ukraine is the victim here in a case of international aggression by a belligerent authoritarian ruler. 

“Returning to his Putin appeasement, Carlson insisted that: ‘Ukraine is strategically irrelevant to the United States’ and that: ‘No rational person could defend a war with Russia over Ukraine.’  War, says Carlson would be bad for the economy.  So America should just mind its own business.  But this startling accurate imitation of appeasement of German expansionism before World War II isn’t Carlson’s only note.
“Currently, Carlson is on the road, visiting with another authoritarian leader and open white supremacist, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.  Since coming to power, Orbán has overseen a movement that has ceded ever more authority from the government to his ruling Fidesz party.  He has used that power to take a brutal stance against immigrants, roll back rights for LGBTQ citizens, place crushing restrictions on the press, and consolidate all the media of the country—over 400 outlets—into a single organization under his direct control.

“He’s also used it to engage in repeated acts of anti-Semitism by maintaining that there is a secret Jewish conspiracy to manipulate world governments.  At the center of his fictional spider web is Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, George Soros.  Soros has been repeatedly targeted by Orbán and by other members of Fidesz.  In particular, Soros is accused of a grand conspiracy that would open European borders to floods of immigrants who would overwhelm the region’s ‘western Christian identity.’  Speaking in 2018, Orbán made his othering of both Jews and immigrants explicit, in terms that might have been lifted from Mein Kampf.  ‘We are fighting an enemy that is different from us,’ said the authoritarian leader, ‘Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.’

“Naturally, Tucker Carlson has been a big supporter of Orbán on his program and has made past trips to visit what he describes as a ‘simple, sweet country’ that has learned how to deal with this insidious threat.  In December, Fox News backed one of these reports by posting a cartoon to social media in which Soros was a hook-nosed puppet-master, pulling the strings of Democratic officials.  That cartoon has since been removed after protests by the Anti-Defamation League.

“But that doesn’t mean that the sentiment behind the cartoon has been lost, or that Fox will not continue to back Carlson in spreading anti-Semitic slanders even as he encourages Americans to surrender territory in eastern Europe to authoritarian dictators.  That’s because Carlson has just announced that he will follow up his faux-documentary in which he claimed that the Jan. 6 insurgency was an inside job by the FBI with a new one, titled ‘Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight For Civilization.’

“This new work will focus on the ‘success’ Hungary has enjoyed through steps like the ‘Stop Soros Law’ that made it illegal to promote immigration.  One that bans either organizations or individuals from providing any form of assistance to undocumented immigrants.  Or anyone who promotes immigrant rights.  As Vox noted: ‘This is so broadly worded that, in theory, the government could arrest someone who provides food to an undocumented migrant on the street or attends a political rally in favor of their rights.’

“Right now, Fox News host Tucker Carlson is telling Americans should simply look away as one authoritarian dictator conducts a massive grab for territory and resources.  And he’s visiting with another authoritarian dictator to explain how western civilization needs to be saved from people ‘not like us’ who are being encouraged by wealthy international Jews.” (Mark Sumner, Daily Kos, January 26, 2022)

The article aptly closes by noting: “Tucker Carlson is a Nazi.  There is no other word.”

It’s not just the Ukrainian war that Carlson spews dangerous nonsense about.  MoveOn reports: “Most recently, Carlson has taken up a debunked conspiracy theory, started on an anti-vaccination website and spread by QAnon, claiming that the ‘Biden administration was funding secret biolabs in Ukraine’—which Russian officials and state media ran with and which they are now using as their pretext for the assault on Ukraine.  This is how far U.S. conspiracy theorists and right-wing media, led by Carlson, will go to undermine President Biden, Anthony Fauci, and medical science.”
(MoveOn, March 17, 2022)

Inequality Media Civic Action hits the nail on the head in their expose of Fox: “Viewers of Fox News are twice as likely to believe Covid lies as those who get their news from NPR, CNN, or MSNBC.  An astonishing 82% of Fox News watchers believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.  Now Fox News is shamefully lying to its audience about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Tucker Carlson has claimed that Ukraine isn’t a real democracy, that Putin is simply trying to resolve a border dispute, and that whatever the autocrat’s failings, he’s not as bad as progressives in the U.S. who criticize Fox News.

“Fox News recklessly broadcasts disinformation that makes a harmful imprint on its viewers, who, according to poll after poll, are far more likely than other Americans to believe lies about the pandemic and the 2020 election.  Most of Fox’s own executives and anchors don’t even believe their network’s lies.  Fox requires its employees to be vaccinated or to submit to regular Covid tests, but Carlson, who with 3.2 million viewers hosts the most-watched show on cable news, regularly features guests who peddle the lie that vaccines are harmful.

“The day of the January 6 insurrection, both Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity begged Trump to call off the attacks.  Yet they’ve promoted the Big Lie that Trump won the election and that the riot was a patriotic protest ever since.” (Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, March 9, 2022)

Fox “News” is a propaganda network for the NFP; objective news reporting means nothing to them.  Crazy Eight PAC summarizes just how dangerous—and deadly—Fox’s ridiculous rants actually are: “It’s not just Trump Republicans in Congress who are spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories—it’s right-wing news outlets like FOX News.  There’s no denying that FOX is an influential cable network.  According to the PEW Research Center, Republicans trust Fox News more than any other outlet.  Over the summer, 60% of FOX News’ vaccine coverage included anti-vax claims, putting millions of lives at risk.  82% of FOX News viewers believe the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.  It’s honestly no wonder insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 after being mobilized and emboldened by their “trusted” reporters.

“Plus, on Jan. 6 while FOX News hosts were privately begging Mark Meadows to get Trump to condemn the violence, they still decided to downplay the violence.  FOX News hosts have continually provided a platform for right-wing Republicans in Congress to spread dangerous lies to rile up their base to the point of violence.” (Crazy Eight PAC, February 22, 2022)

Considering how many lives have been lost due to Trump and the NFP’s failure to take appropriate action, Fox executives should be put on trial and, once the objective facts are revealed, its broadcasting license revoked.  Anyone concerned about human life should support this being done, but the NFP doesn’t care about the truth, facts, or even life itself.  All they want is total power for themselves.  

Fox is not the only dangerous media outlet spouting dangerous anti-American propaganda; One America News is just as bad, as Inequality Media Civic Action demonstrates: “Now that DirecTV has dropped the far-right cable network One America News (OAN), we finally have a chance to deplatform OAN for good.“Let’s get straight to the facts.  One America News has been spreading Russian propaganda for years.  Their commentator Kristian Rouz was being paid both by OAN and Russian state media outlet Sputnik in 2019.In 2021, the National Intelligence Council determined that a pro-Trump OAN documentary was in part the work of a Russian operative ‘Putin had purview over’—named Andriy Derkach. And Derkach also regularly provided material for OAN host Chanel Rion.

“OAN is so tied to Russia that when they sued Rachel Maddow for defamation after she called the network ‘literally paid Russian propaganda,’ they lost the lawsuit—and then lost again in a Ninth Circuit appeal, leaving them on the hook for $250,000 in attorney fees and more than $10,000 to Maddow and her employers.

“But here’s the kicker: they’re still on the air—radicalizing Americans every day.

“Even when they’re not taking cues from Russian operatives, One America News is continually undermining American democracy.  They were the biggest supporters of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.  That’s right, even bigger than Fox News.

OAN is facing billion-dollar defamation lawsuits for their Big Lie coverage—from two Georgia election workers, and from the voting companies Smartmatic and Dominion. During the OAN coverage of the 2020 election, founder Robert Herring Sr. banned the airing of any polls that didn’t show Trump in first place.

“One OAN producer saw the network’s flag in the crowds of the January 6 insurrectionists and, after deciding he couldn’t keep spreading voter fraud lies in good conscience anymore, told the New York Times, ‘That’s what happens when people listen to us.’

“Of course, OAN fired him immediately.

“DirecTV had 90% of OAN’s subscribers.  Now, Verizon holds 75% of the remaining subscribers. If they drop the channel, it won’t make a comeback.  It’s time to get OAN off cable for good.  Journalistic integrity—and the health of our democracy—demands it.” (Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, May 28, 2022)

No matter what the evidence to the contrary, the NFP continues to cry that the “liberal media” is out to get them.  The problem is that the Democratic party has no media presence to promote their views in the same way that the NFP has Fox News, CNN, and others.  This is not to suggest that the Democratic party needs to promote lies in order to win elections, as the NFP does.  But it does mean that the Democratic party needs to re-focus its priorities.  Daily Kos explains: “Check out this interview with Obama White House communications director Dan Pfiefer: ‘The biggest problem is that most Democrats continue to believe the best way we’re going to communicate, or maybe the only way to communicate our message, is through traditional press.  We’re going to tell the New York Times, we’re going to tell CNN, we’re going to tell the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and they’re going to communicate that to the public.  That model hasn’t worked for a very long time.

“We’re in a world where Facebook dominates, where right-wing propaganda and disinformation dominates.  The idea that anyone other than the most plugged-in news junkies are going to have any real information about what’s happening is just folly.

“Our party tends to think the press will do our job for us.  We think they’re going to communicate our message.  But it’s our responsibility to get the message, or the news, from Joe Biden’s lips or Nancy Pelosi’s lips to the voters’ ears.  And that’s not going to happen organically.  It has to happen through paid advertising, through social content we generate, through progressive media, and there has been very little effort to adjust our communication strategy.’

“These three paragraphs hit the nail on the head as to the problem Democrats face today.  Progressives can be very good at messaging—President Obama was one of the great orators in American history, Bernie Sanders is one of the most consistently on-message people in politics today, and AOC has shown an ability to communicate with a huge audience through social media.  But they simply cannot compete with the right wing’s multibillion-dollar propaganda machine that is blasting out a single, unified, hate-filled message across various media platforms—on television, online, on Facebook, and on the radio—all day, every day.  Democrats need progressive media outlets that can set the narrative the way these right-wing outlets do, but right now there’s nothing like it.” (Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos, February 7, 2022)

The Big Lie is by no means restricted to Fox News, however.  Free Speech for People tells us just how ingrained fake news, misrepresentation and outright lies have become in our culture: “In the weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, rioters took to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and 4chan to propagate the Big Lie and plan a violent takeover of the United States Congress.  These social media platforms are complicit in an insurrection that left five Americans dead and over 140 Capitol police officers injured.  They have profited by fueling the disinformation crisis that has aided in the rise of extremist groups like QAnon.

“The January 6th insurrection was symptomatic of a larger threat to our democracy.  A handful of global corporations have taken control of the internet, the dominant medium of all modern communication and commerce, and have used that control to violate personal privacy and to promote unprecedented amplification of dangerous disinformation and vitriol.  If left unchecked, social media companies will no doubt play a significant role in the next violent attack on our republic, all in the name of turning a profit.

“That’s why Free Speech For People has introduced the Big Tech Accountability Act, a model bill that would hold social media companies accountable for amplifying disinformation and violence via their online platforms.” (Free Speech for People, February 18, 2022)

Some of the best known media giants are, unbelievably, hiring far-righters in a ridiculous effort to appear “mainstream.”  Will Without War exposes The Washington Post’s placating the NFP: “The Washington Post recently dragged John Bolton out of cold storage and gave him their platform to parrot the same old failed talking points against diplomacy and the Iran nuclear deal.  Yes—that John Bolton.  Champion of the Iraq war and former President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor. 

“As diplomats work to revive the Iran nuclear deal, The Washington Post gave its platform to George W. Bush and Donald Trump’s warmongering lackey, who infamously orchestrated the dissolution of the first Iran nuclear deal and championed the disastrous U.S. war in Iraq.  

“We welcome a vibrant debate on all sides on the merits of the nuclear deal, but we need better than Bolton’s bad faith arguments.  It is irresponsible and outright dangerous for The Washington Post and other outlets to give hawks like Bolton their platform to parrot the same failed talking points that lead us away from peace and push us toward war.” 

“The simple fact is diplomacy works.  International arms control agreements work.  What doesn’t work?  Threats of fire and fury, more sanctions, and more endless wars. 

“Let’s not forget that it was John Bolton who: 

• orchestrated the Iraq war—lying to the world about weapons of mass destruction as George W. Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security;
• sabotaged an international arms control convention on biological weapons in Geneva; 
• wrecked diplomatic engagements with both North Korea and Cuba; and
• shuttered the White House Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense right before the pandemic as Trump’s National Security Advisor.

“As long as newsrooms like The Washington Post keep giving platforms to failed, false experts like John Bolton, the Washington echo chamber will never move past its same old foreign policy.” (Win Without War, April 3, 2022)

It’s not just the Washington Post that is kowtowing to right-wing extremists.  CBS has even had the audacity to hire Mick Mulvaney.  Other98 reports: “CBS News recently hired Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, as an on-air contributor.  And they didn’t even bother to mention Mulvaney’s former title on his first appearance—they just identified him as a former Office of Management and Budget director.

“Unsurprisingly, Mulvaney used his time to disparage President Biden’s budget proposal, using CBS News’s credibility as cover for partisan BS.  And we’re not the only ones who want Mulvaney gone.  Staff at CBS and CBS News have expressed disgust.  ‘Everyone here is baffled,’ one staff member told the Washington Post.

“Mulvaney’s track record is terrible.  Here are just a couple of examples:
Mulvaney was Acting Chief of Staff while Trump extorted Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, leading to his first impeachment.  When Trump’s Ukraine extortion was made public, Mulvaney told the press to ‘get over it.’  And Mulvaney has a long history of advocating the destruction of Social Security and Medicare, two of the most vital and popular programs in the US.

“Giving Mick Mulvaney a cushy contributor job does nothing to inform CBS News viewers.  He can only be counted on to push his pro-Billionaire, anti-Social Security, and misinformation agenda.” (John Sellers, Other98, April 12, 2022)

Facebook bears a huge responsibility for the decline of objective journalism in this country.  Daily Kos is just one of many progressive news sites that has suffered because of Facebook’s favoritism of right-wing propaganda networks over reality-based reporting: “Five years ago, Daily Kos was one of the fastest-growing news sites around.  Then, almost overnight, it stopped.  Why?  Because of Facebook.

In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg personally approved a change that throttled traffic to progressive news sites, like Daily Kos.  Traffic to our site from Facebook cratered.  Just see for yourself:

That’s an 84 percent decline in traffic from Facebook.  Things got worse for progressive outlets ahead of the 2020 election.

“Facebook’s algorithm changes allowed right-wing news sites—including and especially those that promoted extremist views and conspiracy theories—to grow rapidly.  Right-wing ‘news’ outlets dominate Facebook’s most-linked posts.  (Today, seven of the top 10 stories on Facebook are from right-wing commentators.)  The world’s largest social media platform has become a mouthpiece and recruitment platform for right-wingers, and it’s become hugely profitable for them: A new report says that: ‘The Daily Wire’ from Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor who has three of Facebook’s top 10 stories today, brings in $100 million annually.

“Daily Kos would be a very different place today if Facebook hadn’t throttled traffic to progressive news sites.  We’d be much larger and have powerful tools to compete against right-wing outlets promoting fake news and conspiracy theories.  But Facebook shows no sign of ending their support for right-wing extremists, so we have to work harder to reach people. (Faith Gardner, Daily Kos, February 21, 2022)

One of the most disturbing facts about the media today is the fact that some of the most extreme fascists have their own programs and podcasts.  Alex Jones is just about the most extreme anti-rationalist it is possible to imagine; nothing is too immoral or ridiculous for him to embrace.  But he is far from alone.  Left Action tells us what Steve Bannon has been up to lately: “Trump fanboy and treason-enthusiast Steve Bannon has been spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation on his podcast, War Room, which has over 1,800 episodes and millions of downloads.  Bannon has called for impeaching President Biden, praised Putin for invading Ukraine, spread conspiracy theories about COVID-19, and promoted the Big Lie about the 2020 election. 

“While Bannon’s podcast was removed from Spotify, it’s still available on Apple’s and Google’s podcast apps.  We’ve seen what happens when people like Steve Bannon are given a platform to spread lies and conspiracy theories.  We need Apple and Google to do the right thing and drop Bannon’s podcast.” (Left Action, March 1, 2022)

The so-called mainstream media continues about its merry way as if the NFP is a legitimate political party and gives undue deference to its leaders.  Win Without War tells us about The Washington Post’s effort in this regard: “John Bolton is at it again.  And this time he had help: As diplomats work to revive the Iran nuclear deal, The Washington Post gave its platform to George W. Bush and Donald Trump’s warmongering lackey, who infamously orchestrated the dissolution of the first Iran nuclear deal and championed the disastrous U.S. war in Iraq.  

“We welcome a vibrant debate on all sides on the merits of the nuclear deal, but we need better than Bolton’s bad faith arguments.  It is irresponsible and outright dangerous for The Washington Post and other outlets to give hawks like Bolton their platform to parrot the same failed talking points that lead us away from peace and push us toward war. 

“Newsrooms across the country play a critical role in propping up a status quo of disastrous national security decisions.  We’ve seen them react to public pressure to change in the past. 

‘The Iran nuclear deal was a historic achievement which prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, helped us avoid another horrific war, and made people in both the United States and Iran safer.  And we applaud the Biden administration for keeping its campaign promise and engaging in the hard work of diplomacy to build a lasting peace.

The simple fact is diplomacy works.  International arms control agreements work.  What doesn’t work?  Threats of fire and fury, more sanctions, and more endless wars. 

“Let’s not forget that it was John Bolton who: 

• orchestrated the Iraq war—lying to the world about weapons of mass destruction as George W. Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security;
• sabotaged an international arms control convention on biological weapons in Geneva; 
• wrecked diplomatic engagements with both North Korea and Cuba; and
• shuttered the White House Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense right before the pandemic as Trump’s National Security Advisor.

“As long as newsrooms like The Washington Post keep giving platforms to failed, false experts like John Bolton, the Washington echo chamber will never move past its same old foreign policy.  If we want to hear from different voices, then we need to let them know we’re paying attention—and that we are tired of this failed status quo!” (Win Without War, March 25, 2022)

Fox, OAN, and other fascist media groups are inspiring hatred and causing violence.  Their goal is to make their listeners angry enough to “do something” and that something is nothing more than a thinly-veiled call to violence.  MoveOn supplies us with one example: “Over the weekend, a white supremacist gunman opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.  He murdered ten people and injured three others—and eleven of the thirteen people shot were Black. 

“Authorities have found a 180-page manifesto, authored by the shooter, in which he identifies as a white supremacist and antisemite and describes his intention to attack a Black neighborhood.  In his manifesto, the shooter speaks extensively about the ‘great replacement’ theory, which asserts that white people are being driven out and replaced by non-white people in Western societies.

“It’s a heinous, racist conspiracy theory—and for years, Tucker Carlson has been known as one of its chief proponents. Carlson openly describes immigrants in grotesque, inhumane terms—he has argued, on air, that Democrats were letting in ‘more obedient voters from the third world’ in order to ‘replace’ the current electorate.

“Every night, this dangerous rhetoric is beamed into millions of homes across the United States.  There’s absolutely no place for this sort of violent, hateful, dangerous rhetoric—it’s the same sort of sentiment that has influenced the white supremacist attacks in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Montreal, and Christchurch in past years.  Tucker Carlson has built his career on his fear-mongering, racist, and conservative views.  Republicans in Congress and in the media have mimicked talking points about ‘great replacement theory.’  They cannot escape accountability for actions inspired by their racist rhetoric.” (MoveOn, May 16, 2022)

Texas Governor Greg Abbott made his position known on guns back in 2015: “I’m embarrassed: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind California.  Let’s pick up the pace, Texans.”  After another mass shooting in Texas, Blue Amp Action wrote: “Now 19 elementary school kids are dead, as well as 3 adults.  Just like the babies we lost in Newtown, the high school kids in Parkland and those targeted just last week for being Black in Buffalo.  There are so many more examples, I could go on for another 5,000 words listing them all.  It is heart-wrenching.” (Cliff Schecter, Blue Amp Action, May 25, 2022)

And of course Lauren Boebert has to get her two cents in, as reported by Crazy Eight PAC: “Boebert said, ‘Yes, there is definitely a replacement theory that’s going on right now.  We are killing American jobs and bringing in illegal aliens from all over the world to replace them…’

“Over and over again, Boebert doubles down on Great Replacement Theory, even as it incites mass violence.  Boebert falsely claimed that Democrats were ‘paying 15 grand to illegal immigrants’ in order to win elections.  She asked if Vice President Kamala Harris would be ‘loading up Air Force 2 with illegals to bring them in without the hassle of crossing the border?’ (Crazy Eight PAC, May 19, 2022)

Statements such as this, as wrong and stupid as they are, are ubiquitous in today’s NFP.  There is no accountability; no one to set the record straight, no one to call her what she is, namely a shameless fascist liar.  And until there is, she and her ilk will continue saying blatant lies and statements, knowing that no one will seriously challenge them.

Color of Change notes: “On a nightly basis, AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are carrying Carlson and Fox News’ racist lies into millions of homes, indoctrinating them into a theory that continues to inspire violence against our communities.  These companies are currently paying Fox News two to five times what they pay similar networks like CNN and MSNBC, which means the cable companies are paying extra to broadcast white nationalist propaganda into millions of homes.

“There is a direct through line between the tech industry’s lack of regulation and their consolidation of power to the anti-Black violence we saw in Buffalo.  Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have all grown beyond their own ability to ensure our safety.  We need to reduce their power to do harm at scale.  Any platform with enough power to literally enable a white nationalist coup attempt is a platform that is too big, and that needs federal regulation now.” (Color of Change, May 18, 2022)

Incidentally, AT&T and Verizon’s record on LGBTQ issues is spotty at best.  While both claim to be supportive of the community, they spent over a million and a half dollars funding anti LGBTQ politicians.  

Tucker Carlson, Fox News, OAN, and the entire NFP have blood on their hands.  These are hate networks, not news agencies of any kind.  They must be removed and their executives put on trial for initing violence.  Justice demands nothing less.

The so-called “mainstream” media has a responsibility to its viewers: Open, honest reporting.  Saying this is not being done is the greatest of understatements.  People for the American Way is demanding that the January 6 Committee meetings be aired on public television: “I’m sure you remember where you were as the insurrection of last January 6th unfolded, and a violent and racist mob stormed our U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overthrow our government.  Personally, I was glued to the TV screen with shock and outrage over what this meant for our country.

“On that day, all the major networks covered the deadly riot for hours, scrapping most of their planned programming.  These networks knew that the public needed, and had a right, to witness the day’s horrific events with their own eyes.  Now, the House Select Committee on the events of January 6 is planning to hold a series of high-profile public hearings about its findings; the first such hearing will be the evening of June 9.  We’re urging networks to once again prioritize our right to be informed—and broadcast these hearings in full.

“We deserve to hear and see the Committee’s hearings first-hand—because we have a right to demand accountability and make informed decisions about what comes next for our country.

“Just consider this historical example: when impeachment proceedings against President Nixon began, the public wasn’t convinced.  But by the time he left office, people from all parties were overwhelmingly in support of his removal.  What changed?  A major factor was PBS’s decision to broadcast the Watergate hearings in full—247 hours total.  Millions of viewers tuned in as the story of the Watergate break-in and the cover-up unfolded before their eyes, hearing testimony from presidential advisors, the attorney general, former spies, and more.

“A strong democracy needs an informed public. And especially today—when our political climate is marked by disinformation and distractions that would be unheard of in the 1970s—the only way to cut through the noise is with the absolute, unvarnished truth from witnesses testifying under oath.” (People for the American Way, May 24, 2022)

Unfortunately, the mainstream media of 1974 no longer exists.  The idea of exposing a corrupt president for what he is is no longer a consideration, no matter how compelling the evidence of his crimes.  Today’s media is no longer dedicated to presenting the true, unvarnished facts.  They refuse to acknowledge that one of the two major political parties has been taken over by fascists.  The media’s guilt in causing the state of affairs in this country today is an undeniable fact.

---

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

The New Fascist party seemingly has a fixed agenda when it comes to money: Take as much as possible from the American people, shut down all human services, and line the pockets of their mega-business and corporate polluter partners.  Despite their constant crying that “we cannot afford” anything resembling assisting people, the NFP has no problem whatever in lining the pockets of private contractors for the Pentagon.  The problem is that the Democrats are guilty of the same financial shenanigans, though to a lesser extent.  Common Dreams reports: “President Joe Biden signed a record-shattering military budget earlier this week, and a new analysis published Thursday predicted that if recent contracting trends continue, the Pentagon will funnel $407 billion worth of public funds to private weapons makers this fiscal year—more than the federal government spent when sending $1,400 relief checks to most Americans in 2021.  Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, found that ‘from fiscal year (FY) 2002 to FY2021, 55% of all Pentagon spending went to private sector military contractors.’

“…The National Defense Authorization Act for FY2022 was passed with broad bipartisan support earlier this month in the House, where the margin was 363-70, and in the Senate, where the vote was 88-11.  By signing the bill into law on Monday, Biden approved a record-high $778 billion military budget.

“Even though U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August, Republicans and Democrats awash in weapons industry cash refused to support popular amendments to reduce Pentagon spending.  In fact, lawmakers in the House and the Senate added $25 billion—which happens to be the amount of funding that progressive advocacy group Public Citizen says is necessary to ramp up vaccine manufacturing to inoculate the world against Covid-19—on top of the already gargantuan $753 billion military budget requested by Biden back in May.  

“Since 9/11, US Has Spent $21 Trillion on Militarism at Home and Abroad.” (Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams, December 31, 2021)

Public Citizen puts all this military spending into perspective: “Our country’s military budget for this year is a staggering $782 billion.  President Biden is asking for $813 billion—an additional $31 billion—for next year.  And Republicans (along with some Democrats) in Congress are pressing for even more than that. 

• Many politicians are citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as justification to funnel even more of our tax dollars to the already bloated military-industrial complex.
• But $813 billion is more than 13 times what Russia spends on its military.
• In fact, it’s more than the combined spending of the next 13 countries on the list—China, India, Russia, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Australia, Israel, and Canada.

“Throwing ever more money at the Pentagon is not about supporting the troops, improving national security, or making the world safer for democracy.” (Robert Weissman, Public Citizen, April 5, 2022)

It is about members of Congress using Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to funnel even more of our tax dollars to their friends at Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.

An article in Win Without War tells us that one of the most unrecognized dangers in nuclear weapons is accidents: “If nuclear war has been on your mind recently, you’re not alone.  A recent poll found that 88% of U.S. adults are concerned about a nuclear conflict between the United States, Europe, and Russia.  The terrifying consequences would be horrific—instant death for thousands, if not millions of people, followed by environmental destruction, famine, and more death in the fallout.

“What you may not know is that President Biden is pushing us closer toward the possibility.  Last month he proposed spending an ENORMOUS sum—$50.9 BILLION—on nukes alone: weapons labs, plutonium pits, and the production and testing of warheads and bombs.

“Why?  The failed logic of deterrence.  An argument that has done little to make us, or anyone else, safe.  The reality is that our nuclear stockpile didn’t stop Putin from building his own.  What’s more, it hasn’t stopped him from threatening to use these devastating weapons as he’s waged a horrific war in Ukraine for 45 days.  Biden’s proposed budget doubles down on a failed strategy, in an even more unpredictable environment.

“One of the biggest risks with nuclear weapons isn’t even international conflict.  It’s a simple mistake. 

“Last month, Cole Smith, a former US air force nuclear missile operator wrote that ‘there have been more near-misses than the world knows.’  Like in 1980, when an airman dropped a socket down an ICBM launch tube, piercing a hole in the fuel tank below.  The resulting explosion threw the nine-megaton warhead—the most powerful single nuclear weapon in U.S. history—into the woods.

“Or in 2018, when an emergency alert system told everyone in Hawaii there was an incoming ballistic missile threat and that people should take shelter immediately.  The message said it was not a test. 

“We’ve escaped disaster time and time again not because of deterrence, but because of luck.  But as the United States sets a course to ramp up their nuclear weapons development, other countries will follow—greatly increasing the risk of technological error and human miscalculation, as well as mutually assured destruction.” (Win Without War, April 10, 2022)

Another little-reported war atrocity concerns Yemen.  Win Without War provides us with some really discomforting information: “For years, the U.S. government has been supplying the Saudi-led coalition with the very drones and weapons they use to invade Yemen and murder innocent people by the thousands.  But you may not know that the United States has been waging a parallel war in Yemen—not against Houthi militias, but against pockets of al-Qaeda and ISIS.  What did that look like?  Well, between 2017 and 2019, our military bombed Yemen no fewer than 500 times. 

“Years later, we know shockingly little of the actual toll, but innocent people on the ground—parents, a sister, an uncle, friends who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda—they do.  Today, the Department of Defense STILL fails to investigate, acknowledge, or provide redress for credible reports of civilian casualties.  And that’s why WE need to demand better. 

“This status quo of death and impunity is unacceptable, but thanks to the work of human rights defenders, we are FINALLY learning the truth—and we have a critical moment to push the Pentagon to admit its failures.  U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy want to know exactly how many innocent people the U.S. military has killed in Yemen—don’t you? 

“The United States’ responsibility for broader suffering in Yemen is undeniable.  Between 2015 and 2020, the United States sold more than $64 BILLION worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia—a huge proportion of the arsenal they’ve used on the ground to intervene in Yemen’s civil war.  This alone should give us pause about the role our country plays on the world stage.

“But in addition to the civil war that dominates headlines, U.S. complicity in Yemen is more than indirect.  Yemeni-based rights group Mwatana for Human Rights and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic have found that as many as 38 civilians—including 13 children—were killed as a result of U.S. airstrikes directed at al-Qaeda and ISIS between 2017 and 2019.  But you wouldn’t know it if you asked the Pentagon—the reality is that there was NO formal or public acknowledgment of the innocent lives lost in those bombings until human rights defenders gathered 150 pages of evidence and forced the U.S. government to admit innocent people had died as a result. 

“Any innocent life lost at the hands of the U.S. military is a failure—whether in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria.  We cannot let our U.S. forces off the hook when they kill and injure innocent families and children.  But if we want accountability and justice, we’ve got to demand the Pentagon tell the truth about the consequences of U.S. militarism around the globe.” (Win Without War, March 17, 2022)

After the insurrection took place, America’s big banks said they would halt all political donations.  As Take On Wall Street reports, this was nothing more than a public relations stunt: “After violent Trump supporters—using baseless, racist allegations that African-Americans in cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit were responsible for the 2020 election being stolen—staged a deadly attack at our Capitol on January 6th, the big banks powerful lobbying association D.C. pledged to pause all political donations and re-evaluate its relationships with Republicans in Congress who incited the insurrection.  It was a big deal, because the American Bankers Association (ABA) is a major banking industry lobbying group, representing institutions that control over 95% of the industry’s $19 trillion in deposits, $11 trillion in loans, and more than 2 million employees.

“Of course, it also wasn’t true.

“In an explosive report by Rolling Stone, it was revealed that after that announcement the ABA’s political action committee contributed $43,000 to insurrectionist Republicans.  They gave the maximum legal donation to 17 different House Republicans who voted to stop the certification of the election.” (Take On Wall Street, January 5, 2022)

And of course, billionaires continue to pour obscene amounts of money into NFP elections.  Americans for Tax Fairness reports: “Twelve years ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates to money in politics when they handed down their disastrous 5-4 Citizens United decision allowing for unlimited amounts of campaign cash to be spent by special interest groups.  Today, at a time of skyrocketing wealth gains among America’s 700+ billionaires, the ultra-wealthy are turning their money into political power.

“In the 2020 presidential election, 661 billionaires pumped $1.2 billion into elections―not including the additional $1.4 billion spent by Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer on their presidential campaigns.  That represented about $1 out of every $10 spent in the election, according to a new Americans for Tax Fairness report.

“On this anniversary of the disastrous Citizens United decision, the escalating campaign donations of billionaires offer the clearest argument possible for why we have to get Big Money out of politics.  Weak taxation of the wealthy combined with anemic regulation of campaign fundraising have handed America’s billionaires outsized political influence to go along with their huge economic clout.” (Frank Clemente, Americans for Tax Fairness, January 22, 2022)

Billionaire Rupert Murdoch is, like most of the mega rich, an avid supporter of the NFP.  Public Citizen reports: “Rupert Murdoch is the bazillionaire owner of Fox News—the world’s leading propaganda outlet for right-wing extremism and the cult of Donald Trump. 

• We just found out that Murdoch wrote a check for $2,000,000 to the super PAC controlled by allies of Senator Mitch McConnell.
• That wasn’t even the biggest check the McConnell-aligned ‘outside spending’ group got as it raked in $27 million from January to March, boosting its cash reserves to a staggering $72 million.
• And all of this is—bizarrely, sadly, treacherously—legal due to the Supreme Court’s absurd Citizens United ruling from 2010.” (Robert Weissman, Public Citizen, April 19, 2022)

The billionaires who support the NFP want nothing more than to line their pockets even more.  That they would support the NFP is no surprise; during the pandemic, they increased their wealth by $2.1 trillion.  You read that right: They became 70 percent wealthier at a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying.  This despite the fact that the pandemic cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion (not to mention almost a million lives).  If this were not enough, an ATF report stated that, if this trend continues, America’s richest families will leave an estimated $21 trillion to their heirs over the next two decades.  Americans for Tax Fairness reports: “Due to enormous estate tax loopholes, this hoarding of wealth could allow them to avoid $8.4 trillion in estate and gift taxes.  The richest families are taking advantage of tax loopholes that have been written into law by clever tax lawyers and members of Congress, which grow dynastic wealth while starving the United States of critical tax revenue that could pay for everything from education to healthcare to housing and more.” (Maura Quint, Americans for Tax Fairness, February 6, 2022)

How about profits?  Chevron has the highest profit ratio in the last seven years.  The same is true of Exxon Mobil, Shell, and BP.  Meanwhile, gas prices are the highest in the same time period.  The facts don’t lie: The more these gougers make, the more they want.  

One incident little reported in the U.S. but covered extensively worldwide  shines the light on Chevron practices.  Common Dreams reports: “Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger walked free Monday after 993 days of detention stemming from his decades-long legal fight with Chevron, which deployed its vast resources in a campaign to destroy Donziger after he won a $9.5 billion settlement against the fossil fuel giant over its pollution of the Amazon rainforest.

“Donziger’s case has attracted global attention and outrage, with the United Nations high commissioner on human rights calling his prolonged detention a violation of international law.  Lawmakers in the United States have also decried Donziger’s prosecution as an ‘unprecedented and unjust legal assault.’

“’We are relieved that Steven Donziger will finally recover his freedom after almost 1,000 days of arbitrary detention, which included 45 days in prison and over 900 days under house arrest,’ Daniel Joloy, senior policy advisor at Amnesty International, said in a statement Monday.  ‘He should have never been detained for even one day, as it has been clear the whole process against him has been in retaliation for his human rights work that exposed corporate wrongdoings.’

“’Corporations must not be allowed to continue abusing the U.S. justice system to silence and intimidate human rights defenders or anyone else exposing their wrongdoing,’ Joloy added.” (Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, April 25, 2022)

Stop the Money Pipeline links the fossil fuel industry with the war in Ukraine: “One thing to know about the horrifying war on Ukraine: it’s funded by fossil fuels.  Between forty and fifty percent of the Russian state’s budget comes from its oil and gas exports.  The war is a tragic crisis for millions.  But JPMorgan Chase sees it as just another opportunity to make a quick buck.

“Last week, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, alongside a cadre of fossil fuel executives, met with the Biden administration to demand they expand gas production.  This is clearly self-interested: JPMorgan Chase is the largest banker of fossil fuels in the world, and oil and gas expansion will only grow their bottom line.

“JPMorgan Chase is trying to profit off a war that has killed thousands of people.

Let’s be clear: energy security, and a safe and livable future for all will come from a just transition to renewable energy, not by increasing our reliance on fossil fuels.  It’s no coincidence that the others in the meeting with Dimon were the CEOs of oil and gas companies ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Marathon Petroleum.  As the largest banker of fossil fuels in the world, Chase makes money when fossil fuel companies make money.

“If JPMorgan Chase was serious about energy security they’d fund a massive buildout of renewable energy, not new fossil fuels.  But the only thing they’re serious about is lining the pockets of their ultra-wealthy executives and shareholders.

“There’s a name for using the instability and chaos of war in order to get rich: war profiteering.

“There is a very real energy crisis as a result of Russia’s war on Ukraine.  Europe gets as much as 10% of its total energy supply from Russian oil and gas.  But the answer is not to lock in new fossil fuel production that will only make the climate crisis worse.  The answer is to fund renewables more than ever before.” (Stop the Money Pipeline, March 29, 2022)

A Stop the Money Pipeline article the following day adds: “Every year our coalition partners release the Banking on Climate Chaos report—the world’s most comprehensive study into banks’ financing of the fossil fuel industry.  Today, it’s revealed that the world’s sixty largest banks have funneled $4.6 Trillion into fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015. (Stop the Money Pipeline, March 30, 2022)

The article then breaks down the largest contributors for fossil fuel funding in the period from 2016 to 2021: Bank of America: $232 billion.  Wells Fargo: $272 billion.  Citi: $285 billion.  And JPMorgan Chase: $382 billion.

The article concludes: “The worst offenders are all US banks.  JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are the four largest funders of fossil fuels in the world—and together they account for over one-quarter of all fossil fuel financing.  This is especially despicable as they have all pledged to align their business models with the Paris Agreement.

“$4.6 trillion is an outrageous amount of money to give to the industry driving climate chaos.  $4.6 trillion is more than double the cumulative sharemarket value of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP; it’s more than total global investments in renewables for 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 combined.

“Twelve years ago Wall Street tanked the economy, now they are hell-bent on torching the entire planet.  Wells Fargo is the world’s largest funder of fracking.  Morgan Stanley is the world’s largest funder of LNG.  JPMorgan Chase is the world’s largest funder of fossil fuel expansion.”

Stop the Money Pipeline tells us about Bank of America: “Bank of America is the fourth largest global funder of fossil fuels.  One of their biggest fossil clients is ExxonMobil.  Exxon knew about the climate crisis as early as 1977, and orchestrated a multi-decade campaign to obfuscate the severity of the crisis and delay action.

“Bank of America says they have plans to align their financing with the Paris Agreement, but they still finance Exxon to the tune of billions of dollars every year.  That’s greenwashing and hypocrisy.  It’s time for them to stop.

“ExxonMobil is one of the worst offenders, but none of the major oil and gas companies have plans to transition off of polluting fossil fuels.  According to a recent report, no major American or European oil and gas company is on track to meet Paris goals, and most are rated ‘grossly insufficient.’  Yet Bank of America keeps sending them money.  This is unacceptable.  All of us deserve to live on a planet that hasn’t been cooked by climate change, and Bank of America is standing in the way.” (Stop the Money Pipeline, June 21, 2022)

Stand.earth gives us more information on Citi: “Between 2016 and 2021, Citi provided over $40 billion USD worth of finance and investment to oil and gas companies operating in the Amazon basin.  As the top financier of state-owned companies in the Amazon, the bank plays a key role in funding state-run oil companies with ties to corruption, Indigenous rights violations, pollution, and deforestation in the Amazon.

“In its Sustainable Progress Strategy, ‘Climate Risk’ is one of the three key areas of focus, with a commitment to ‘Measure, manage and reduce the climate risk and impact of our client portfolio.’  Despite this statement, Citi lacks policies that restrict the bank from getting involved with clients linked to deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and fragmentation of intact forest landscapes.

“The climate risk of funding the ecological collapse of the Amazon is obvious and we need to urge Citi to not only update its sustainability goals, but also to urgently stop financing Amazon oil and gas projects.  We cannot open up the Amazon forest to more oil drilling.” (Tyson Miller, Stand.earth, April 26, 2022)

More Perfect Union adds another name to the list of offenders: “In a leaked email, an Applebee’s franchise exec says that rising gas prices are great for business because the chain can offer workers lower wages.  ‘Most of our employee base and potential employee base live paycheck to paycheck…the labor market is about to turn in our favor.’

“John Peyton, CEO of Dine Brands, which owns Applebee’s, took home an estimated $6.7 million in 2021.  The company increased weekly sales 12.6% from 2019 and reported $19.8 million in net income last quarter.  Dine Brands also owns IHOP, so we’re talking about more than 3,530 restaurants employing tens of thousands of workers.  And these guys are celebrating high gas prices because it means they can cut wages?

“Throughout the pandemic, restaurant employees have literally risked their lives to keep restaurants afloat, and feed families.  Now, Applebee’s executives are repaying that service with betrayal.  John Peyton has said in public statements that the pandemic has made Applebee’s and IHOP stronger and he even told CNBC they’re looking to replace workers with robots.  Peyton makes over 1000 times as much as the median compensation of Applebee’s workers according to a report by Indeed that shows Applebee’s servers take home about $17.16 per hour, including tips.” (Faiz Shakir, More Perfect Union. March 30, 2022)

Another big moneymaker for banks concerns hidden fees, a greed-based idea that has brought huge amounts of consumer money into bank’s coffers.  Banks and financial institutions are using these to rip off consumers.  Overdraft fees, foreign transaction fees, and online payment fees are all part of this banking scam.  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is investigating all this; it is to be hoped that this will make banking activities more transparent to the public.

Americans for Financial Reform gives us more information on how banks are making obscene profits off of overdraft fees: “Sens. Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren and Rep Carol Maloney have introduced the Stop Overdraft Profiteering Act and they need our help to get it passed.  The legislation is popular with the American people, including even 76% of Republicans and 68% of independents.  It’s not hard to understand why.  Banks are currently raking in more than $15 billion a year in overdraft fees, despite providing little service and often using deceptive tactics to increase their profits at the expense of the customer.

“The Stop Overdraft Profiteering Act would ban deceptive tactics, limit fees, set up consumer protections and stop Wall Street banks from reaping enormous profits at the expense of the most economically vulnerable.

“Financial institutions use overdraft fees in a way that is deceptive and unfair to consumers, but great for bank bottom lines.  The FDIC reports that the vast majority of large banks have been enrolling consumers automatically in overdraft plans, charge an average of $35 per overdraft, and manipulate the order of transactions to post in a way that causes overdrafts and maximizes profit.  Some have started to change.  But it is not enough.

“This problem is significant.  A report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that the majority of debit card overdraft fees are incurred on transactions of $24 or less, and that the majority of overdrafts are repaid within three days.  Put in lending terms, if a consumer borrowed $24 for three days and paid the median overdraft fee of $34, such a loan would carry a 17,000% annual percentage rate (APR).

“Here’s four highlights from the Stop Overdraft Profiteering Act that would immediately make a difference in so many lives.  The bill:

• Limits the number of overdraft fees a consumer may be charged in a year.
• Prohibits charging a non-sufficient fund fee for any debit card transaction. 
• Prohibits automatic enrollment in overdraft protection plans when opening an account. 
• Bans the reporting of negative information related to overdraft coverage to any consumer credit reporting agency. (Candace Archer,  Americans for Financial Reform, June 17, 2022)

True to form, the NFP wants to raise taxes on the poorest Americans, as Common Dreams discusses: “The policy agenda that Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida unveiled last month—and has continued to promote despite mounting backlash—would hike annual taxes on the poorest 40% of people in the United States by $1,000 on average while not raising taxes on the richest 1% by a single penny.  So concluded a state-by-state analysis of Scott’s plan released Monday by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which estimates that ‘the poorest fifth of Americans would pay 34% of the tax increase while the next fifth of Americans would pay 45% of the tax increase.’” (Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, March 7, 2022)

There is another aspect to the problem of money in politics, as Issue One reports: “You know what’s outrageous?  The fact that members of Congress can buy and sell stocks while in office and make millions in the market by receiving non-public information by virtue of their positions.  It’s time that stopped.  Thanks to our hard work, there’s exciting bipartisan momentum on Capitol Hill to stop insider trading by lawmakers.  Reps. Spanberger (D-VA) and Roy (R-TX) introduced the TRUST in Congress Act (H.R. 336) in the House, and Sens. Ossoff (D-GA) and Kelly (D-AZ) introduced similar legislation, the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act (S. 3494), in the Senate.  Both of these bills would ban members of Congress and their families from buying and selling stocks while in office.” (Ethan Rome, Issue One, February 15, 2022)

In all fairness, members of both parties are engaging in this highly unethical practice.  So the likeliness of anything coming of these bills seems remote. 

There’s more.  Common Cause reports: “In 2020, then-Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and retiring Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) made headlines for buying and selling millions of dollars’ worth of stock after being warned about the coming impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in a closed-door meeting.  This incident shook Americans’ faith in the integrity of their government—and was an extreme example of the inevitable conflicts of interest that come with allowing members of Congress to own and trade stocks while in office.

“Unless much stronger rules are set and penalties increased, some bad-apple lawmakers will always be tempted to put their own financial gain over the public good.  And even law-abiding officials will be caught up in a system that leaves the rest of us questioning our lawmakers’ intentions.” (Devon Nir, Common Cause, February 16, 2022)

The defense industry continues to receive massive amounts of taxpayer’s dollars, no matter what political party is in power.  Justice Democrats reports: “Reuters reports that President Biden will ask Congress for a defense budget exceeding $770 billion for the next fiscal year, citing the need to ‘modernize the military.’  Sources suggest that the figure could actually exceed $800 billion, $50 billion more than Trump’s last defense budget.

“‘Modernize the military’ will mean padding the pockets of defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and their shareholders.  Defense companies gave big to Congressional Democrats and Biden in 2020 and now these corporations are counting on corporate Democrats to champion their interest.

“…When asked during his campaign if he would support Medicare For All, Joe Biden said no.  He said ‘you got to look at the cost.’  But when it comes to increasing an already inflated military budget, there is no limit.  We’ve seen it before.  The same politicians who dismiss Medicare for All, and other social programs as ‘too expensive’ champion a bloated defense budget, including kickbacks to defense, aerospace, and technology companies.  Congress needs to spend less on war and more funding our progressive priorities to meet the nation’s needs at home.” (Justice Democrats, February 21, 2022)

Biden’s statement shows that both Democrats and the NFP have no problem giving the American War Machine all the money it wants.  But when it comes to servicing Americans—that’s another story.  On this issue, at least, there isn’t much difference between the two parties.  This should be the clarion call for a new political party, although the odds of this happening any time soon are remote.

Coalition on Human Needs adds: “We’re told that we ‘can’t afford’ critical investments in our families and communities, while at the same time, America’s wealthiest family dynasties―like the Waltons and Kochs―are set to pass $21 trillion on to their heirs over the next two decades virtually tax free.  Due to enormous estate and gift tax loopholes, they could dodge trillions of dollars in taxes over the next 24 years, perhaps as much $8.4 TRILLION!  This is tax revenue that could be used to lower the costs of health care, child care, education, housing, and more.  In fact, just half of the $8.4 trillion these dynastic families may avoid in taxes could pay for 24 years of the expanded Child Tax Credit, which is benefiting more than 60 million children and last year reduced childhood poverty by nearly 40%. (And—outrageously—has now expired unless Congress acts to extend it.)  Since 2000, estate taxes paid have dropped from $24.4 billion to just $9.3 billion―and have declined by half since the 2017 Trump-GOP tax scam.” (Deborah Weinstein, Coalition on Human Needs, February 22, 2022)

Biden’s claim that we “can’t afford” Medicare for All plays right into the hands of the NFP.  Progress America reports: “In the waning days of the Trump administration, Jared Kushner launched a pilot program to test a “direct contracting model” with Medicare.  Trump & Kushner’s scheme allows Wall Street-backed startups and private insurance giants to take over portions of Medicare.  Under this model, so-called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs) are paid monthly by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to cover a specified portion of a patient’s medical care—a significant shift from traditional Medicare’s direct reimbursement of providers.  And in this pilot period, Medicare patients could be enrolled into private DCEs without their knowledge or permission!…

“This insidious attack on Medicare allows these direct contracting entities to insert themselves between doctors and patients, and use our Medicare dollars to pad their profits.  Seniors value traditional Medicare because it is simple, efficient, and universal.  Right now, these changes are happening at a small scale, but the program is set to expand this year unless President Biden takes action to stop it.” (Mike Phelan, Progress America, February 23, 2022)

It is obscene how the richest people and families in America have been able to cheat the tax system.  The People United tells us: “The Internal Revenue Service has been starved of resources for decades, by both parties, because nobody likes paying taxes.  But because the IRS has been underfunded for so long, they don’t have the resources to take on the real tax cheats, so they go after people who can’t afford to defend themselves.  Instead of looking closely at the returns of the wealthy or corporations, they go after people who can barely make ends meet, and have no choice but to pay their penalty.

“Because they know they can get away with it, the wealthy steal $600 billion per year through tax evasion.  If we don’t stop it, they’ll pocket more than $7 trillion over the next decade.  The IRS needs funding―to take on wealthy tax cheats and provide services (like timely tax refunds) to the rest of us.  This isn’t raising taxes.  It’s about enforcing the law!” (The People United, February 22, 2022)

The news media persists in claiming that when Wall Street does well, the economy is doing well.  This is complete nonsense; the gains in Wall Street are not being shared.  Wealth inequality in 2022 is at its highest level since the Second World War.

The NFP steadfastly refuses to consider raising the minimum wage, which has remained the same for fifteen years now.  Consider this: A McDonalds employee in the U.S. makes nine dollars an hour with no benefits (a Big Mac costs $5.81).  In Denmark, a McDonalds employee makes 22 dollars an hour, gets six weeks vacation, 1 year PAID maternity leave, life insurance, and a pension.  A Big Mac costs $4.82.  Someone should ask the NFP how raising the minimum wage will raise the price of hamburgers.

Price gouging is the name of the game in today’s America.  The price of common goods, gasoline, housing, and just about everything else has risen astronomically in recent years.  Corporate monopolies are responsible for this, aided and abetted by the NFP.  As Public Citizen explains: “We have a monopoly crisis in this country.  From food, to phones, cars, pharmaceuticals, TV and movies, and more, chances are a company whose products you use has recently merged with another company.

“It makes sense from the companies’ perspectives: The more of a market you control, the more people have to come to you for goods and the less you have to out-compete other businesses.  That’s why over the last 20 years, three quarters of industries have gotten more concentrated!

“But these corporate mergers are bad for you and me.  Corporations merging together means less competition, fewer choices, lower wages, higher prices, and less innovation.  Fortunately, the government is creating new guidelines that could end the wave of mergers that help these wealthy companies at our expense.

“Lobbyists often consult with the government behind closed doors, making their case for why they think keeping the existing, too weak guidelines that just so happen to benefit themselves would be the right move in their minds.” (Public Citizen, April 21, 2022)

Big Pharma continues its price gouging and nobody seems able or willing to do anything about it.  Public Citizen notes: “$101,087,677,294.  That’s how much the U.S. spent on the top 20 prescription drugs in 2020.  But while Big Pharma is making a killing for their shareholders and executives, almost one in three Americans are rationing their prescriptions because they can’t afford them. 

“How can Big Pharma make so much money off treatments that people need to survive?

• They benefit from billions and billions in public investment in research and development.
• They take advantage of patents and other monopoly protections to set prices sky high.
• And they spend a fortune on lobbyists to protect their profits.” (Robert Weissman, Public Citizen, February 23, 2022)

Biden and his Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra have the legal authority to do something about Big Pharma’s monopolies and lower the price for prescription medicines. Time will tell if he actually does anything about this terrible situation.

Big Pharma’s callousness and greed are by no means restricted to the U.S.
Amnesty International shows how COVID has become a global problem: “400 million cases of COVID-19 have led to 5.7 million deaths.  Our world will never be the same. Yet amidst this suffering, BILLIONS of people still lack access to vaccine doses.

“Let’s be clear: It’s not a supply problem.

“Ten billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines were produced last year, more than enough to reach the 40% target of global vaccination set by the World Health Organization for the end of 2021.  Instead, just over 4% of those living in low-income countries had been fully vaccinated.  Turning their back on those most in need, Big Pharma has been monopolizing technology, lobbying against the sharing of intellectual property, charging high prices, and prioritizing wealthy countries

“Don’t believe us?  In 2021, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna projected revenues of up to $54 BILLION, all while supplying less than 2% of their vaccines to low-income countries.  There is one word for this: GREED. Profits are being prioritized over people, and people are dying as a result.  The pandemic is far from over—and inequities are growing deeper and deeper around the world.  And within the U.S., people held in ICE detention centers are still waiting to be vaccinated, and many are at high risk for exposure to the virus.  There are reports that asylum-seekers with active cases of COVID-19 are being deported back to Haiti.” (Billie Hirsch, Amnesty International, March 12, 2022)

WomanUp reports on one aspect of Big Pharma’s unprecedented price gouging: “Insulin in the US costs over 12 times more than the average cost in other countries.  Currently, a standard vial of insulin can cost between $175-$300, and average patients with diabetes need about 2 vials each month. 

“And Republicans want to keep it that way.

“Millions of Americans are struggling to keep up with the costs of these lifesaving drugs, with many having to ration their doses.  That’s why House Democrats (and only 12 House Republicans) just passed a bill that would cap the monthly cost of insulin at $35 for insured patients.  This legislation will save lives, and ease the financial burden that millions of Americans face each month.  But this bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, with Republicans standing in the way of access to affordable insulin.” (WomanUp, April 5, 2022)

The NFP has no problem with the rising costs of virtually everything.  To cite but two examples, in the last 21 years, housing costs have risen by 118%, while health care costs have risen 145%.  Meanwhile, the minimum wage remains at $7.25 per hour and Social Security has risen only 55%.  So, the real victims are the young, inexperienced workers and our senior citizens.  Of course, the NFP never addresses these issues in a positive way: They want to keep the minimum wage where it is.  Many NFP leaders are even calling for the elimination of the minimum wage altogether.  

Inequality Media Civic Action pulls no punches in explaining why prices on virtually everything have risen so sharply: “The latest inflation report says that prices rose 7.5 percent over the past year, the highest inflation rate in 30 years.  And according to the corporate media, it’s all because of Joe Biden and government spending.

“That’s hogwash.

“In fact, one of the biggest drivers of inflation is something the mainstream media never talks about at all: the outsized power of corporations.  Just two companies, Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark, dominate the market for household paper products like diapers and toilet paper.  Four large meat-processing conglomerates control the prices of beef, pork, and poultry.  And don’t get me started on Amazon and Walmart.  These companies aren’t raising prices because they have to.  They’re raising prices because they can.

“But the American people aren’t hearing any of this, and that’s a big, big problem.  Because if the voters don’t get the real story about monopolistic power and what’s causing inflation, they won’t know what solutions to demand from their elected officials.  Worse yet, they just might end up rewarding the very corporations responsible for the problem by electing a Republican majority in Congress—whose corporate campaign donations ensure they won’t break up corporate monopoly power.

“If markets were truly competitive, companies would need to keep their prices down in order to prevent competitors from grabbing away customers.  But greedy corporations are raising prices even as they rake in record profits.

“How can this be?  The answer is that they have so much market power they can artificially drive up prices with impunity.  Again: The lion’s share of the market for toilet paper is controlled by just two companies: P&G and Kimberly-Clark.  So last April, when they jacked up prices, we had no choice but to pay up.

“Or consider another consumer product duopoly—PepsiCo (the parent company of Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Quaker, Tropicana, and other brands), and Coca-Cola.  In April, PepsiCo announced it was increasing prices.  Then, just like clockwork, its only major competitor announced similar price hikes.

“In every case, the companies blamed higher costs on labor, freight, and raw materials.  But in every case, these companies were also recording record profits, and their CEOs were raking it in.  In other words, they’re lying to you.  They’re using ‘inflation’ as an excuse to price gouge and fatten compensation packages for their executives.

“Here’s the thing.  Turning dry economic concepts into social media content that that people (including young folks) will actually watch is a huge task.  But the brilliant creative team at Inequality Media Civic Action has figured it out—and they continue to exceed my expectations.  Plus, we’ve built an online audience of more than 6.5 million followers, including a surprisingly large number of conservatives and independents.  So we can reach the people we need, even as viewing habits change and attention spans get shorter, with a small team on a shoestring budget.” (Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, March 4, 2022)

Inequality Media Civic Action ran a follow-up article in April: “This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that prices were 8.5 percent higher last month than they were a year ago— the highest rate of inflation since 1981.  The buying power of Americans is being squeezed more and more each day.  But the media is failing to tell the whole story.

“Here are the facts about inflation you need to know:
1. Corporate profits are at a 70-year high.  Yet corporations are still raising their prices.
2. They are not raising prices because of the increasing costs of supplies and labor—which are real but expected when an economy goes suddenly from a pandemically-induced deep freeze to meeting the soaring demands of consumers who are emerging from the pandemic.  Corporations enjoying record profits in a healthy competitive economy would absorb these costs.
3. Instead, they’re passing these costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices.  In many cases they’re raising prices higher than those cost increases, using the cover of inflation to increase their profit margins even more.
4. They’re doing so because they face little or no competition.  If markets were competitive, companies would keep their prices down to prevent competitors from grabbing away customers.
5. Since the 1980s, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.  This concentration gives corporations the power to raise prices because it makes it easy for them to informally coordinate price increases with the handful of other companies in their same industry—without risking the possibility of losing customers, who have no other choice.
6. Corporations are using these near-record profits to boost share prices by buying back a record amount of their own shares of stock.  Stock buybacks hit a new record last year.  So far this year they’re on track to exceed that record. Stock buybacks are predicted to hit $1 trillion this year—an all-time high.
7. Most American workers have barely had a wage increase in 40 years (adjusted for inflation).  Although some corporations have recently given out wage increases in response to the post-pandemic surge in demand, these wage increases have been almost completely eroded by price increases.  When corporations are enjoying near-record profits, we would expect corporations to pay the higher wages out of their profits rather than to pass them on to consumers in the form of higher prices.  But they are not.  The labor market is not ‘unhealthily’ tight, as Fed Chair Jerome Powell asserts; corporations are unhealthily fat.  Workers do not have too much power; corporations do.
8. As a result of all this, income and wealth are being redistributed upward from average working people (many of whom live from paycheck to paycheck) to CEOs and shareholders, including the wealthiest people in America.  Billionaires have become $1.7 trillion richer during the pandemic.  CEO pay (based largely on stock values) is now at a record 350-to-1 ratio relative to median pay.
9. Wealthy Americans are now paying a lower tax rate than the working class.  Some are paying no taxes at all.
10. Big corporations have accumulated a substantial amount of political power, with which they’ve beaten back lower drug prices, prevented higher corporate taxes, and amassed unprecedented corporate welfare.

“In short, although the American economy is rebounding nicely from the recession, the growing imbalance of economic power is bad for most Americans and for the economy as a whole.

“So, how can we fix this?  I have a few ideas:
1. Tougher antitrust enforcement.
2. A windfall profits tax on corporate profiteers.
3. Higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
4. A ban on corporate stock buybacks.
5. Stronger unions.
6. Campaign finance reform to get big money out of politics.

“None of these solutions is radical.  What’s radical is allowing this direct upward redistribution of wealth from the wallets of working Americans to the pockets of corporate executives and shareholders.” (Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, April 12, 2022)

These same corporations that have seen their profits soar to unimaginable heights are paying little or no income taxes, as Demand Progress illustrates: “Tesla will pay $0 in federal taxes this year despite recording a record profit of $5.5 billion in 2021 thanks to existing corporate tax loopholes and the company’s ‘creative’ accounting. That’s unacceptable.  Tesla is headquartered in the United States and its 2021 profits secured CEO Elon Musk’s title as the world’s richest man.  Yet the corporation will avoid all US corporate taxes because its enormous profits were recorded outside the US, while inside the US, the company reported a loss. 

“For at least three years running, Tesla has avoided contributing to funding the social services and infrastructure that the US desperately needs.  Multinational corporations like Tesla regularly use offshore tax havens to report all their profits abroad, where they’re subject to drastically lower tax rates.  130 countries including the US entered into an agreement last year intended to crack down on tax evasion by setting a standard corporate tax rate of 15%.  But, as Tesla’s 2021 tax filings indicate, the new agreement won’t have much effect because key tax havens still haven’t joined.  Tesla’s SEC filings show that US sales accounted for nearly half of Tesla’s total revenue in 2021, but the company is still declaring a loss in the US for the year.  That means Tesla will avoid US corporate taxes altogether.Congress must pass legislation applying a 15% corporate tax rate to all profits—regardless of whether they’re reported domestically or abroad.” (Demand Progress, March 18, 2022) 

Americans for Tax Fairness elaborates: “Billionaire business owners are seeing their wealth skyrocket while they continue to pay their employees very low wages.  Take Nike for example.  The typical Nike employee would have to work 15 hours to afford a single pair of Air Jordan sneakers.  Nike’s co-founder, Phil Knight, has seen his wealth grow by 83.5%―to nearly $25 billion―during the pandemic and can afford two new pairs of Air Jordans every second!

FedEx founder and CEO Fred Smith is worth $5.3 billion―seeing his wealth nearly double during the pandemic.  And yet, FedEx ranks #100 lowest in median worker wages among S&P 500 corporations.” (Frank Clemente, Americans for Tax Fairness, March 19, 2022)

Common Cause tells us of the hypocrisy and lies of some of the companies that promised to stop financing the NFP leaders who incited the insurrection: “Five days after the January 6th insurrection, AT&T promised that it’d stop funding the Republican lawmakers who incited the attack.  But now, they’re just the latest corporation to break that pledge.  That’s right: this winter, just one year after the riot—AT&T’s corporate PAC donated tens of thousands of dollars directly to the campaigns of more than a dozen GOP election deniers.

“It seems that AT&T’s short-lived pledge to put democracy first was nothing more than empty words.  Now that the company thinks nobody is looking, it’s once again supporting politicians who—by peddling Donald Trump’s lies and refusing to certify the 2020 election—incited the insurrection at our Capitol.  And AT&T is not alone.  PACs of companies—like General Motors, UPS, American Airlines, and more—that promised to halt donations to these Republicans in the wake of the insurrection have since collectively kicked in more than $2,300,000 to help re-elect them.” (Devon Nir, Common Cause, March 11, 2022)

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reports on the same issue: “After the January 6 insurrection, dozens of companies quickly pledged to suspend political donations, with many pledging to suspend donations specifically to the Sedition Caucus—the 147 members of Congress who voted against certifying the election.  Others pledged to pause all donations while they reviewed donation criteria.  Many of these companies had strong words about their commitment to democracy and peaceful transitions of power. 

“But months later, after the spotlight was gone, companies like Walgreens, UPS, Capital One, Exelon and Motorola Solutions all quietly began giving big to re-elect the Sedition Caucus. 

“By the end of 2021, UPS had given to 63 members of the Sedition Caucus—becoming one of the top corporate donors to the members who rejected democracy.  Motorola Solutions also went big when they abandoned their pledge, giving $61,000 to 14 members of the Sedition Caucus.  Walgreens gave more than $25,000 starting in November 2021—including to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who has targeted members of the House Republican Caucus who are participating in the January 6th Select Committee.  Capital One kept their pledge until November as well—but then gave $5,000 to Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, who had reportedly said that he’d put companies who paused donations on a ‘list.’ (Noah Bookbinder, CREW, March 17, 2022) 

Amazon is just another mega-corporation engaging in shady dealings.  Public Citizen reports: “A congressional committee has accused corporate giant Amazon of lying under oath about ways it blocks competition.  Here’s some of what the House Judiciary Committee said in a letter last week to Attorney General Merrick Garland: ‘We write to alert the Department of Justice to potentially criminal conduct by Amazon and certain of its executives.  Last Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary (Committee) conducted an extensive investigation into competition in digital markets.  During that investigation, and in follow-up inquiries, Amazon engaged in a pattern and practice of misleading conduct that suggests it was ‘acting with an improper purpose’ ‘to influence, obstruct, or impede’ the Committee’s investigation and inquiries.  In its first appearance before the Committee during the investigation, Amazon lied through a senior executive’s sworn testimony that Amazon did not use any of the troves of data it had collected on its third-party sellers to compete with them.  But credible investigative reporting showed otherwise.  Amazon repeatedly endeavored to thwart the Committee’s efforts to uncover the truth about Amazon’s business practices.  For this, it must be held accountable.  We therefore refer this matter to the Department to investigate whether Amazon or its executives obstructed Congress or violated other applicable federal laws.’” (Robert Weissman, Public Citizen, March 17, 2022)

Demand Progress tells us about Amazon’s merger with MGM: “Just when you thought Amazon couldn’t get any bigger, it did.  Amazon just closed its merger with entertainment conglomerate MGM, a $8.45 billion deal that will hugely consolidate the online streaming industry—and expand Amazon’s already absurd market power.

“Big tech companies already abuse their gatekeeper status to undermine human rights, distort democracy, misuse our personal data, and stifle competition.  Amazon’s latest deal will just make it worse.  Meanwhile, Amazon joined Google to create a misleading lobbying campaign, and Facebook paid Republican consultants huge sums of money to smear TikTok.

“Amazon, Apple, Google, and other companies have an unfair advantage over small businesses because they run the platforms these smaller businesses use to sell their products.or example, many of the apps sold on Apple’s or Google’s app market, or products sold on Amazon, are made by other companies.  That means the big platform companies effectively get to make the rules for their competitors.  And unsurprisingly, they rig the game to favor their own products.

“Amazon regularly discriminates against the small businesses that use its platform to sell their products by replicating popular products sold by small brands and by preferencing its own products over those of other brands.Apple, Google, and other big platforms are similarly positioned to discriminate against, or cannibalize, smaller competitors.  It’s not just the small businesses themselves that suffer.  Consumers suffer too, from higher prices and fewer choices.” (Demand Progress, April 3, 2022)

Jobs With Justice shows how little Amazon cares about its employees: “Greed and power continue to be the attributes of many CEOs of top businesses.  These people continue to put profits over the well-being of their workers, all while instilling their workers with fears that they are easily replaceable, unworthy of a livable wage, and their safety is not a concern.

“As Amazon’s profits continue to increase, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy follows in Jeff Bezos’ footsteps by continuing the practice of worker exploitation and union busting.  Amazon has refused to accept their workers in multiple locations desire to unionize and have for many years fought against organizing efforts.  Despite the company’s best efforts, workers won their election in Staten Island and are awaiting the results of the election in Bessemer, Alabama.” (Joel Mendelson, Jobs With Justice, May 16, 2022)

Starbucks is no different.  The above article notes: “When Starbucks baristas in Buffalo, New York started organizing to fight for better wages, benefits, and health protections, they were met with an onslaught of anti-union messaging and scare tactics from CEO Howard Schultz and other company executives.”

The Patriot Act, passed in 2001 with overwhelming bipartisan support, was written to give law enforcement agencies more power in dealing with terrorism.  This was in response to the events of 9/11/01.  Demand Progress focuses on one little-known but crucial component of this Act: “The Hill just dropped an article this week claiming that the public just doesn’t care about government surveillance.Demand Progress’ million members beg to differ.

“Since our inception, Demand Progress members have successfully stepped up to change government surveillance policy numerous times to protect our privacy.  Right now, we are sounding the alarm about how the government has been using a massive loophole to buy our personal data from third parties.  And we’re holding the media accountable for not taking our members’ concerns about government surveillance seriously.

“It is unconscionable that the media would imply that you don’t care about government use of our most private and personal data.  Let’s review the facts.

• When Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which allowed the government to collect vast amounts of data without a warrant, was up for renewal, Demand Progress members stepped up and spoke out. As a result, Section 215 was left to expire.
• When the Secret Service, ICE, and the FBI were found to be buying real-time location data, Demand Progress members signed on by the thousands to make them stop.
• And Demand Progress members came out in force against the IRS’ attempt to use facial recognition, helping to convince the agency to abandon the project.

“What is true is that the media has done a terrible job in covering government surveillance.  Recently, intelligence agencies have been found to be using Fourth Amendment loopholes to buy our personal data from third parties, even though they couldn’t legally collect it without a warrant.But this revelation has barely been a blip on the media’s radar.  In other words, even though Section 215 is gone, government bulk collection of data—which can include anything from financial records to phone calls to internet histories—is far from over. And this invasion of privacy is not getting the media attention, or the attention from Congress, it deserves.  Demand Progress is rallying its membership to pass two bills critical for limiting this warrantless surveillance: the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act and the Government Surveillance Transparency Act.  And we’re making public the very real risk to privacy and wellbeing Americans are facing while this surveillance goes unchecked.” (Robert Cruickshank, Demand Progress, March 26, 2022)

Fight for the Future is an organization dedicated to protecting user’s rights in the digital age.  Their report on Apple’s App Store should be read by all Americans: “Apple’s App Store isn’t just a storefront.  It is a chokepoint that oppressive governments around the world wield to control the Internet.  For over a decade, Apple has forced its iPhone users to install software exclusively through its iOS app store.  This has allowed Apple to wield control over what software its 1 billion iPhone users are allowed to access, and has ensured that Apple is able to collect a 30% cut from all sales.  Authoritarian governments frequently exploit this situation by requesting Apple remove encrypted messaging apps, VPN services, and LGBTQ+ apps, in exchange for allowing Apple to continue doing business in their country.
…”Apple’s firm grip on its App Store is a serious problem for human rights and free expression  all over the world.  The App Store gives Apple unprecedented power to decide what we can see and do online.  It squeezes small businesses, stifles competition, and hurts consumers, and worse of all, puts vulnerable groups at risk.” (Fight for the Future, March 30, 2022)

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RELIGION’S DECLINE IN AMERICA

To listen to politicians and the media, one would think that religion, specifically Christianity, is as alive and vibrant as ever. Fortunately this is no longer the case. Daily Kos tells the story: “ Evangelical Christians are an egregious example of how a noisy minority can appear to be a more significant number of people than they actually are. And they have used that noise to grab political power by hijacking the GOP. But as conservative evangelicals in the US have solidified their hold over the Republican party, Americans as a whole are becoming less religious. In 1980, 89% of Americans Identified as Christian. By 2020 that number was 68%. And what is even worse news for organized religion is that the move to secularism is generational. The young are not buying what the church sells. Which raises the question, what is religion selling?

“According to its propaganda, the Church says it provides a haven in a harsh, uncertain world. It explains where we came from and where we are going. It guarantees entry to heaven (if you check the right boxes). It provides a moral guide. It gives solace to people when they are hurt or grieving. And it is a community where like-minded people can socialize. My mother went to church every Sunday of her life. But I have no evidence that she believed in God—she never talked about the subject. Nor did she ever use God as a reason to promote bigotry and prejudice. And ironically, I think an older woman provides a clue as to why younger Americans no longer feel drawn to the church. Because, while she embraced the charity and compassion of traditional mainstream Protestantism, the Church today is best known for its arbitrary moral absolutism and judgmental prejudice.

“Ever since the Moral Majority supported Ronald Reagan, a divorced, non-church goer, over Jimmy Carter, a devout evangelical Christian, conservative Christianity has not only been a political force but America’s largest promoter of hatred, bigotry, and anger in the public sphere. And the youth of America don’t like it. Voting patterns provide evidence for that argument. Millennials overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, who comprise the party supporting the rights of disadvantaged groups in America—aka, those who do not fit the white, male, heteronormative mold. Or, put another way, they champion people whose civil rights would be stripped from them if religious bigots got their way. And these are issues that resonate with younger adults who are more likely to support the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, a social safety net, and a woman’s right to choose.

“In fairness, it’s not only the young. Many older Americans also back the same positions. The support for gay marriage, which stood at 27% in 1996 when Gallup first asked the question, has now reached 70%. Even the majority of Republicans support it. You will not find it used as a political issue much anymore. But the damage to evangelicals from their campaign against same-sex marriage—which exposed them as hateful and even unChristian—lingers.

“Going hand in hand with political power is the root of all evil, the want of money. The Church is big business. And wherever there is money, there are liars, thieves, cheats, con artists, and cynical opportunists. I don’t know if religion has a higher percentage of grifters than other fields of financial buccaneering, but one thing the church has in spades is hypocrites. When Bernie Madoff was putting his hand in your pocket, he wasn’t telling you how you should lead your life. or enumerating who was a sinner destined for hell. But religious snake-oil salesmen lard their larceny with moral mandates they themselves often ignore.

“Consider televangelist Jim Bakker, founder of the PTL club.  In 1979, the FCC investigated him for fraud.  In 1985, a confidential IRS report found Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye had used $1.3 million in charitable donations for their benefit from 1980 to 1983.  But no action was taken by a Reagan administration that turned a blind eye to the financial sins of its evangelical base.  In 1987, news surfaced that Bakker had had sex with the 21-year-old secretary, Jessica Hahn.  He said it was consensual.  She said she had been drugged and raped.  He paid her $279,000 in hush money.  Bakker might have survived the sex, but the bribe upset the sanctimonious.  So he had to quit.  In 1989, he was found guilty of 24 charges of fraud and received a 45-year prison sentence.  An appeals court reduced it to eight years.  And he ended up serving five.

“Currently, he is selling food and other supplies to doomsday preppers.  And his latest scam is promoting colloidal silver as a cure for COVID.  Sued once more, he had to make restitution for fraudulent claims again.  He is not alone among the religious degenerates.  Jimmy Swaggart’s love of prostitutes led to his defrocking.  Noted homophobe, Ted Haggard, was busted for buying sex and crystal meth from a male prostitute.  Tony Alamo was sentenced to 175 years in prison for sexual abuse, transporting underage girls across state lines for sexual purposes, pedophilia, marrying an eight-year-old girl, and child rape.  Alamo’s defense: he was framed by the Vatican.

“And there are the reprobates who are not ministers but promote a Christian lifestyle.  People like Josh Duggar (child porn), Jerry Falwell Jr. (three-way sex and lying), and David Vitter (prostitution).

“You get the point and that’s enough for this diary.  Let’s leave the Catholic Church and child rape for another day.

“I predict that by 2032, the number of nonbelievers in the US may well reach 40%.  Republicans could slow down the trend by supporting more immigration from Central and South America, because Hispanics are more religious than Gringos.  Would a right-wing Bible-thumping racist ever chose to support large amounts of brown immigration?  I suspect that, much as the scorpion stung the frog, the religious bigot would rather drown than do the decent thing.” (Community, Daily Kos, December 31, 2021)

The NFP knows that religion is losing face with more and more people.  Their strategy is to ignore the facts and pass themselves off as the most religious and moral people in the world.

The NFP’s own views and actions are contributing to Christianity’s decline in America.  Daily Kos lays bare the hypocrisy and stupidity of the NFP’s devotion to believing without thinking: “The same conservative evangelical ‘churches’ that decided habitual liar and lifelong sex predator Donald Trump was, at long last, the American savior they were looking for have not—and this should come as no surprise—dulled in their fascist support for ending democracy rather than abide Trump’s very real election shellacking.  That’s the news from a New York Times piece checking in with the Colorado Springs crowd, where hard-right pastors are inviting in hard-right election conspiracy theorists who continue to declare that ‘fraud’ cheated Trump out of a win because…well, because nothing, that’s why.

“It’s the same nonsensical claims and the same known-crooked actors.  Still, Republicans eat this stuff up because Republican media has been ‘grooming’ the base to accept ridiculous lies about whatever needs to be lied about.  Evangelical conservatism has more than flirted with fascism as a counter to American democracy, which hasn’t been going their way for a lot longer than that.

“When you’ve got a movement already wedded to the notion that Americans should abide by hard-right evangelical beliefs by force of law, it’s not hard to sell them on theories that voting itself has become illegitimate.  They don’t want to know the facts.  They just want someone to tell them ‘facts’ sufficient for smashing the place up and rebuilding America as a palace of their own personal prejudices.

“The quote around which the Times builds up the rest of its story is from a ‘one-time Republican congressional candidate’ presenting his PowerPoint slides about ‘Socialism.’  William Federer announces that it’s the failure of the January coup to overturn the election that means ‘lo and behold, an anti-Christian spirit’s been released across the country and the world.’

“Showing people a slide deck to explain why historic ‘socialism’ means you need to erase our nation’s democracy is a niche approach.  Most of the street thugs who want to end democracy, like the Proud Boys, aren’t about to sit through a slide show.  Most of the rich financiers of such schemes have no interest in hearing somebody else’s opinions on why democracy should end—if you were rich enough to have opinions that matter, they already would have heard them.

“Slap some references to an Antichrist in there, however, and the Colorado Springs church circuit will eat that up.  These are people who already believe the devil controls animals they don’t like, weather patterns, and certain traffic lights—tell them that all of the Americans voting against them are merely demon-possessed puppets whose votes shouldn’t be counted to begin with, and you will get a lot of gray heads nodding along and posting your thoughts to their Facebook feeds.

“Fascism is an irrational movement that has contempt for reality, substituting whatever outlandish fictions are necessary in order for the paranoid to justify oppression or the outright murder of whoever is not them, and nobody involved here gives the slightest damn about whether there is evidence of election fraud.  The ‘evidence’ of the Republican conspiracy theorist is that they lost when they wanted to win, which means their enemies did something, which means it’s time for erasing everything and starting over with new rules to make sure such insults no longer happen.” (Hunter, Daily Kos, April 26, 2022)

Anyone who has ever opened a history book knows that religions simply cannot accept the existence of other religions.  Christianity has, since its inception, been at war with other religions.  One Christian sect can’t even accept the existence of other Christian sects.  TheWrap tells us:  “Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia and far-right conspiracy theorist, has unleashed her latest political attack on the Catholic Church.  And the Catholic Church isn’t happy.  Or mind you, the Catholic League isn’t happy.  Greene, while talking with right-wing activist Michael Voris of Church Militant (via Mediaite), said that ‘Satan’s controlling the church’ and that U.S. Bishops have ‘taken enormous sums of money from the federal government, federal taxpayers to assist in illegal immigration, some refugee resettlement also.’ (Drew Taylor, TheWrap, April 27, 2022)
To be sure, not all Christian churches have a problem with public education.  However, this is certainly not true in fundamentalist Christianity.   To these people, any schooling that doesn’t teach their interpretation of scripture is the enemy.

Make no mistake about it.  The NFP wants to utterly destroy public education and replace it with fundamentalist church schools.  The last thing they want is pluralism: they want ALL children taught that their particular version of Christianity is the only “true” version and that everyone else is wrong, and might even be agents of Satan.  This means public schools must go.  To get an insight as to what this would mean for our country, consider the case of the Christian Academy of Louisville Kentucky.  Students were told to write a letter to a friend of the same gender who is “struggling with homosexuality” and convince them that they can be “cured” by using scripture to assist them in changing their “lifestyle.”  Yes, the school came under fire for this, but the point is that the right-wing simply refuses to acknowledge basic facts about the LGBTQ community; despite all the evidence to the contrary, they still insist that homosexuality is a “choice.”  And they also won’t be convinced that gays and lesbians aren’t a threat. 

And of course the illegitimate Supreme Court tries to support the NFP’s view on school prayer by twisted legal means.  The Center for Inquiry reports: “The Supreme Court today concluded a brutal week of assaults on the critical constitutional principle of the separation of church and state by issuing its ruling in the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.  The conservative majority on the Court ruled 6-3 that both the Free Exercise Clause and the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment require a public school district to permit a football coach to publicly pray on the field following a game.

“This decision comes on top of religiously motivated decisions in Carson v. Makin, requiring state funding of religious schools when secular private schools are funded, and Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women’s Health Org., stripping away the federal constitutional right to choose an abortion.

“It’s never been clearer that this current Supreme Court will view every situation through a lens most sympathetic toward religion. Decades of rock solid precedent protecting the secular character of the United States government have been cast away just in the past seven days. And if one thing is certain, it is that this Court isn’t done advancing the interests of the religious Right.

“In his headlong rush to pander to religious extremists, Justice Neil Gorsuch ignored both the facts of the case in Kennedy as well as longstanding agreement on the meaning of the Establishment Clause, dismissing out of hand the notion that students might feel coerced to join a prayer vigil led by their coach, regardless of their own religious beliefs or lack thereof.” (Center for Inquiry, June 27, 2022)

Common Dreams supplies us with more information on how the former “Supreme” Court is attempting to turn the United States into a Christo-fascist country: “The Supreme Court is relentlessly funding and empowering Christian fascism.  It not only overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a constitutional right to an abortion, but ruled on June 21 that Maine may not exclude religious schools from a state tuition program.  It has ruled that a Montana state program to support private schools must include religious schools.  It ruled that a 40-foot cross could remain on state property in suburban Maryland.  It upheld the Trump administration regulation allowing employers to deny birth control coverage to female employees on religious grounds.  It ruled that employment discrimination laws do not apply to teachers at religious schools.  It ruled that a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia could ignore city rules and refuse to screen same-sex couples applying to take in foster children.  It neutered the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  It watered down laws allowing workers to combat sexual and racial harassment in court.  It reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions to permit corporations, private groups and oligarchs to spend unlimited funds on elections, a system of legalized bribery, in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission.  It permitted states to opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.  It undercut the ability of public sector unions to raise funds.  It forced workers with legal grievances to submit their complaints to privatized arbitration boards.  It ruled that states cannot restrict the right to carry concealed weapons in public.  It ruled that suspects cannot sue police who neglect to read them their Miranda warnings and use their statements against them in court.  Outlawing contraception, same-sex marriage and same-sex consensual relations are probably next.  Only 25 percent of those polled say they have confidence in Supreme Court decisions.

“The connecting tissue among the disparate militia groups, QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-abortion activists, right-wing patriot organizations, Second Amendment advocates, neo-Confederates and Trump supporters that stormed the Capitol on January 6 is this frightening Christian fascism.

“Fascists achieve power by creating parallel institutions—schools, universities, media platforms and paramilitary forces—and seizing the organs of internal security and the judiciary.  They deform the law, including electoral law, to serve their ends.  They are rarely in the majority.  The Nazis never polled above 37 percent in free elections in Germany.  Christian fascists constitute less than a third of the U.S. electorate, about the same percentage of those who consider abortion to be murder.  What the ideology demands is law.  What the ideology opposes is a crime.  Once a legal system is subservient to dogma an open society is impossible.

“Blow by blow autocratic power is being solidified by this monstrous Christian fascism which is bankrolled by the most retrograde forces of corporate capitalism.  It looks set to take control of the U.S. Congress in the midterm elections.  If Trump, or a Trump-like clone, is elected in 2024, what is left of our democracy will likely be extinguished.

“These Christians fascists are clear about the society they intend to create.
In their ideal America, our ‘secular humanist’ society based on science and reason will be destroyed.  The Ten Commandments will form the basis of the legal system.  Creationism or ‘Intelligent Design’ will be taught in public schools, many of which will be overtly ‘Christian.’  Those branded as social deviants, including the LGBTQ community, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals, and those dismissed as ‘nominal Christians’—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of Bible—will be silenced, imprisoned, or killed.  The role of the federal government will be reduced to protecting property rights, ‘homeland’ security and waging war.  Most government assistance programs and federal departments, including education, will be terminated.  Church organizations will be funded and empowered to run social-welfare agencies and schools.  The poor, condemned for sloth, indolence, and sinfulness, will be denied help.  The death penalty will be expanded to include ‘moral crimes,’ including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder.  Women, denied contraception, access to abortion, and equality under the law, will be subordinate to men.  Those who practice other faiths will become, at best, second-class citizens.  The wars waged by the American empire will be defined as religious crusades.  Victims of police violence and those in prison will have no redress.  There will be no separation of church and state.  The only legitimate voices in public discourse and the media will be ‘Christian.’  America will be sacralized as an agent of God.  Those who defy the ‘Christian’ authorities, at home and abroad, will be condemned as agents of Satan.

“…Most of those tasked with reporting on and interpreting history, social movements and religious beliefs have failed us.  They spoke about the past, vowing ‘Never again,’ but refused to use the lessons of the past to explain the present.  It was not ignorance.  It was cowardice.  To confront the Christian fascists, even in universities, meant career-canceling accusations of religious bigotry and intolerance.  It meant credible threats of violence from conspiracy theorists who believed they were called by God to murder abortion providers, Muslims, and ‘secular humanists.’  It was easier, as many academics did in Weimar Germany, to believe that the fascists did not mean what they said, that there were strains within the movement that could be reasoned with, that opening channels of dialogue and communication could see the fascists domesticated, that if in power the fascists would not act on their extremist and violent rhetoric.  With few exceptions, German academics did not protest the Nazi assumption of power and the wholesale dismissal of their liberal, socialist, and Jewish colleagues.” (Chris Hedges, Common Dreams, June 27, 2022)

The NFP won’t be happy until everyone espouses only their religion—and their politics.  They want to replace the secular U.S. Constitution—where the only mention of religion is exclusionary—with a new Constitution, based on biblical law.  As they understand it.

The Catholic Church’s cover-up of priestly sexual abuses with minors, which has apparently gone on since time immemorial, was the greatest scandal the church ever faced.  But it is not just the Catholic Church that covers up these crimes, as Care2 Action reports: “A bombshell investigation is shaking the Southern Baptist community in the U.S. New reporting reveals that, for more than a decade, officials within the church kept a secret list of pastors and employees who were known sexual predators.  Yet instead of siding with the victims of these crimes, church officials chose to prioritize protecting the perpetrators—even conducting multiple coverups.  A horrific 205-page church database tracked more than 700 cases against hundreds of abusers…and those are just the cases we know about. How many times did church leaders and employees brutally abuse unsuspecting congregants, while the church stood by and did nothing?

“The people victimized include women, children, and people of all genders.  They were traumatized first, when the assaults occurred.  And again, when church leadership failed them by hushing up the problem and continuing to support the perpetrators.  For anyone to do that to children and other victims is untenable—but it’s especially sickening when a whole organization refuses to care.  As so many survivors know, we cannot rely on abusive institutions to hold themselves accountable.  It simply does not work, and leaves the door open for future abuses to occur.  Survivors deserve answers, justice, and peace of mind that this will not happen again in the future.” (Care2 Action, June 12, 2022)

Religion may be declining in the United States, but the NFP has no problem providing CPR to keep it alive.  And grow.  Center for Inquiry reports: “The Supreme Court is bulldozing the Wall of Separation.  In a ruling just handed down, the Court’s conservative supermajority ruled that taxpayers can be forced to fund religious education.  In Maine, the state pays for students to attend secular private schools if they live in areas without public schools of their own.  The Court just ruled that by excluding sectarian schools from this arrangement, the state is in violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

“The Center for Inquiry was part of an amicus brief that urged the court to stand for our founding principles and protect church-state separation.  But the Roberts Court appears intent on turning aside decades of precedent that put limits on taxpayer funds flowing to religious activity.  As Center for Inquiry President and CEO Robyn Blumner put it in our official statement, ‘With this ruling, the power of the state may force Americans—about one third of whom subscribe to no religious faith—to foot the bill for children’s religious education and indoctrination.’

“Even worse, the Court has made clear that religious schools that are discriminatory, teach prejudice against other groups, or misinform students about basic scientific facts, such as an old earth and evolution, are just as entitled to public funds.” (Center for Inquiry, June 21, 2022)

Justice Sotomeyer wrote a perfect response to the court’s wrong decision, as reported by Daily Kos: “Sotomayor was, again, scathing in response, writing that her colleagues had ‘upended constitutional doctrine.’  The Court has ‘shift[ed] from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.’  Thus, she wrote, ‘any State that values its historic antiestablishment interests more than this Court does will have to curtail the support it offers to its citizens.’

“‘Nothing in the Constitution requires today’s result,’ Sotomayor argued.  The majority opinion is ‘especially perverse,’ she wrote, because the case involves public education.  ‘As this Court has long recognized, the Establishment Clause requires that public education be secular and neutral as to religion,’ Sotomayor wrote.  Eventually, she fears, the court will come to ‘a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.’

“This is as radical a decision as any the court has made, and a reminder that Roberts is fundamentally no better than any of the Trump appointees when the chips are down, when the foundational principles of the nation are before him.” (Joan McCarter, Daily Kos, June 21, 2022)

No atheist to my knowledge is against allowing the religious to practice their faith and to believe in any god their imagination can conjure up.  The reverse is not the case; fundamentalist Christians detest atheism and rationalism.  All we ask is that they stop trying to force their beliefs on everyone else.

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THE UPCOMING RIGHT-WING DICTATORSHIP

When I began reporting on the antics of the fascists in the Republican party back in 2016, many readers were skeptical, thinking that common sense would prevail and politics would return to normal.  Unfortunately, just about everything I predicted has come to pass, and the NFP has become more and more reactionary with each passing day.  Common Dreams ran an article that supports my contention that the United States is on course to become a right-wing fascist dictatorship: “In a matter of years, the United States’ deeply flawed and increasingly fragile democratic system could collapse under the weight of a long-running reactionary onslaught and be replaced by a right-wing dictatorship—one for which former President Donald Trump was ‘just a warm-up act.’  ‘Willingness to publicly endorse the Big Lie has become a litmus test of Republican loyalty to Mr. Trump.’  Such was the stark warning that Thomas Homer-Dixon, executive director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University and a scholar of violent conflict, delivered in an exhaustive op-ed published in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.

“Homer-Dixon, the former head of a center on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto, warned that the ‘political and social landscape’ of the U.S.—a profoundly unequal and ideologically polarized nation that also happens to be ‘armed to the teeth’—is ‘flashing with warning signals.’  ‘By 2025,’ he wrote, ‘American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence.  By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.’

“Arguing that prominent reactionary figures such as the late right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh and Trump—who awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020—‘are as much symptoms’ of U.S. political dysfunction as its causes, Homer-Dixon contended that the nation’s present crises have their roots in myriad historical phenomena: Some can be traced to the country’s founding—to an abiding distrust in government baked into the country’s political culture during the Revolution, to slavery, to the political compromise of the Electoral College that slavery spawned, to the overrepresentation of rural voting power in the Senate, and to the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War.  ‘But successful polities around the world,’ he continued, ‘have overcome flaws just as fundamental.’

“So why is U.S. democracy particularly vulnerable to full-scale collapse in the near future?

“Homer-Dixon argued that ‘what seems to have pushed the United States to the brink of losing its democracy today is a multiplication effect between its underlying flaws and recent shifts in the society’s ‘material’ characteristics.  These shifts include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity, and rising inequality as the country’s economy—transformed by technological change and globalization—has transitioned from muscle power, heavy industry, and manufacturing as the main sources of its wealth to idea power, information technology, symbolic production, and finance,’ he wrote.  ‘America’s economic, racial and social gaps have helped cause ideological polarization between the political right and left, and the worsening polarization has paralyzed government while aggravating the gaps’

“Eager and well-positioned to exploit such divisions are Trump and his Republican loyalists, many of whom have endorsed the so-called ‘Big Lie’ that Trump won the 2020 presidential election but had it stolen from him by the Democratic Party.  That falsehood—which helped fuel the January 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection and, according to one new survey, is embraced by two-thirds of GOP voters—is ‘potent anti-democratic poison,’ Homer-Dixon wrote.  ‘Willingness to publicly endorse the Big Lie has become a litmus test of Republican loyalty to Mr. Trump,’ he observed.  ‘This isn’t just an ideological move to promote Republican solidarity against Democrats.  It puts its adherents one step away from the psychological dynamic of extreme dehumanization that has led to some of the worst violence in human history.  And it has refashioned—into a moral crusade against evil—Republican efforts to gerrymander Congressional districts into pretzel-like shapes, to restrict voting rights, and to take control of state-level electoral apparatuses.’

“As The Guardian reported Sunday, ‘Allies of Donald Trump and others who have spread baseless conspiracy theories about the election have launched campaigns’ for key positions—from governor to secretary of state—that have significant influence over the post-election certification process.

“‘Republicans who have embraced lies about the election are also running for secretary of state offices in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada,’ the outlet noted.  ‘Overlooked for years, there is now a broader awareness of the enormous power these secretaries of state wield over how elections are run and ballots are counted.  That power was on unprecedented display in 2020, when secretaries of state made decisions about things like how to establish ballot drop boxes and whether to automatically send out mail-in ballot applications to voters.

“’Secretaries of state wield enormous unilateral power and, if they were elected, election deniers could do extensive damage in future elections,’ The Guardian added.” (Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, January 3, 2022)

At least one NFP member won’t be a part of Congress, at least for the foreseeable future.  Devin Nunes resigned on January 3, 2022 to—surprise!—run Trump’s new media and technology company.  

Nunes’ insane actions have been covered at length in my earlier articles.  But, he’s still making headlines, and even some NFPers are turning against him.  Case in point: His loss of a recent lawsuit, as reported by Daily Kos: “Another of Nunes’ goofball lawsuits has been unceremoniously slapped down—this time by a majority of Trump-appointed judges.  The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled on Thursday that Nunes ‘failed to seek a correction fast enough’ in his $435 million (!) defamation suit against CNN, according to a Reuters report.  The report also noted that Nunes was unable to show he deserved ‘special’ economic damages.  As a result, his suit was dismissed with prejudice.

“Nunes sued over a Nov. 22, 2019 article that said Lev Parnas, a then-indicted associate of former Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, was willing to testify before Congress that Nunes met in 2018 with a former Ukrainian prosecutor to discuss ‘digging up dirt’ on [Joe] Biden, a Democrat and now U.S. president.

“The former Republican congressman also objected to a broadcast of CNN’s ‘Cuomo Prime Time,’ where the reporter and host Chris Cuomo discussed his alleged role in ‘looking for dirt’ on Biden and his son Hunter.
Nunes denied the accusations, said his reputation was damaged, and branded CNN ‘the mother of fake news.’

“This 2-1 ruling comes on the heels of an April 1 federal appeals court decision upholding the dismissal of Nunes’ $250 million defamation suit against The Washington Post.  And we’re already familiar with his rapidly accumulating losses against pretend Twitter cows.” (Aldous J. Pennyfarthing, Daily Kos, April 15, 2022)

To see how far to the right the NFP has become, consider what Public Citizen has to say about how their reaction to voting rights has changed over the years: “It was July of 2006.  Not even 16 years ago.

• Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act—which was initially passed in 1965, during the height of the Civil Rights movement, to prohibit racial discrimination in voting.
• The Senate voted 98 to 0 to reauthorize the landmark legislation (two senators did not vote).
• Not one Republican voted against reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act in 2006.
• Before that, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized in 1982.
• And in 1975.
• And in 1970.
• Every time, the vote in Congress was overwhelmingly bipartisan.
• Every time, the legislation was then signed into law by a Republican president.

In fact, there are 16 Republicans in the Senate right now who were in Congress (House or Senate) in 2006 and supported the Voting Rights Act

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) 
Sen. Roy Blunt (Missouri) 
Sen. John Boozman (Arkansas) 
Sen. Richard Burr (North Carolina) 
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia) 
Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) 
Sen. John Cornyn (Texas) 
Sen. Mike Crapo (Idaho) 
Sen. Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) 
Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) 
Sen. Jim Inhofe (Oklahoma) 
Sen. Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) 
Sen. Jerry Moran (Kansas) 
Sen. Richard Shelby (Alabama) 
Sen. John Thune (South Dakota) 
Sen. Roger Wicker (Mississippi)

“Yet every one of those 16 senators—who, again, supported voting rights legislation in the past—has, so far, failed to support the Freedom To Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.” (Robert Weissman, Public Citizen, January 12, 2022)

These people, along with virtually every other NFP leader, has put party fascism before democracy.  What happened?  Did these sixteen individuals suddenly turn racist?  No, but their party obviously has.

The NFP is oblivious to the will of the people.  This became crystal clear early in May, 2022 when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito drafted an opinion on overturning Roe V. Wade which was soon leaked to the public.  This in spite of the fact that Roe is immensely popular with the public and the fact that there isn’t a single state in the union in which more than 30 percent of its population supports overturning Roe.  Obviously, the NFP members of the Court neither respect legal precedent or the will of the people.  They want to establish the Fourth Reich, the will of the people be damned.  

The extremists on our nation’s highest court, like everyone else in the NFP, aren’t the least bit concerned about the health and welfare of the American people, or even of the planet itself.  They are opposed to any kind of gun restrictions, they oppose consumer protections, environmental regulations, climate change, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, contraception, fair elections, and just about anything else the Democrats support.  They are trolls, pure and simple.  Trolls that can’t and won’t listen to anyone that disagrees with them.  They view the world in absolutist terms of “us vs. them” in which “them” are not only wrong, but innately evil.  

The NFP isn’t even trying to deny their efforts to keep Americans from voting.  Arizona Dems reports: “this legislative session, Republicans have used their power to introduce over 100 anti-democracy election bills, and Senator Kelly Townsend just said the quiet part out loud on the Senate floor.  While explaining her yes vote to another bill that suppresses our freedom to vote, Sen. Townsend said, ‘we’re all trying very hard to suppress the vote.’

”These bills do everything to prevent you from signing up to vote, voting, and knowing if your ballot has been counted.  Right-wing Republicans have sponsored bills that prohibit same-day voter registration, early vote centers, unmonitored ballot boxes, and drive-thru voting.  This disproportionately harms the young, Black, Indigenous, and people of color. (Arizona Dems, March 22, 2022)

Citizen’s rights are being dismantled before our very eyes, and most Americans are unaware of just how serious the situation has become.  Public Citizen focuses on one aspect of this trend: “Whether we know it or not, most of us have signed away the right to have our day in court if our legal rights are violated at work or if we are ripped off by a giant corporation.

“How?  It’s called ‘forced arbitration.’

• Forced arbitration clauses are a non-negotiable part of the take-it-or-leave-it contracts and terms of service we all sign or accept as part of everyday life.
• They prevent workers and consumers from having their day in court when companies violate the law.
• These clauses come with big things—like when you start a job, enroll in a health insurance plan, buy a car, rent an apartment, or take out a mortgage.
• And they come with smaller things—like when you buy a washing machine, open a bank account, join a gym, or switch Internet providers.
• You may even have unknowingly agreed to a forced arbitration clause when you bought the phone, tablet, or computer you’re reading this email on.
• In forced arbitration, your case is decided by a private arbitration firm chosen by the company you are trying to hold accountable.
• There is no judge or jury.  Arbitrators do not have to follow the law or legal precedent.  And there is generally no right to appeal.
• Arbitrators rule in favor of the company—rather than the employee or consumer—a staggering percentage of the time.
• And the whole process—including the arbitrators’ rulings—happens in secret.  So individual perpetrators, as well as institutions that enable them, evade public accountability.

“Forced arbitration clauses can even apply in cases about egregious instances of sexual harassment and assault—perpetuating such crimes by letting victimizers escape justice and keeping wrongdoing in the shadows.” (Robert Weissman, Public Citizen, January 31, 2022)

In other words, private citizens can be screwed over in any number of ways and have little or no recourse to fight back.  There are no rules.  The judges are appointed by the defendants.  Why would they rule against those who have hired them?  This ridiculous and un-American state of affairs is just another aspect of right-wing dictatorship taking over our lives.

Another component in the NFP’s agenda—one that has long been a conservative mainstay—is the determination to eliminate a woman’s right to choose.  UltraViolet Action tells us just how extreme the MAGA NFP has become on this issue—aided and abetted by Pepsi: “Last May, Texas passed the most draconian abortion ban in the country, outlawing the practice at just six weeks, before most people even know they are pregnant, and putting a $10,000 bounty on anyone who helps someone access abortion care.  Then, last August, Pepsi wrote a check to the Texas Republican Party, pouring money into the campaigns of the politicians responsible for ending legal abortion in the state.

“Enough is enough.  It’s time to hold the corporations that have funded the assault on reproductive freedom accountable.  Pepsi is the sponsor of this Sunday’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, handing us a huge opportunity to call them out in front of the largest possible national audience.

“The Supreme Court is on the verge of ending Roe v. Wade and allowing radical right-wing politicians to ban abortion in nearly half the country.  How could this happen at a time when voters support Roe v. Wade by a 2-to-1 margin?  Because corporations have been flooding money into the campaigns of right-wing politicians for years.  Corporations like Pepsi.” (UltraViolet Action, February 11, 2022)

Clearly, the NFP is against abortion in any form whatsoever.  But it isn’t because they are concerned about the unborn.  It’s simply because they need to control women.  Mississippi’s governor Tate Reeves was interviews on CNN and asked if incest victims will be forced to carry their child to term under their state’s pending anti-abortion law.  His answer was that there aren’t that many pregnant incest victims.  This is what passes for compassion in the NFP.

There’s more: When asked if the NFP would ban IUDs and other forms of birth control once Roe v. Wade is overturned, Reeves said: “That is not what we’re focused on at this time.”  At this time.

During his confirmation hearing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh was asked if he would work to eliminate Roe v. Wade.  He responded by saying: “It’s settled as precedent of the Supreme Court.”  But when it came time to actually vote on overturning Roe, he voted to do so.  In other words, he lied during his confirmation hearing.  That’s perjury, pure and simple, and perjury is a crime that carries severe penalties.  This alone should be enough to impeach him and, when convicted, removed from the court.  But nothing is being done about this.  Why not?

America’s worst fears were realized on June 24, when the court officially overturned Roe v. Wade, which removed federal protection of abortion rights for all women in the United States.  Daily Kos reports: “For half a century, the radical right has fought to reclaim state control over the the uterus of every person in this country capable of getting pregnant.  They succeeded Friday in a 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that ends federal protections of abortion rights.  With the decision, 13 states—Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming—automatically banned abortion with trigger laws their extremist governors and legislatures put in place waiting for this decision.

“…That this is not at all about sanctity of life, has never been about the sanctity of life, is right there in black and white in Alito’s decision.  In his draft opinion, he included a side trip into the distant past, praising 17th century English jurist Matthew Hale, who had at least two women executed for witchcraft and who created the premise that husbands cannot be prosecuted for raping their wives.  Alito approvingly quoted Hale in the draft, writing: ‘Two treatises by Sir Matthew Hale likewise described abortion of a quick child who died in the womb as a ‘great crime’ and a ‘great misprision.’

“The ‘quickening’ is defined by Alito in his draft as ‘the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy,’ but Hale argued that even before that movement, abortion was homicide.  ‘Hale wrote that if a physician gave a woman ‘with child’ a ‘potion’ to cause an abortion, and the woman died, it was ‘murder’ because the potion was given ‘unlawfully to destroy her child within her.’

“While that particularly reference, soundly pilloried by legal experts and every well-grounded 21st century thinking person was left out of the final decision by Alito, that was the mindset with which Alito and the extremist majority approached the question: the mindset of a 17th century jurist who was pretty far out even for his own day, writing a century before the American Revolution and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, upon which the Supreme Court has been happily spitting during this session.

“This ruling, as Kerry Eleveld wrote when the draft was leaked in May, ‘opens the floodgates’ from ‘contraception to LGBTQ rights.’  That’s because it ‘intrinsically calls into question other unenumerated rights the Supreme Court has conferred on Americans, such as the right to privacy, raise children, use contraception, or marry the person of their choosing regardless of the color of their skin or their gender.’  That is the path this illegitimate, extremist Supreme Court has put the nation on, one that would roll back at least a century’s worth of progress in American life.

“Don’t expect the newly unleashed rabid right to stop at banning abortion, either.  They’re already planning what comes next, the punishment for people having abortions: ‘mandatory psychiatric custody.’  That’s coming not from the fringes of the Republican establishment, because you can’t define a ‘fringe’ anymore—they’re all in it.  It’s coming from a senior research fellow and director of the DeVos Center at the Heritage Foundation, one of the leading (if such a thing exists) think tanks of the right.

“It’s clear that this Supreme Court, even with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson added next term, is not going to protect this fundamental right.  It’s also clear from the Jackson hearings and from red state actions that they’re not going to stop at abortion.  They’re aiming for marriage equality, for contraception—hell, they’ve even started talking about the states banning interracial marriage.” (Joan McCarter, Daily Kos, June 24, 2022)

The Center for Inquiry points out the religious foundation behind the court’s decision: “Make no mistake: Today’s ruling was not the act of a secular court but of a religious tribunal.  The six justices who ruled to take away women’s right to abortion did not do so because of good-faith interpretations of the Constitution or due to any fact-based debate about when human life begins.  No, the Supreme Court is inviting religious dogma to override the rights, health, and lives of women. 

“‘Today, the Supreme Court deceptively used constitutional law as a subterfuge to impose religious dogma on the entire nation,’ said Eddie Tabash, Board Chair of the Center for Inquiry.

“‘Millions of women are now condemned to a loss of what should be a universal right of bodily autonomy and self determination.  The intrusion of the police power of the state into the most intimate areas of one’s private life marks the beginning of a new authoritarian era.  We must do whatever we can to restore for all time the precious freedom that the Court arbitrarily destroyed today.’

“To make matters worse, at least one justice signaled that the Court is by no means finished with taking away Americans’ rights to suit their particular religious viewpoint.  In his separate opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Court should reconsider ‘all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,’ such as the rights to contraception and for same-sex couples to marry or even have sex. 

“Facts and science have no bearing on this way of thinking.  The inherent equal status of each individual is disregarded.  This is about allowing one group’s religious beliefs to dictate the most intimate decision making for the rest of us, whether we share those beliefs or not.  That is something the high court is charged with preventing, and yet today it has relinquished its role, consigning the fundamental rights of women to state lawmakers in the thrall of the religious Right.” (Center for Inquiry, June 24, 2022)

Day by day, the New Fascist Party is becoming one hundred percent totalitarian in scope and actions.  Lest there be any doubt about this, ask yourself how many totalitarian regimes the NFP has spoken out against.
Proof of this was again displayed when Russian dictator Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine.  Common Dreams reports: “Russia launched a far-reaching military attack on Ukraine on Thursday, invading the country through multiple border sites and bombing more than a dozen cities as civilians attempted to flee their homes in panic.

“…Russia’s assault—which came after months of troop build-ups along the Ukrainian border—drew widespread international condemnation, with world leaders and humanitarian groups denouncing the invasion as an illegal act of aggression and demanding an immediate withdrawal of Russian forces.

“’In the name of humanity, bring your troops back to Russia,’ United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Thursday in a direct appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin.  ‘In the name of humanity, do not allow to start in Europe what could be the worst war since the beginning of the [20th] Century.’

“’It violates the principles of the [U.N.] Charter,’ Guterres added.  ‘And it will cause, if it doesn’t stop, a level of suffering Europe has not known since, at least, the Balkan crisis.’

“…’President Putin has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering,’ U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement.  ‘Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring, and the United States and its Allies and partners will respond in a united and decisive way.  The world will hold Russia accountable.’” (Common Dreams, February 24, 2022)

And what was Trump’s spin on this abominable act?  He praised Putin’s war, calling him a “genius.”  And of course many NFP members and the right-wing press then dutifully went into action, siding with Trump and Putin.  Fox “News” host Laura Ingraham called Ukraine’s plea for peace “pathetic” and even blamed the Mueller report for Putin’s invasion.   Steve Bannon praised Putin for being “anti-woke.”  And Lauren Witzke, Delaware’s GOP’s candidate for Senate in 2020, managed to bring her version of fundamentalist Christianity into the equation, praising Putin for “his Christian nationalist nation.”  She noted: ”I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.”

When reporters called on NFP senators asking if they agreed with calling Putin a genius, only one dared to disagree with Trump.  One.  Trump’s complete control of the NFP should be obvious to anyone at this point.

But despite the efforts of the NFP to somehow link Biden’s policies with the war against Ukraine, the facts are quite the contrary: It is Trump’s foreign policy failures that led to the outbreak of war.  For one thing, Trump tried to extort the Ukrainian government if they did not support his reelection bid.  With typical pettiness, once he realized Ukraine would not support him, he withheld defensive armaments from them.  Trump also reassured Putin that he would not be held accountable for the invasion.  

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Trump’s criminal administration.  It was Trump who fought trade wars with Mexico and China, losing in both cases.  He shut down the government twice when Congress refused to fund his wall, despite his campaign promise that Mexico would pay for it.  Trump’s well-known propensity to side with the world’s worst dictators is common knowledge: He played footsies with Kim Jong Il and took no action to stop Kim’s nuclear arms program.  He ordered a premature withdrawal from Afghanistan, cut funding for Nato, left the Paris accord, abandoned the Kurds, and refused to honor the nuclear treaty with Iran which is, after all, an ally of Putins.  There is much more, but these facts alone demonstrate that Trump’s foreign policy (if it is right to even call it a policy) was the worst in United States history.

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FASCISM ON THE BALLOT: THE UPCOMING 2022 ELECTION

Let us begin this chapter with a discussion of how the “Big Lie” has come to dominate NFP leaders’ thinking—as well as the thinking of far too many Americans.  Public Citizen tells how this has come about: “January 6 was not a singular moment.  More than the culmination of Donald Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election results, it was the launch of the institutionalization of the Big Lie.

• Now, the Big Lie has mutated from a specific claim about 2020 into an outright assault on democracy itself.
• The mutated claim is that the very machinery of our election system cannot be trusted.
• The Alice-in-Wonderland idea is: because it is impossible for Donald Trump and his allies not to win elections, any result to the contrary is, per se, fraudulent.
• And it follows that extreme measures are justified to preempt or offset this fantastical threat to democracy.

“A majority of Republican voters say that the 2020 election results were fraudulent and that they cannot trust the 2024 results if their candidate does not prevail.  Even more troublingly, 40% of Republicans say that ‘patriots’ may have to resort to violence because the country has gone so far off track.

“These are the beliefs that are driving a fascist-tinged and conspiracist-minded extremist movement in the country.

• That movement is taking action, much of which overlaps with ongoing efforts to deny people their freedom to vote and tilt the electoral map for Republican candidates.
• More than 30 voting restrictive laws have been passed in 19 states.
• States across the nation are rushing to gerrymander their congressional districts for the next decade in ways that overwhelmingly will benefit Republican candidates.
• At least eight states, including Arizona and Georgia, enacted laws in 2021 that changed election laws to give more power to legislatures or partisan entities and strip election duties from secretaries of state.
• Trump-allied extremists, many of whom adhere to the Big Lie, are taking control of election administration officials.

“It is no exaggeration to say that the American democratic experiment is under assault. We face the prospect not just of voter suppression, but outright election sabotage—the prospect that state legislators will overturn the actual vote count and declare as winner someone who did not receive the most votes.” (Robert Weissman, Public Citizen, January 5, 2022)

The election of 2022 will be crucial in determining the future of North America.  Common Dreams compares the two major political parties by providing a history lesson that every American would be well advised to read: “When fascism reared its ugly head in Europe and Japan in the 1920s, it signaled a coming war.  As a newer and slicker form of that despotism rises here in America, it may well bring the same type of crisis.

“We stand on the threshold of momentous change in this nation.  While it’s rarely discussed in this frame, the next two elections will almost certainly determine what form of government we’ll have for at least a generation.  Will America become more free and democratic, or will we devolve into a 21st century form of Trumpy fascism?

“The Democratic Party is institutionally committed to America finally realizing a republican form of democracy, rejecting gerrymanders and voter suppression while embracing the kind of ‘maximum participation’ ease of voting seen in every other advanced democracy in the world.

“Three significant pieces of legislation to reverse the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and protect the integrity of the vote have passed the House and if Democratic Leadership (looking at you, Biden and Schumer) can get them through the Senate there is a vastly improved chance for the survival of our form of government.  Additionally, most federally elected Democrats support strengthening our democracy by ending the filibuster in the Senate and adding at least Washington, DC as a new state (with high support for Puerto Rico as well).

“But do Democrats have the will and power to fight a battle against financially well-armed rightwing billionaires and their predatory and polluting industries?  Not to mention taking on today’s GOP version of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the volunteer civilian ‘tough guy’ militias that initially roamed around Italy beating up Jews and lefties?

“The Republican Party, having openly given up on democracy, is trying through gerrymandering, voter suppression and election rigging to seize and hold control of our nation against the will of the majority of America’s voters.  Calling it a ‘slow motion insurrection,’ the Associated Press reports how the GOP is taking over election systems across America with the explicit goal of refusing to certify elections that they lose in 2022 and 2024.

‘Never in the country’s modern history,’ the AP notes, ‘has a a major party sought to turn the administration of elections into an explicitly partisan act.’  In the process, the Republican Party has put fascism on the ballot in 2022 and 2024.

“Benito Mussolini pioneered this system back in the 1920s, synthesizing it out of the most corrupt eras of the declining Roman Empire, and named it after the fasces, the ancient symbol of that empire.  A single thin stick is easily broken.  But when you bundle a dozen or more of them together and wrap them with a leather strap, they are collectively unbreakable without enormous effort.  When Mussolini put forward the fasces as the symbol for his new Italian movement, however, the bundle of sticks he had in mind weren’t the people: they were Italian corporations and the wealthy elite who owned and ran them.

“As the dictionary notes, the system of government Mussolini reinvented was called fascism and prescribed merging the interests of giant corporations and their leaders with the power of the state.  It is, literally, ‘the merging of state and business leadership.’

“…Such a merger was explicitly rejected by the Founders of this nation and the Framers of the Constitution, who had just fought a war against Britain and its largest and most profitable corporation, the East India Company.  Thomas Paine said it best: we created government to serve We, The People first and foremost.  ‘[I]ndividuals themselves,’ he wrote in The Rights of Man in 1791, ‘entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.’ [italics added]

“As the Declaration of Independence says: ‘That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…But even in the early years of our republic those who’d accumulated great wealth tried to step in to take it over to promote their own interests.  Authoritarian forces have seized control of the GOP and are committed to ending democracy in this country, replacing it with an Orban-like Hungary-style merger of corporate and state leadership.  Then-retired President Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter to Samuel Kerchival what today would be considered a blistering attack on corporate power: ‘Those seeking profits,’ he wrote, ‘were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure.  Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government…I am not among those who fear the people.  They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.’

“Corporate power has always been influential in America, but five ‘conservatives’ on the Supreme Court elevated it to a near-Mussolini level in their Citizens United decision, opening the door for the GOP to embrace an Americanized version of Mussolini’s idea:

• The ‘conservatives’ on the Court first ruled that billionaires buying politicians was ‘free speech’ instead of ‘bribery.’ (Buckley 1976 and Citizens United 2010).
• They then unleashed corporate power, ruling that corporations are ‘persons’ with ‘rights’ under the Bill of Rights, including the ‘free speech’ and ‘assembly’ rights to ‘petition the government’ and financially support politicians (Bellotti 1978 and Citizens United 2010).

“Yes, as Mitt Romney famously said, ‘Corporations are people, my friend.’  All because a handful of lifetime-appointed right-wingers on the Supreme Court decided it would help their wealthy patrons.

“In Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out how absurd this reasoning was: corporations in their modern form didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written in 1787.  ‘All general business corporation statutes appear to date from well after 1800,’ Stevens pointed out to his conservative colleagues on the Court.  ‘The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare…[T]hey are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.’

As if he were looking at today’s corporations that daily tell Congress what to pass and what to block, Stevens added: ‘Politicians who fear that a certain corporation can make or break their reelection chances may be cowed into silence about that corporation.’

“When Ronald Reagan came into office and began America’s turn toward neoliberal oligarchy there wasn’t a single billionaire in America because, in part, the top 74% income tax rate prevented that kind of wealth accumulation.  Regardless of inflation since then, in 1980 nobody controlled a fortune on the order of American oligarchs like Bezos or Musk do today.  Instead, wealth flowed to working people, producing in the 1940-1980 era the richest and broadest middle class in world history.  Similarly, as Lee Drutman documents for The Atlantic, before the Supreme Court got into the act corporations generally avoided participating in politics beyond routine PR.  ‘[V]ery few companies had their own Washington lobbyists prior to the 1970s,’ he writes. ‘To the extent that businesses did lobby in the 1950s and 1960s (typically through associations), they were clumsy and ineffective.’

“Today lobbyists spend over $3 billion a year buying and selling votes and legislation, which has destroyed Americans’ faith in government and brought us to this crisis.  Thanks to five ‘conservatives’ on the Supreme Court, we are now well down the road to a final ‘merging of state and business leadership.’

“At the same time, as Chauncey DeVega brilliantly notes at Salon:

Domestic terrorism experts have also warned that right-wing extremists and paramilitary groups are organizing on the local and state level to intimidate, harass and target ‘liberals,’ Black and brown people, Muslims, Jews, immigrant communities and others deemed to be their enemies.  This is part of a nationwide campaign by Republican fascists and the larger white right to attack American democracy on the local and state level in order to facilitate Trump’s return to power (or the ‘election’ of his designated successor).

“When the ever-cautious National Public Radio runs a headline that says: ‘Retired general warns the U.S. military could lead a coup after the 2024 election’ you know we’re in deep trouble.

“The biggest battle for the survival of American democracy is before us now.  Authoritarian forces have seized control of the GOP and are committed to ending democracy in this country, replacing it with an Orban-like Hungary-style merger of corporate and state leadership.  January 6th is now openly viewed by Trump’s followers as a rehearsal for 2024 as they fine-tune vote-counting systems and elect toadies who will bend to their will and change election outcomes the next time voters reject them.

“John Hennen, professor emeritus of history at Kentucky’s Morehead State University, nailed it when he said, ‘We must build a democratic resistance that amounts to a counter-fascist coup…’

“Every American who cares about freedom, self-governance, and the ideal of democracy must now rise to the occasion.  The upcoming elections will be political wars with stakes unlike those seen by any living citizens.  The good news is that, increasingly, both our media and elected Democrats (and former Republicans) are calling this out for what it is, a naked assault on our system of government itself.  But will it be enough?  That will depend on Democratic turnout.

“Professor Hennen’s colleague, Brian Clardy, a Murray State University history professor emeritus tells us straight up: ‘The Democrats have to remind people that next year and in 2024, democracy itself will be on trial.’

And 21st century fascism will be there right beside it, under the ‘R’ column on the ballot.” (Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams, January 3, 2022)

When it comes to education, many NFP leaders are doing everything in their power to legitimize racism and naziism.  Daily Kos tells us: “The Republican assault on the teaching of ‘divisive concepts’ like the existence of racism continues, and a new bill proposed in Indiana makes it ever more clear that this is an all-out assault on public education itself.  The bill drew attention when one of its co-authors said that teachers should be impartial in teaching about Nazism.  State Sen. Scott Baldwin’s appalling comment came in response to a brave question from history teacher Matt Bockenfeld.

“‘For example, it’s the second semester of U.S. history, so we’re learning about the rise of fascism and the rise of Nazism right now,’ Bockenfeld said at a committee hearing on the bill.  ‘And I’m just not neutral on the political ideology of fascism.  We condemn it, and we condemn it in full, and I tell my students the purpose, in a democracy, of understanding the traits of fascism is so that we can recognize it and we can combat it.’
“Bockenfeld expressed concern that the bill would prevent that teaching, saying, ‘Of course, we’re neutral on political issues of the day.  We don’t stand up and say who we voted for or anything like that.  But we’re not neutral on Nazism.  We take a stand in the classroom against it, and it matters that we do.’

“Baldwin took exception to that.  ‘I have no problem with the education system providing instruction on the existence of Nazism, fascism, or Marxism,’ he said.  ‘I believe that we’ve gone too far when we take a position on those isms…We need to be impartial.’

“Impartial. About Nazis.

“Baldwin’s bill repeatedly includes ‘political affiliation’ as a protected category along with sex, race, ethnicity, color, religion, and national origin.  As he scrambled to claim he didn’t mean what he said, now that it was making headlines, he claimed, ‘When I was drafting this bill, my intent with regard to ‘political affiliation’ was to cover political parties within the legal American political system.’  As for what he said when he was directly and explicitly questioned about Nazis, ‘In my comments during committee, I was thinking more about the big picture and trying to say that we should not tell kids what to think about politics.’  

…”But Baldwin’s bill doesn’t just ban teachers from teaching that Nazism is bad.  It also allows parents ‘to opt into or out of certain educational activities and curricular materials under certain conditions,’ potentially forcing teachers to constantly adjust the curriculum for multiple individual students based not on legitimate educational needs but on the particular prejudices of their parents.  LGBTQ students are omitted from the list of protected categories that includes Nazis.” (Laura Clawson, Daily Kos, January 11, 2022)

Baldwin’s strategy is crystal clear: Protect Nazis from being insulted or denigrated in any way, but offer no protections whatever for the LGBTQ community.  And attack public education by passing legislation crippling teachers from teaching about systematic racism.

Public education has indeed taken a beating from the NFP, as the ACLU reports: “Imagine being a middle school history teacher and not being allowed to discuss ‘systemic racism’ while teaching about slavery.  This is just one of many restrictions on education that state lawmakers across the country are trying to make happen right now.  Classroom censorship bills and statewide campaigns to remove books from schools and public libraries—predominantly by and about communities of color, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups—are being fast-tracked in multiple states from Texas to Idaho.

“The ACLU is meeting this surge of censorship with new litigation and fierce advocacy.  We’ve already filed lawsuits in Oklahoma and New Hampshire, challenging these statewide classroom censorship bans.  We won’t stop fighting until students’ rights to free speech and equitable education are fully protected but we need you with us.

“So far in 2022 alone, state legislatures have introduced 71 new bills across 22 states that restrict discussions about race and gender in schools, many of which explicitly target K-12.  That would be dangerous enough, but opponents of civil liberties are also advancing racially-motivated voter suppression proposals, restricting access to abortion, and waging cruel and dangerous campaigns to ban transgender youth from sports and gender-affirming, life-saving health care.” (Emerson Sykes, ACLU, March 27, 2022)

Like everything else, the price of a college education has gone through the roof in recent decades.  Katie Porter gives us the numbers: “In 1990, the average cost of tuition for a year at a public university was $1,780.  In 2020, it was over $10,000—far outpacing inflation.  From 1989 (when I first started college) to 2016, college costs increased almost 8 times faster than wages.  As we toured different schools, some told families to plan to spend $80,000 per year.  That’s why so many Americans are straddled with student loan debt and why many others aren’t able to attend college at all.  While I’ve called on the Biden Administration to forgive student loan debt (something that would benefit our ENTIRE economy), I also think it’s important we address the root cause of all of this debt—higher education costs that are out of reach for many families.” (Katie Porter, April 25, 2022)

It should come as no surprise that the NFP has no problem whatever with higher education costs.  As they work harder and harder to eliminate the middle class, the only ones left able to afford higher education are those in the highest economic brackets—who are, almost without exception, ultra conservative.  

More to the point, the last thing the NFP wants is an educated public, one that will see through their transparent lies and evil practices.  This is the main reason why they want to destroy public education through voucher scams.

Vouchers have long been a priority with the NFP, despite the fact that the idea of the public being forced to support private schools, the majority of which are religious, is not popular with most voters.  Once again, we see the NFP plowing ahead with an idea they like, but most Americans do not.  More Perfect Union explains: “A who’s who of the right-wing grievance industrial complex is trying to break public schools and privatize education for profit.  The problem for them is that school privatization isn’t popular.  In fact, the privatization agenda is incredibly radical and doesn’t even have support within the Republican Party.  So instead of stating their true goals, politicians like Ted Cruz whip up their base with racist dog whistles, false narratives, and straight out lies.  They then hide that hate behind friendly-sounding names like parental choice, protecting the children and…vouchers.

“Vouchers, along with charter schools which can be run by for-profit corporations that are not subject to the same regulations and oversight as public schools, are publicly funded by taxpayer dollars.  Some of the owners of these schools make millions of dollars, so it’s little wonder they’re bankrolling the orchestrated panic of ‘Critical Race Theory.’

“From the State Policy Network to Parents Defending Education to the Goldwater Institute, the Koch brothers are behind many of the front groups pushing the privatization scheme.  The Donors Trust, a group Mother Jones magazine describes as ‘The Dark Money ATM of the Conservative Movement,’ and Christopher Rufo, of the Manhattan Institute and self described inventor of the conflict over critical race theory, aren’t even trying to hide their real goals.  Rufo told the New York Times, it’s never been about kids.  This is about cultivating political power.  He went on to brag: ‘I’ve unlocked a new terrain in the culture war and demonstrated a successful strategy.’

“They want to use racism and fear to push kids into private, for-profit private schools for their own financial gain and power.  Because let’s be clear, these private schools aren’t like the ones we see in Gossip Girl with great teachers, rich kids, and great hair.  We’re talking about schools in strip malls that shut down without notice and have left kids and parents stranded.  We’re talking about charter schools that match or underperform 81% of traditional public schools.” (Faiz Shakir, More Perfect Union, April 19, 2022)

And of course Ted Cruz is also all in to destroy anyone who dares question him, Trump, or anyone else not an NFP member.  We have already noted that he said if Republicans re-take the house in November, they are likely to impeach Biden “whether it’s justified or not.”  Justified or not?  What clearer message could any NFP leader make that they are all about revenge and not serving their constituents?  They have nothing on Biden, but it’s not about that at all.  It’s just a baseless attack on a man who has done more for his country than any Republican of the last fifty years.  But he is a Democrat, and this alone makes him their enemy.

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IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID

The NFP, like the earlier Republican party it replaced, always portrays itself as the party of sound fiscal policies.  In fact, their policies are “sound” only for a minority of Americans—the country’s corporate elites.

2021 was a perfect year for the country’s richest.  Daily Kos provides the details: “While the U.S. Senate was not passing the Build Back Better Act in 2021, America’s billionaires got one trillion dollars richer.  We need a billionaire tax.  According to calculations based on Forbes data, the country’s 750 billionaires got $1 trillion richer in 2021 alone, which could pay for half of the Build Back Better Act.  Elon Musk alone saw his wealth increase by $118 billion, which could fund six years of universal preschool. 

“But under current law, most of this wealth gain would never be taxed unless the underlying assets are sold.  The Build Back Better Act needs to be amended to include a billionaire tax, so that we can aggressively fight climate change, expand health care access, offer free universal pre-school, build affordable housing and more.  It is a moral imperative right now. 

“The Build Back Better Act is currently stalled in the U.S. Senate, due to resistance from conservative Democrat Joe Manchin—so it will need to be amended.  But the Washington Post reported on December 24 that Manchin is willing to support a billionaire tax.  If we pass a billionaire tax, we can cobble enough votes to pass the Build Back Better Act in the Senate.” (Paul Hogarth, Daily Kos, January 5, 2022)

A few timely words from Inequality Media Civic Action are in order here: “It’s important to consider: Elon Musk alone has more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans. That’s 131 million people combined.  In the minute it will take you to read this email, Jeff Bezos will have added about $30,000 to his wealth. But virtually none of that wealth growth—the main source of billionaire income—may ever be taxed.  That’s because income tax doesn’t cover billionaire wealth:
Bezos’s salary is just $81,840. Musk’s is $0.  In many years, they’ve both avoided paying any federal income tax at all.So, while millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the pandemic,  billionaires like Bezos and Musk got 70% richer.

“None of us should accept an economy where teachers, nurses, and firefighters pay a higher tax rate than billionaires.” (Inequality Media Civic Action, May 22, 2022)

Musk has gotten a lot of attention after he bought Twitter.  Free Press raises the alarm: “I’m sure you saw the news: The Twitter board has unanimously approved Elon Musk’s bid to take over the company and take it private. What will Musk do with the platform now?

“Musk doesn’t have a great track record of protecting free speech.  And he’s definitely not an expert on content moderation or civil and human rights.  In fact, he regularly attacks his political opponents, supports disinformation spreaders, and rallies a Twitter mob of loyal fans to go after anyone who disagrees with him.  What’s more, he’s shown a tendency to protect speech he likes while suppressing speech he doesn’t.

“We know that companies like Twitter evaluate their business models.  In one internal study, Twitter found that it amplified right-wing content more than other content. Yet the company has failed to implement sound moderation and enforcement practices to correct course.  This year is an election year and people all over the United States will use social media, including Twitter, as a lifeline for information.

“The longer companies like Twitter wait to fix the feed, the more harm they inflict on our democracy—and the more likely we are to see election disinformation, violence and hate spread.” (Free Press, April 26, 2022)

Common Dreams adds: “‘This isn’t just some corporate takeover,’ said one critic.  ‘This is about a set of very specific moves that our oligarchs have been taking that have gradually concentrated economic, political, and discursive power in fewer and fewer hands.

“Rights advocates, public health experts, and media critics were among those on Monday who warned that the purchase of Twitter by mega-billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, creates a direct threat to democracy and the common good by putting the outsized power of the social media platform used by hundreds of millions worldwide into the hands of one man.

“The social media company accepted Musk’s offer to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share—leading some critics to note other ways the enormous sum of money could have been spent rather than on what Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.) called ‘a vanity project boondoggle to silence’ Musk’s critics.

“Musk’s purchase has led to concern that former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account will be reinstated.  Trump was banned from the platform in January 2021 after violating its rules by inciting his followers to violently attack the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election results.

“‘Musk hasn’t just purchased another expensive play toy, but a global online community that includes about 330 million regular users,’ said Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of Free Press.  ‘With control of such a massive platform comes great responsibility—and Musk hasn’t shown he has the capacity to be accountable to this diverse online community,’ she added, noting Musk’s own history of using Twitter to ‘intimidate and disparage others, including journalists, elected officials, owners of competing businesses and anyone else who might challenge his views.’” (Julis Conley, Common Dreams, April 25, 2022)

Jesse Case puts $44 billion in perspective, because it is such an unfathomable amount: “For perspective, if you somehow made $200,000 every single day from Columbus’ landing in 1492 until today, you still wouldn’t have the $44 billion to buy Twitter.  It’s pretty gross.”

I admit I was skeptical about those numbers, so I calculated them myself and came up with a number of 38.69 billion dollars, so the numbers given are correct, and not an exaggeration.  Amazing.  That is gross indeed; the fact that any one individual possesses this much money is criminal.  

Inequality Media Civic Action sums up the Musk/Twitter purchase and offers some background information as well: “Twitter’s founder and top managers had offered Musk a seat on the board but he didn’t take it because he’d have to be responsible to all other shareholders.  Now, he doesn’t have to be accountable to anyone.

“Musk says no one should object to what he wants to do with Twitter because he’s a ‘free speech absolutist,’ and who can be against free speech?  Besides (he and his apologists say) if consumers don’t like what he does with Twitter, they can go elsewhere.  Freedom to choose.

“Free market? Free speech? Free choice?

“When billionaires like Elon Musk justify their motives by using ‘freedom,’ beware.  They actually seek freedom from accountability.  They want to use their vast fortunes to do whatever they please—unconstrained by laws or regulations, shareholders, even consumers.

“The ‘free market’ increasingly reflects the demands of big money.  Unfriendly takeovers, such as Musk threatens to mount at Twitter, weren’t part of the ‘free market’ until the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Before then, laws and regulations constrained them.  Then came corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and Michael Milken.  Their MO was to find corporations whose assets were worth more than their stock value, borrow against them, acquire enough shares to force them to cut costs (such as laying off workers, abandoning their communities, busting unions, and taking on crushing debt), and cash in.  But the raiders’ antics often imposed huge social costs.  They pushed America from stakeholder capitalism (where workers and communities had a say in what corporations did) to shareholder capitalism (where the sole corporate goal is to maximize shareholder value).  Inequality skyrocketed, insecurity soared, vast swaths of America were abandoned, and millions of good jobs vanished.

The raiders altered the ‘free market’ to allow them to do this.  That’s what the super-rich do.  There’s no ‘free market’ in nature.  The ‘free market’ depends on laws and rules.  If you have enough money, you can lobby (bribe) legislators to make changes in those laws and rules that make you even more money.  (You can also get the government to subsidize you—Musk has received a reported $4.9 billion so far.)

“’Free speech’ is another freedom that turns on wealth.  As a practical matter, your ability to be heard turns on the size of the megaphone you can buy.  If you’re extremely rich you can purchase The Washington Post or own Fox News.  If you’re the wealthiest person in the world you can buy one of the biggest megaphones in the world called Twitter—and then decide who can use it, what its algorithms are going to be, and how it either invites or filters out big lies.

“Musk said last week that he doesn’t care about the economics of the deal and is pursuing it because it is ‘extremely important to the future of civilization.’  Fine, but who anointed Musk to decide the future of civilization?

“Consumers of social don’t have much freedom of choice.  If consumers don’t like what Musk does with Twitter, they cannot simply switch to another Twitter-like platform.  There aren’t any.  The largest social media platforms have grown gigantic because anyone who wants to participate in them and influence debate has to join them.  After they reach a certain size, they’re the only megaphone in town.  Where else would consumers go to post short messages that can reach tens of millions of people other than Twitter?

“With social media, the ordinary rules of competition don’t apply.  Once a platform is dominant it becomes even more dominant.  As Donald Trump discovered with his ‘Truth Social’ fiasco, upstarts don’t stand much chance.  Musk’s real goal has nothing to do with the freedom of others.  His goal is his own unconstrained freedom—the freedom to wield enormous power without having to be accountable to laws and regulations, to shareholders, or to market competition—which is why he’s dead set on owning Twitter.  Unlike his ambitions to upend transportation and interstellar flight, this one is dangerous.  It might well upend democracy.” (Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, April 25, 2022)

David Rothkopf adds: “The richest guy on the 2021 Forbes 400 owns The Washington Post.  Number 2 owns Twitter.  Number 3 owns Facebook.  Numbers 5 and 6 started Google.  Numbers 4 and 9 started Microsoft.  Number 10 owns Bloomberg.  Free speech?  You decide.”

As expected, Musk announced, even before the “deal” had been consummated, that he will un-ban Trump from Twitter.  Daily Kos exposes his nonsensical rationalizations for this action: “Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has not gone through, but he’s sending a message about the far-right future he envisions for the social media platform.  On Tuesday, Musk announced that yes, he absolutely would unban Donald Trump from Twitter.  ‘I think it was a morally bad decision to be clear and foolish in the extreme,’ Musk said at a ‘Future of the Car’ event.  He added, revealing how little he knows what he’s talking about, ‘It alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.’

“Let’s take this one part at a time.  ‘I think it was a morally bad decision to be clear and foolish in the extreme.’  Donald Trump used Twitter to help incite an insurrection, and Elon Musk thinks it was a morally bad decision to ban him for that.  That tells us a lot about Musk.  Maybe nothing we didn’t know, but it reinforces what a moral disaster Musk himself is.

”’It alienated a large part of the country…’ Musk says.  He is certainly in touch with and very attentive to the people alienated by Trump’s banning, but that doesn’t make them more numerous than those who were relieved by the banning—and it overstates the centrality of Twitter in people’s lives.  Just 23% of U.S. adults use Twitter, according to the Pew Research Center, and Democrats and young people are substantially more likely to use the platform.  One in four Twitter users thinks that users being banned is a big problem, and Republicans are more than three times as likely to say that.  By contrast, 53% of users say that inaccurate or misleading information is a major problem.  In other words, Musk either hasn’t done the most basic research into what Twitter users want from the platform or he’s only listening to Republicans, or both.  Probably both.

“Musk: “…and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.’  Trump still has a voice, to be sure.  But he has fallen dramatically out of the public conversation since being banned from Twitter and Facebook (events that also coincided roughly with him leaving the White House, which obviously also had an effect on his public presence).  ‘Mentions of Trump went down by 34% on Twitter and 23% on Facebook the week after he was banned from both platforms following the Capitol riot on January 6,’ Recode reported in May 2021.  ‘Since then, Trump mentions have continued to decline around 90% on both platforms from where they were the week of the riots.

Reports” that election fraud misinformation plummeted by 73% after Trump’s banning are themselves a little misleading, since more than 70,000 QAnon accounts were banned around the same time.  (Maybe Musk wants to bring them back, too?) But it’s safe to say that the specific types of misinformation Trump favored didn’t increase as a result of his banning.

“Trump still has a voice, it’s true.  His press releases continue to get coverage and he’s been holding rallies for endorsed candidates.  But 100% denying Trump a voice was not the point.  Twitter permanently suspended Trump, according to a company statement, ‘due to the risk of further incitement of violence.’  Twitter went on to cite specific tweets which it said were ‘likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.’

“Literally Twitter’s reasoning was that Trump was using Twitter to incite violence.  Elon Musk doesn’t get it, doesn’t care, or both.  Probably both.  Musk’s comments about the Trump ban came on Tuesday, but on Monday he made clear who he’s listening to and what he thinks is happening on Twitter.  In a reply to Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, Musk said, ‘Twitter obv has a strong left-wing bias.’

“FUNNY. STORY. According to one study, highlighted by More Perfect Union’s Max Berger, ‘Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In 6 out of 7 countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left.  Consistent with this overall trend, our second set of findings studying the U.S. media landscape revealed that algorithmic amplification favours right-leaning news sources.’

“According to another study from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, ‘the claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.  No trustworthy large-scale studies have determined that conservative content is being removed for ideological reasons or that searches are being manipulated to favor liberal interests.’

“Everything about Musk, though, screams out that he’s one of those guys who thinks his intuitions are more powerful than the facts.  And in this case, Musk’s intuitions are all about elevating his own political views and his alt-right buddies.

“So, yeah.  That’s what’s coming if Musk’s takeover of Twitter becomes final.  Donald Trump and an owner who believes, in direct opposition to the available facts, that Twitter is skewed to the left and needs to be fixed.  Also just more of what we already get in ridiculously large measure at all times: uninformed spew from an uber-wealthy guy who thinks his money proves his intelligence.  Fun times.” (Laura Clawson, Daily Kos, May 10, 2022)

So what, if anything, can be done to make billionaires accountable?

President Biden’s new budget proposes a starting point to fix this broken system.  The Billionaire Minimum Income Tax would establish a 20 percent minimum tax rate on all American households worth more than $100 million.  Biden’s Billionaires Income Tax would raise $360 billion in revenue over the next 10 years.  Senator Wyden has a similar plan that raises even more.

“When billionaires don’t pay their fair share, the cost is greater than just money.  It starves the government of funding that would go directly toward mental health, child care, and other social programs.  It defunds schools, Medicare and national security.  And of course, it increases income inequality.  Billionaires must give back to the society that made them successful.” (Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, April 18, 2022)

Now let’s consider the results of President Biden’s economic agenda for his first year in office.  Americans for Tax Fairness reports: “Instead of focusing on giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations, President Biden has worked to ensure working families have a chance to get ahead.  He’s led the fastest economic recovery in history, creating more jobs in one year than any president before him.  This is thanks to Biden getting Congress to pass the American Rescue Plan–Covid relief legislation that got most of the population vaccinated and saved us from a debilitating recession.  And thanks to his leadership, Congress enacted the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law–-the biggest investment in rebuilding our roads, transit and water systems in decades.

“…Here are just a few things President Biden accomplished during his first year in office:

• Creating more than 6 million jobs, the most on record.
• Cutting the unemployment rate by over one-third, the biggest single year drop in history. 
• Growing the U.S. economy by 5.7%, the highest growth rate in almost 40 years.
• Expanding the Child Tax Credit, saving 3.7 million children from poverty. 
• Getting 4.5 million people healthcare under the Affordable Care Act. 
• Approving $55 billion in investments over 10 years to offer safe drinking water. 
• Expanding broadband internet to provide up to 30 million Americans with fast, reliable service. 
• Investing $110 billion for rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges–the single biggest investment since the interstate highway system was finished 50 years ago. 
• Making the single largest public transit investment in American history. 

Plus so much more.” (Frank Clemente, Americans for Tax Fairness, March 1, 2022)

Of course, the NFP will continue to sing the praises of “trickle-down” economics—despite its abysmal failure at every level.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has had devastating economic (and moral) consequences worldwide.  The United States is no exception, as Inequality Media Civic Action proves: “The latest inflation numbers came out yesterday and hit a 40-year high.  With gas prices set to keep soaring thanks to Putin, Americans are furious.  Predictably, Republicans are pushing all the wrong answers, blaming ‘big government’ and calling for more tax cuts for the rich, weaker environmental protections, and interest rate increases aimed at throwing millions of Americans out of work.

“That’s all nonsense.  The real structural problem is giant, monopolistic corporations, which are taking advantage of a lack of real competition to jack up prices even as they bank historic profits.  From Big Oil to paper companies to online retailers, corporations aren’t raising prices to keep pace with rising costs or overcome global supply chain issues or even make up for the current squeeze on Russian oil and gas. They’re doing it because they can.

“Think about the energy market: Only a few entities have access to the land and pipelines that control the oil and gas still powering most of the world.  With so few companies in control, they can easily coordinate price increases, and rake in record profits.  Last year, in fact, a top Chevron exec all but admitted to reporters that the company was constraining supply to pad its bottom line.

“And it’s not just the oil companies.  Everywhere Americans turn, they face concentrated corporate monopolies moving in lockstep.  The lion’s share of the market for toilet paper, for instance, is controlled by just two companies: P&G and Kimberly-Clark.  Last April, when they jacked up prices, we had no choice but to pay up.

“Ditto with the junk food industry.  Last April, PepsiCo announced it was increasing prices.  Then, just like clockwork, its only major competitor, Coca-Cola, announced similar price increases.  Of course the companies blamed higher costs on labor, freight, and raw materials.  But in every case, these companies were also recording record profits, and their CEOs were making money hand over fist.

“Here’s an idea: combat inflation by reviving antitrust enforcement, which has been dormant since the Reagan years.  But if Republicans convince voters that inflation is all Joe Biden’s fault, that will never happen.” (Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, March 11, 2022)

The NFP has no problem whatever with astronomical defense budgets, as Win Without War makes clear: “Congress just approved an astronomically high, three-quarters of a TRILLION dollar Pentagon budget.  Some have suggested that Russia’s devastating war in Ukraine justifies the big spend, but little of that funding is going to help Ukraine fight Russia in the coming weeks and months. 

“A huge chunk is for ‘procurement’—building new ships like the Arleigh Burke class destroyer and the failed F-35 fighter jets—things that take YEARS to build.  The kicker?  It’s BILLIONS of dollars for weapons the Pentagon didn’t even ask for.  You know who did?  Weapons contractors and their lobbyists.  And they’re about to get paid. 

“This week, Congress approved $783 BILLION for the Pentagon—$25 billion more than they even asked for.  (And just in case you’re keeping score, Russia’s entire annual military budget is about $62 billion).  It’s an incredible amount, especially with President Biden’s assurances that U.S. troops won’t be sent to fight the Russians in Ukraine. 

“Q: If we’re not funding troops, what are these billions even paying for?  A: U.S.-made weapons and warships. 

“That means lucrative, billion-dollar contracts for the folks at Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, and the like.  And it’s by design: these companies have staffed themselves with former DOD officials, put HUNDREDS of registered lobbyists on their payroll, and spent more than $100 MILLION on lobbying each year for the last decade.

“It’s corruption, plain and simple.” (Win Without War, March 12, 2022) 

War is big business; it has little or nothing to do with trying to help people or disadvantaged countries.  Win Without War shows how weapons contractors milk the system to gain unimaginable wealth: “On Monday, President Biden proposed an $813,000,000,000 Pentagon budget—a $31 BILLION increase over last year’s already astronomical topline.  By Thursday, weapons contractors were scrambling to grab their share of the pie, ‘banging on doors on Capitol Hill to sell more fighter jets, missiles, small arms, [and] drones.’  But it’s not just war CEOs who are about to strike it rich(er). 

“Last summer, an investigation found that 47 members of Congress hold stock in weapons corporations.  That includes folks like Rep. Dianna Harshbarger (R-TN), whose household bought up to $60,000 worth of Northrop Grumman stock on February 25—the day after Russia invaded Ukraine. 

“If we stand by, the Biden administration is likely to sign off on the first nearly TRILLION dollar Pentagon budget.  Lives are literally at stake: As we speak, weapons lobbyists are scheduling meetings with Pentagon officials and briefing lawmakers and Hill staff, trying to ensure that a majority of Biden’s proposed $813 BILLION Pentagon budget flows directly to them—and away from people who desperately need help accessing safe housing, good-paying jobs, and quality healthcare.  But companies like Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon Technologies profit by keeping our priorities focused on weapons and war.  And it should be no surprise that they’re furiously working to maintain this broken system.” (Win Without War, April 1, 2022)

There is another, even more sinister and dangerous, aspect to the Pentagon budget, as explained by Win Without War: “Late last year, President Biden signed an ambitious executive order requiring the federal government to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.  But the window to avert catastrophic climate change is slamming shut in just the next few years, and this plan has a critical weakness: The president’s order exempts ANY emissions related to national security, combat, intelligence or military training—well over half of the U.S. government’s output.

“We can no longer ignore the fact that weapons and war require massive amounts of fossil fuel.  The Pentagon’s privilege to pollute leaves the United States unable to accurately account for the harm it does to the planet AND hamstrung in its efforts to address the climate crisis.  That’s why we’re launching an urgent campaign to END it. Momentum is already building in Congress to push President Biden to lift the exemption, ensure the Pentagon is held accountable, and lead the fight against climate change.” 

“There’s no such thing as an eco-friendly war machine.  Here’s where we remind you that the U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum.  In one hour alone, the F-35A fighter jet can burn gallons of fuel by the thousands, and those gallons add up.  This year, the Defense Department is expected to burn through 82.3m barrels of fuel—more than the total oil consumption of Finland.  And there’s little indication that anything will change.  The most recent Pentagon sustainability plan—nearly two years old now—has no decarbonization targets at all.

“This week’s IPCC report makes clear a future of inaction will be increasingly bleak: ‘Major cities under water.  Unprecedented heatwaves. Terrifying storms.  Widespread water shortages.  The extinction of a million species of plants and animals.’” (Win Without War, April 23, 2022)

The world, not just the United States, has to make a decision: What will it be, a safe, habitable earth or the destruction of the planet?  It’s not hard to realize which direction we are moving toward.

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GUN MADNESS AND THE NFP’S INDIFFERENCE

The levels of gun violence have risen dramatically in recent years; mass shootings have become so commonplace that reporting them rarely raises an eyebrow.  Nine mass shootings were reported in one weekend alone in March, 2022.  The gun lobby wields frightening power and lines the pockets of the NFP leaders whose only response to these shootings is to offer “thoughts and prayers.”  More on this in a moment.

The public overwhelmingly support some form of gun control, showing once again that the NFP operates in complete defiance of the will of the people.  Public Citizen tells us: “Guns have become the leading cause of death among children in our country.  Not disease.  Not malnutrition.  Not accidents. (Auto accidents had been the leading cause of death among children for decades until overtaken by guns in 2020.)

• Poll after poll after poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans—at least 8 out of 10—want stronger background checks for gun purchases.
• Even 3 out of 4 NRA members support background checks for *all* gun purchases.  Yes, NRA members!
• In 2019, and again in 2021, the House of Representatives passed two bills that would make beyond-commonsense improvements to the background check system.
• One bill would expand criminal background checks to those seeking to buy guns online or at gun shows.
• The other bill would extend the waiting period for potential buyers flagged by the instant background check system so that the FBI has more time to investigate.
• But those bills stalled out in the Senate due to rank partisan obstructionism by Republicans. (Of course.)
• Senate Democrats are ready to try again, in the hope—slim though it may be—that this latest massacre will at last move some Republicans to do the right thing.” (Robert Weissman, Public Citizen, May 25, 2022)

The same article asked readers to sign a letter to their senators which reads: “To Every Republican Senator:  Are you ever going to stand up to the gun lobby and the tiny minority of Americans who think there should be no restrictions on guns whatsoever?  If you actually care about saving lives and doing what the vast majority of your constituents want you to do, you have a moral and political duty to pass commonsense legislation that will improve background checks for potential gun buyers.”

Imagine what would happen if every American actually signed on with this. Would it change the actions of the NFP?  Of course not!  They couldn’t care less what their constituents want.  They don’t care if they live or die.

Want proof?  Consider the NFP’s reaction after yet another school shooting in Uvalde Texas that resulted in nineteen dead students and two adults. Daily Kos tells us: “Another day in the U.S., another bunch of people murdered with weapons designed for warfare.  And, if you’re a Republican, 19 dead kids is just another day at the office, where you sit back and do just what you did yesterday and the day before that: absolutely %&#$ing nothing.

“Several Republicans offered their ‘thoughts and prayers,’ or the hot new equivalent: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who received $176, 274 from the National Rifle Association (NRA) in 2019, said he and his wife were ‘fervently lifting up in prayer the children and families.’  Mitch McConnell claimed to be ‘horrified and heartbroken’ while he received $1,267,139 in donations from the NRA in 2019.  Sen. Krysten Sinema was also ‘horrified and heartbroken,’ as was Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who asked that we all join her in ‘lifting [the families] loved ones up in prayer,’ just for good measure. 

“Rep. Tony Gonzales offered his prayers on Twitter as well, and even quoted a bit of scripture.  Gonzales is the man of the hour.  He represents Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were slaughtered in cold blood Tuesday at Robb Elementary School.  After his deeply felt offering of prayers for his dead constituents and their families, Gonzales conveniently forgot that just last year he bragged on Twitter about voting no on gun control . Welp, Twitter remembered.

“Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson blamed the recent shootings on rap music, video games, and access to the Internet.  Then he suggested we ‘not point fingers,’ but take the time to ask ourselves ‘why did this happen, how could this happen,’ and ‘what’s wrong with our society?’  Interesting question from a Republican lawmaker.  Here’s another: ‘What’s wrong with the culture in this country that allows something to happen in this country right now?’  Anyone want to tell Ronny that it’s his party?  They’re what’s wrong with this country.  They are the murderers hiding in the house in plain sight.  Oh, and by the way, CNN reported on Monday that Jackson, a former White House doctor, is being investigated for violating federal law for allegedly using campaign funds for his personal use.  In 2021, Jackson was reviewed by the Department of Defense inspector general (IG) who concluded that he made ‘sexual and denigrating’ comments to women, drank while taking sleeping medication on the job, and ‘established a workplace where fear and intimidation were kind of the hallmarks of him, his command, and control of his subordinates,’ a witness interviewed by the Defense Department IG said.

“Florida GOP Rep. Randy Fine decided to go on the offensive in the wake of a mass shooting of elementary school kids with a threatening tweet to President Joe Biden.  Good timing, Randy!  ‘I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our President—try to take our guns and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place,’ Fine tweeted.

“In a recent interview with WPLG-TV in Miami, Fine said he believed Democratic lawmakers who protested on the House floor over bills targeting Walt Disney Co.—a move that led to a temporary pause on floor activities—should be arrested and charged with felonies.  He even compared it to the Jan. 6 insurrection.  ‘What happened on the floor of the Florida House was far worse than what happened in Washington on January 6,’ Fine said.

“…Down in Georgia, former NFL star and Trump-endorsed candidate Herschel Walker secured his place as the GOP Senate nominee.  After his big win Tuesday, he was asked about his thoughts on gun laws by CNN’s Manu Raju.  As usual, the man with the violent, shady past gave his usual: a barely comprehensible answer.  ‘What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff,’ Walker said, and then walked away.  Illuminating!

“For the record, Walker has lied about graduating from the University of Georgia, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.  He’s exaggerated his business acumen.  He once held a gun to his now ex-wife’s head, telling her he was going to ‘blow [her] f—ing brains out.’  He once hawked an ‘FDA-approved spray’ that he claimed, ‘will clean you of COVID.’  And he questioned the science of evolution, challenging the notion of ongoing species diversification by positing that if apes and humans coexist, there must be no evolution.  And most recently, it seems a program he dubiously claims to have founded has been duping veterans.

Daily Kos ran a most telling article about Herschel Walker: “Where to begin with Georgia’s GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker?  There’s a good reason his handlers have kept him largely away from the press, much less allowing him to debate.  But on a personal note, I can’t wait to see how he’ll fare against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in the coming months.  Warnock, a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, is a powerful speaker, and Walker…well, he’s endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

“On Thursday, Walker spoke with Fox News.  When asked about gun reform legislation, the former Cowboys running back and Heisman Trophy winner fumbled all over himself with another mystifyingly vague and baffling answer.  ‘You know, Cain killed Abel, and that’s a problem that we have.  And I said, what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things,’ Walker began.  ‘You talk about doing a disinformation,’ Walker continued.  ‘What about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women, that’s looking at their social media?  What about doing that, looking into things like that, and we can stop that that way,’ Walker said.
Whatever the f&%# all of that means.

“Walker then talked about allocating money for mental health rather than ‘taking away your Constitutional rights,’ but offered no solutions or programs. (Rebekah Sager, Daily Kos, May 26, 2022)

Although he has a lot of competition, Herschel Walker just might be the dumbest individual to run for high office in decades.  

Bold Progressives described Ron DeSantis’ effort to avoid responsibility for the mass shootings that have grown exponentially in recent years: “Thursday, Congressional candidate, activist, and gun violence survivor Maxwell Frost interrupted a right-wing event and spoke the truth to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on the need to take action on gun violence.  DeSantis was furious at being held to account and shouted him down, screaming ‘Nobody wants to hear from you.’  To a gun-violence survivor.” (Bold Progressives, June 4, 2022) DeSantis is neither emotionally, morally, or intellectually worthy of being in politics.  

Lastly, Colorado Republican Rep. Boebert, a rabid gun owner and advocate, offered five hollow words following the deaths of American children.  ‘You cannot legislate away evil,’ she tweeted Tuesday.  She followed this with what may be the stupidest analogy offered by anyone in the NFP this year: She said: “we didn’t ban planes” after 9/11.”

A brief historical reconnaissance is in order here, as presented by Public Citizen: “There was a time—not that long ago—when America’s gun manufacturers did not advertise assault weapons to the general public.  But for the past 20 years or so, the gun industry has been aggressively marketing military-grade munitions to the American people—with ads specifically invoking race-based fear, twisted notions of masculinity, and distorted ideas about ‘patriotism.’ 

“This has fed some very bad and deadly trends:

• The United States is the only country on the entire planet with more guns (at least 400 million and counting) than people (335 million).  No other country has even half as many guns per capita as we do.
• The number of guns manufactured in America has nearly tripled over the past two decades, from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020. (And it’s not as if guns wear out like light bulbs, refrigerators, or cars.)
• We endure more mass shootings than all other developed countries combined.  It’s not even close.
• The frequency—and body count—of mass shootings has increased as well.
• 13 of the 20 deadliest mass shootings since 1982 happened in just the past decade.
• There were 118 school shootings in 2018, doubling the previous record of 59.  Then 119 in 2019.  Then 114 in 2020.  Then 249 (not a typo) in 2021.  And already 137 so far in 2022 (with more than half the year still to go).
• The 3 deadliest years for school shootings in the past half-century are 2018, 2021, and 2022 (which, again, isn’t quite halfway over yet).
• Guns have become the leading cause of death among children in our country.  Not disease.  Not malnutrition.  Not accidents. (Auto accidents had been the leading cause of death among children for decades until overtaken by guns in 2020.)

And all the while, gun industry profits have exploded.” (Robert Weissman, Public Citizen, May 27, 2022)

Progressive Reform Network adds: “Uvalde.  Sandy Hook.  Las Vegas.  Sutherland Springs.  Pulse Nightclub.  San Bernardino.  Every single one of those massacres was done with an AR-15: an assault rifle that the NRA called ‘America’s Rifle.’

“At this moment, the ghouls of the NRA and gun manufacturers are celebrating and partying at a lavish NRA conference in Houston.  Gun manufacturers like Daniel Defense, the merchants of death that sold the rifles used in Uvalde and Las Vegas, make blood-soaked millions while children are massacred.” (Progressive Reform Network, May 27, 2022)

To reiterate, the NFP is the party that claims to be “pro-life” and “pro-family.”    This is the “party” that the NRA is in bed with.  Clearly, “pro-life,” “pro-family” and “thoughts and prayers” are nothing more than empty words.  

President Biden has repeatedly called on “Rational Republicans” on guns and other issues.  He named Mitch McConnell (!) as one of these individuals that might have second thoughts about gun control in the wake of these mass shootings.  If he truly believes this, then he is hopelessly naive: Nobody in the NFP is going to support anything sensible about guns and gun control.  The president needs to wake up and recognize the NFP is all about “us vs. them.”  They will never compromise, they will never listen.  To think otherwise is to be living in a cocoon.  

As usual, some NFP members trotted out the ridiculous idea that teachers should be armed.  Think about this: What they are saying is that, even though teachers can’t be trusted to teach without NFP supervision, they should be allowed to carry guns into the classroom.  

Occupy Democrats offered a quote by Lakotaman1 that utterly destroys the NFP’s stock argument against bans: “When President [Clinton] banned assault rifles in 1994, mass shootings DROPPED by 43%.  After Republicans let the ban expire in 2004, they INCREASED by 243%.  Please don’t tell me bans don’t work, because I don’t want to hear it!”

Crazy Eight PAC gave us Ron Johnson’s take on the tragedy: “NRA fan boy Republican Sen. Ron Johnson blamed the ‘secularization of society’ and ‘loss of faith’ for mass shootings like this week’s tragedy in Uvalde, Texas.  Speaking to right-wing talk radio, Johnson said, ‘I think the solution is renewed faith.’ (Crazy Eight PAC, May 26, 2022) Johnson’s faith was no doubt bolstered by his receiving over one million dollars from the NRA.

Blue Amp Action tells us of Greg Abbott’s reaction: “Abbott’s response to this sick carnage, to this massacre of our children, was, and I am not making this up, ‘as horrible as what happened it could have been worse.’  No, you didn’t read that wrong.  So you may be wondering, as we are: What kind of empathy-less cretin says this after 19 elementary school kids were murdered because of their own policies?” (Cliff Schecter, Blue Amp Action, May 26, 2022) Did no one think to ask Abbott just how many deaths it would have taken for him not to say “it could have been worse?”

As if to emphasize his callousness and refusal to protect the people he is supposed to protect, Abbott attended a fundraiser only hours after the massacre.  

Blue Amp Action highlights another name NFP member: “Meanwhile, Marco Rubio, one of the largest recipients of NRA funds actually traceable (it’s harder to follow their Russian dark money donations) at over $3,305,000, was busy getting angry not at the murderer, nor the senseless violence, the police who arrived when violence broke out but failed to act or his own complicity in this slaughter, but at the Miami Heat basketball team. 

“Yes, the crime committed by the Heat, at least to L’il Marco, as he was dubbed by Donald Trump in what is actually an intellectually and emotionally fitting sobriquet, was that the Heat decided to use their platform to encourage attendees at their game right after the horror show at Robb Elementary to encourage their fans to call Congress and demand universal background checks and other reforms that would save lives.  L’il Marco, on the other hand, isn’t interested in saving lives, just accruing power and selling whatever is masquerading as his soul.  So he attacked The Heat while making the provably false claim that laws won’t stop these tragedies, because laws have only stopped them from happening almost entirely in virtually every other high income democracy in the world.  He is wholly unfit for office.” (Cliff Schecter, Blue Amp Action, May 28, 2022)

When he heard about the tragedy, Donald Trump Jr. proved himself to be every bit as dumb as his father; he said that guns aren’t to blame.  If the Uvalde shooter didn’t have a gun, he could just as easily have killed 21 people with a bat.  Yahoo News destroys this argument with a fact that should be obvious to anyone possessing a brain: “In fact the gun is critical in the amount of destruction any shooter can deliver.  Assault rifles cause extreme trauma to the human body, and bullets are spit out lightning fast, allowing a gunman to do maximum damage extremely quickly.” (Mary Papenfuss, Yahoo News, May 28, 2022) Is Don Jr. aware of a newly-invented high-powered bat?  

And of course Lauren Boebert offered the gun nuts favorite excuse after the shooting, as Crazy Eight PAC reports: “After a gunman massacred children with an assault rifle, she Tweeted, ‘our schools can have certified armed teachers to protect our children.’  Instead of stopping the flood of deadly weapons of war onto American streets and into the hands of mass shooters, Lauren Boebert’s solution is an armed teacher in every classroom.

“Armed police present in Uvalde, Texas couldn’t stop a madman with an assault rifle.  An armed guard in Buffalo, New York, was shot and killed as he tried to stop a racist massacre.” (Crazy Eight PAC, May 28, 2022)

A message board called 4chan showed photos of a hispanic transgender woman and claimed her to be the shooter.  Not to be outdone in stupidity, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson opined that the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns—not guns—were to blame for the recent mass shootings in the US.

The actions, or rather non-actions of the police at Uvalde have rightly been criticized.  As the tragedy was unfolding, onlookers asked the police to charge into the school and stop the massacre.  They did not.  And, Uvalde’s police department eats up forty percent of its municipal budget.  

Once people began to ask more and more questions about police cowardice in Uvalde, the department predictably went into cover-up mode.  ABC News reports: “The Uvalde Police Department and the Uvalde Independent School District police force are no longer cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety’s investigation into the massacre at Robb Elementary School and the state’s review of the law enforcement response, multiple law enforcement sources tell ABC News.” (Josh Margolin and Aaron Katersky, ABC News, May 31, 2022)

Reports of police incompetence and stupidity got worse and worse as events unfolded.  Daily Kos reports: “Every examination of the shooting and the police reaction in the town of Uvalde, Texas, only seems to make things worse.  Not only has the story of the events been shifting since the first day, every one of those shifts seems to be toward greater levels of both staggering incompetence and something that’s very difficult to distinguish from plain old cowardice.

“On Friday, The New York Times explained more of how the first moments of the tragic shooting unfolded.  And, surprise…It’s worse.

“Worse as in the chief of the school district police arrived on the scene just two minutes after the shooting began, and—lacking a police radio—the chief got on a cellphone and left a message for the remainder of the Uvalde police over a landline.  That message: ‘The gunman has an AR-15, he told them, but he is contained; we need more firepower and we need the building surrounded.’

“That single message, delivered over the phone by the just-arrived chief of the school district police, would become the operating order of the day.  No one countered it.  No one overruled it, even as more shots—and pleading phone calls—came from the room where the gunman was ‘contained.’  And that chief, who commanded a six-person team with no experience handling such a situation, would remain the officer in charge throughout the next hours.

“When a tactical team of border control officers eventually breached the door, they did so not because Uvalde police had reevaluated.  They went in against the orders of that chief, who was ordering them to stop right up until the last second.

“…It’s now known that police from at least 14 different jurisdictions and agencies arrived on the scene in the following hour, crowding into the hallway outside the room where the shooter was executing children.  That absolutely included the Uvalde Police, who were allegedly trained to handle exactly the kind of active shooter situation underway.  No one ever seems to have suggested that an officer with more knowledge take charge

“…it’s also come out in the last two days that teacher Eva Mireles, one of the two teachers who died in that room, called her husband, Ruben Ruiz.  Ruiz is one of those six officers in the school district police.  An officer under Arredondo’s command.  Ruiz continued to follow the command that no one should go into the room, even when his wife was dying on the other side of a plain wooden door.

“Police were there in great numbers…They had on hand every member of a team that had gone through training in how to handle an active shooter situation less than two months earlier…When that door was finally opened, it didn’t take some kind of battering ram.  It took a janitor’s key.  The group that finally went in wasn’t a SWAT unit.  They weren’t from Uvalde.  They were an ‘ad hoc’ group containing members of two federal agencies, along with a sheriff’s deputy, who simply couldn’t stand it anymore.  ‘They were done waiting for permission,’ said one member of the group.

“But as they started to go in, they got a direct order from the police on the scene.  That order was ‘Do not breach.’  By that time, there were over 140 police on hand.  And the order was still not to go in.

“They ignored the order, entered the room, and killed the gunman.” (Mark Sumner, Daily Kos, June 3, 2022)

The situation got worse as more evidence emerged about the Uvalde police department’s stunning incompetence.  Real Justice reports: “The Texas Department of Public Safety admitted that the doors to the classroom in Uvalde where kids and teachers were being slaughtered…were NOT LOCKED.  Yes you heard that right.

“For weeks, the police claimed to need keys and battering rams to get into the classroom.  The cops never even turned the damn door knobs.  And they knew exactly what they did.  Uvalde Police and the city hired a private law firm to stop the body camera footage and other records from ever being public. 

“Not only did the police completely fail to protect anyone, they tried to cover it up and make false excuses.  A Texas police commander said that officers could have stopped the gunman within 3 minutes.  They took 2 HOURS.  Because they were only protecting themselves and refused to perform any basic duties.  Now that we know that they lied for WEEKS, we can’t allow them to continue preventing transparency and avoiding accountability.” (Real Justice, June 23, 2022)

A CNN reporter pointed out the absurdity of the NFP’s stance on school shootings by asking one pointed question: Why do they defend embryos but not children?  Why indeed.

Finally, I am going to provide a lengthy quote from an excellent article in Daily Kos discussing Louie Gohmert’s reaction to all the mass shootings that have been going on.  It’s a masterful article and refutes all the nonsense that this intellectually challenged individual has come up with on this issue: “Before there was Boebert, there was Gohmert.  In 2005, this OG idiot arrived in DC and set a new standard for stupidity in the US Congress.  Now his time is drawing to a close as this towering figure of intellectual deprivation is hanging up his spurs.  He retired from Congress so he could run for Texas Attorney General.  But with just 17% of the primary vote, he failed to make the Republican runoff.  And the sunset beckons.

“He is not leaving quietly.

“On Thursday, when Rep Eric Swalwell (D-CA) asked the Republican Representatives standing in the way of any action to reduce gun deaths, ‘Are you here for our kids, or are you here for the killers?’  Gohmert acted like a toddler caught using magic markers on the furniture.  He yelled, protested his innocence, and lied through his teeth.  Over Zoom, he addressed the accusations and oratorically threw up on himself.  His words, ‘I don’t think it is very effective for children to have people on the other side of the aisle come in and accuse Republicans of being complicit in murder.  And that we put our right to kill over others’ right to live.  To infer by supposed rhetorical questions, ‘Who are you here for?  We must be here for the gunman’, is an outrage.  How dare you?  Do you think we don’t have hearts?’

“I will answer his last question first.  No, I do not think Gohmert has a heart.  Judging by his actions, he is one of the gun lobby’s compassion-free, lap dogs who lack a shred of concern for kids.  And he has put his right to kill over others’ right to live.  And lastly, Swalwell did not ‘infer,’ he ‘implied.’  People who think English ought to be the official language of the US should learn it.

“Next, Gohmert tried a tired deflection.  Cities have high murder rates.  Democrats control cities.  Ergo, Democrats are bad on gun violence.  ‘It’s just that when we look at the things you’re doing And the things you’re trying to do to America.  We have seen the carnage.  I mean for heaven’s sakes.  We’ve seen the example.  Democrats control the major cities that have the worst murder rates.  That’s right.  Your ideas have been shown to get people killed.’

“He mentions Chicago and Philadelphia.  But what he did not address is where Chicago gang-bangers get their guns?  The answer is from states with slack gun laws.  He also fails to mention the high murder rate in cities with Republican Mayors—such as Miami, Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Fort Worth, and Stockton.  Nor does he mention that the states with the highest murder rates are overwhelmingly red.  Most damningly, he ignores that it is the Uvalde school massacre that has inspired the current push for gun control.  And Uvalde is in the gun-crazy Texas—Gohmert’s home state.

“Gohmert then insisted he is a good man.  ‘We care about people.  We care about their lives.  And lives have been so trivialized.  We care deeply.  How dare you?  How dare you, you arrogant people?  Attributing murder to those of us that want to do things to stop it.  Because we’ve seen what your ideas do.  They create more murder.  If you could just possibly get off any arrogant step ladder that allows you to look down on us.’

“It is a truism that people who boast of being good, intelligent, expert, moral, or any other positive attribute are never that thing.  Louie could not sound more like a man with a guilty conscience if he tried.  And what has Gohmert done to ‘stop it?’  What single act could he point to that has saved a life?

“Then Gohmert made things up.  ‘Thomas Jefferson was not at the constitutional convention.  But he said in a letter, if I could change one thing, it would be to require bills be on file for a year before they are voted on.  Because he understood the mistakes that are made when you rush to make big decisions out of emotion.  That’s what we’re trying to prevent so that we can save lives.  And keep people from being killed, for heaven’s sake.

“When a Republican attributes something to a Founder, it is most likely a fabrication.  But I gave Gohmert the benefit of the doubt and googled his Jefferson claim.  I got nothing.  Perhaps there is a letter somewhere that says it—I have by no means read all of Jefferson’s letters.  But I have read ‘A Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States.’  This guide was based on the distillation of parliamentary history and practice Jefferson had learned at William and Mary and considered as Vice-President and presiding officer of the Senate.  The House also adopted it.  Nowhere in its over 200 pages, covering 53 topics—from (1) The importance of following rules to (53) Impeachment—does Jefferson talk about delaying Bills to let them ‘mature’.

“Then Gohmert offers his solution—prayer.  Why?  Probably because it does not cost anything and takes little effort.  And conservatives, like other insane people, are not deterred by serial failure.  ‘I think backistorically.  We had a President in Franklin Roosevelt that on D-Day led the country in a 6 to 8-minute prayer for our troops.  And now we have a President who came on after Uvalde and he used God’s name in vain.  As most of us would consider it.  It was used as an interjection not as a source to be for wisdom like our country did for most of our history.’

“Dear God, Gohmert is more concerned about God’s name than he is about the massacre of 19 children and two teachers.

“Gohmert sticks his landing with a sneer at liberals and a thinly disguised racist swipe at the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions.  ‘Since the 60s we really started having these mass shootings.  Perhaps there was something in the 60s maybe some Supreme Court decisions.  They gave rise to people being taught in schools that whatever you think feels good.  Well, it’s time to get common sense back.’

“If Gohmert wants to understand the truth of gun massacres in the US, he must do better than his failed stab at sociology.  He should look at the devastation of pro-gun deregulation and the increasing ease with which angry young men, and disgruntled older men, can buy high-powered weapons with jumbo clips and devastating ammunition.

“And Gohmert lecturing on common sense is like a mole rat lecturing on astronomy.” (TheCriticalMind, Daily Kos, June 5, 2022)

News From the States reports on how lawmakers in Ohio and Iowa are dealing with the gun violence: “In Ohio, ‘Republicans have offered a two-pronged approach: guns and money,’ reports the Ohio Capital Journal.  Lawmakers in Columbus last week authorized school boards to arm teachers, requiring gun-toting educators to undergo 24 hours of training on how to be a Good Guy with a Gun.  They also devoted more than $100 million to efforts to prevent school shootings, but almost all of it goes to hardening security at schools and the rest goes to administering the arm-a-teacher program.

“Not on the agenda?  Items such as expanded background checks, red flag laws, and bans or age restrictions on rifle purchases.

“In Iowa, meanwhile, lawmakers can’t even figure out whether or not they accidentally created a loophole that makes it impossible to prosecute teenagers with guns, reported the Iowa Capital Dispatch.  Just in case, they passed a law explicitly forbidding people under 18 from carrying guns.  Editor Kathie Obradovich observes in her weekly column that this was a rare move by lawmakers to reign in gun possession.  ‘In 2017, they made it legal for children to fire guns, with adult supervision,’ she writes.  ‘They’ve allowed people walking around with loaded weapons to shoot and kill anyone they think is threatening them under a ‘stand your ground’ law, regardless of whether they were actually in danger and whether they could have avoided trouble by walking away.  It’s just fine to carry firearms in the State Capitol.  This year, they passed a bill allowing the use of AR-15s and similar high-powered weapons of war for deer hunting, for heaven’s sake.’” (Sean Scully, News From the States, June 6, 2022)

Naturally, the now-illegitimate Supreme Court is also in the pockets of the NRA.  Late in June, the court struck down New York state’s restrictions on carrying firearms in public.  The implications of this are frightening in the extreme: The court has for all intents and purposes stated that gun restrictions are unconstitutional.  What this actually means is that it doesn’t matter how many people are killed on the streets, in their homes, or anywhere else.  No place is safe.  They and their NFP compatriots in Congress have no problem with any of that.

The Supreme Court, like everyone else in the NFP, puts guns above lives.

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RACISM—A CORE COMPONENT OF THE NFP

Fascism is indelibly intertwined with racism, as Donald Trump’s presidency has conclusively proven.  As the Republican party morphed into the NFP, hate crimes, bigotry, and discrimination against minorities increased dramatically.  Bigots, who until recent years were considered a fringe minority, have found their champions in the NFP.  The case of Kyle Rittenhouse, which I covered in a previous article, is but one example.

I will begin with a story about one NFP Senate candidate who voiced his opinion on mass shootings, conveniently sneaking racism into the picture: “Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona who is backed by former President Donald Trump, claims gun violence is largely a racial issue.  ‘We do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence.’  Masters told ‘The Jeff Oravits Show’ podcast in April in comments that were spotted this week by The Daily Beast.  ‘It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other.  Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,’ Masters said.  ‘And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.’

“Just weeks after his comments, 10 Black shoppers were murdered in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York.  The suspect, who is white, allegedly targeted Black people during his killing spree.  He was also reportedly a believer in ‘replacement theory,’ a conspiracy theory that has spread in conservative media circles such as Fox News.” (Ed Mazza, yahoo! news, June 5, 2022)

Although I have covered this case in a previous article, I will quote People for the American Way for a brief summary: “Here are the facts: In 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines and used an illegally purchased assault rifle to confront racial justice protesters who had been demonized and made out to be a threat by far-right politicians, commentators, and media outlets.  He killed two people and gravely injured another.  In the aftermath of these events, he was raised to the status of near-mythic figure in right-wing extremist circles, often being called a ‘hero’ by far-right activists.  His 2021 trial was riddled with clear evidence of bias in Rittenhouse’s favor.  And the not guilty verdict in the case will be seen as tacit encouragement by our criminal justice system for racially-inspired white mob violence. (PFAW, January 5, 2022)

Hip Hop Caucus summarizes: “When Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two protestors in Wisconsin, anyone with a shred of common decency hoped he’d be put behind bars.  Instead, he was put on Fox News.  If you want to see the white supremacy of America, look at an avowed racist being offered jobs in Congress when he should have been convicted of murder.” (Rev Yearwood, Hip Hop Caucus, January 5, 2022)

To see just how skewed our judicial system has become, consider the following story as told by Kina Collins: “Last week, I was arrested along with other activists protesting the early release of Jason Van Dyke, the white police officer who shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
Van Dyke shot a 17-year-old Black child 16 times, then reloaded his gun.  He was released from prison early last week after serving less than half of his 81 month sentence.  Think about that.  Just three years for the vicious murder of a child.

“And for protesting this injustice, I was fined $200 and banned from the federal courthouse in Chicago for 60 days.  The fact that I faced federal charges for protesting before Van Dyke faced federal charges for the brutal murder of a Black child tells you everything you need to know about our justice system.  It wasn’t created for people who look like me, or people who look like Laquan McDonald.

“One of the U.S. Marshals who arrested us on Thursday asked me why we were protesting the release of Van Dyke and not the gun violence in Chicago, so I want to be abundantly clear: This is gun violence in Chicago.  As much as Laquan was a victim of police brutality, he was also a victim of gun violence.  His life was ended the same way too many lives end in Chicago—with bullets.” (Kina Collins, Justice Democrats, February 11, 2022)

The racism of the NFP is overt and its leaders make little or no attempt to hide it.  Daily Kos lays out the facts in no uncertain terms: “While Republican senators tried to be as odious as possible for the benefit of steadfastly gullible American media outlets that eat it up with a spoon and the Republican Party itself proved itself unable to stop being racist for even one damn day, it was left to Indiana Republican Sen. Mike Braun to spell out the desired results of Republican Supreme Court ambitions.  It’s not just abortion and birth control rights they want to see rolled back to the states.  The Republican philosophy, says Braun, means that states should regain the ability to make interracial marriage illegal.

“Some jackass Braun spokescreature may attempt to half-a&$edly walk this one back, perhaps with claims that, while Braun personally doesn’t have a problem with interracial marriage, heavens no, he’s merely pointing out that states ought to be able to ban it if the Republicans of that state want to.  And why should states have that supposed ‘right’?  Because every Republican is an odious slimeball no longer willing to even abide the thought of the public being able to elect people who are Not Them, so of course, there’s no other basic human right gained in the last century of American existence that they’re not eager to also erase.

“Republicanism is a white nationalist and fascist movement that does not recognize civil rights.  Any of them.  And they’re coming for every last one of them.” (Hunter, Daily Kos, March 22, 2022)

Are there solutions to the pandemic of gun murders in this country?  Of course there are, but the NFP won’t hear of it.  Progressives on the other hand do have some very workable ideas, as Hip Hop Caucus demonstrates: “We want to make one thing clear: violence is structural, and the continued inaction on gun violence stems from white supremacy.  We’re already hearing disgraceful insinuations from lawmakers attempting to frame mass shootings as anything but a gun control issue.  They will point fingers and say the ‘real’ issue is mental health or school safety—we’re even seeing some lawmakers try to turn it into an immigration issue because the shooter was Latino (despite his being born in North Dakota).  They are doing whatever they can to drive the narrative away from regulating gun control.  These same officials are sharing their ‘thoughts and prayers’ and their ‘heartbreak and horror’ at yesterday’s event—using empty phrases to absolve themselves from blame while gun violence continues to wage war on our communities, our loved ones, and our sense of safety.” (Hip Hop Caucus, May 28, 2022)

In this increasingly Orwellian United States, “justice” has increasingly  become meaningless and even racially biased.  Daily Kos supplies us with an example of how one high school incident that illustrates how the minority victim was unfairly punished: “A video of an Indian American boy being bullied at school in Texas has gone viral for not only depicting a white child choking him for over four minutes, but for the actions taken against the bully.  After Shaan Pritmani was bullied and choked at Coppell Middle School in Dallas, he was suspended for three days while his white perpetrator received only one day of suspension.” (Aysha Qamar, Daily Kos, May 25, 2022)  I have watched this video and encourage others to do so; it is obvious who is bullying and who is being bullied.  The only reason the harsher sentence was given to the victim is obvious: racism against anyone not fortunate enough to be born white. 

Texas is rapidly becoming a benchmark state for the NFP.  Blue Amp Action tells us just how bad it has become: “The Texas Republican Party platform is absolutely terrifying.  In what I believe is still 2022 (you may think it’s 1822 if you read it), this document is so cruel, so filled with conspiracy and filth, it is difficult to digest.  In fact, don’t eat before reading it, as you might find yourself having the opposite reaction.

“It attacks homosexuality as an ‘abnormal lifestyle’ and seeks to overturn gay marriage, takes the official position that the 2020 election was stolen, demands that the state fund and support western civilization instruction
(see: White Supremacy) and calls for the elimination of one of the landmark pieces of legislation in our country’s history, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, so they can fully return to a Jim Crow period where nearly the entire non-white population is stripped of its voting rights.

“USA Today Columnist Rex Huppke described it best: ‘The whole thing is a perverse, offensive, backwards-looking-worldview turducken of hate, conspiracy theories and outright garbage.’” (Cliff Schecter, Blue Amp Action, June 21, 2022)

Daily Kos weighs in with some specifics on the Texas NFP’s platform: “5,000 Texas Republican delegates approved their party’s policy platform.  The 40-page policy wishlist reads like a Fox News fever dream with parts pulled from a QAnon handbook.  With some hard work, this platform will likely never become policy, but it is a frightening look into how far right some republicans want to take our country: 

• Those in the LGBTQ+ community are living ‘an abnormal lifestyle choice’ and define marriage as that between ‘a natural man and a natural woman.’
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and any updates should be repealed and not reauthorized.
• Any sort of gun control measures are seen as a direct violation of the Second Amendment and ‘our God given rights.’
• The United States should leave the United Nations.
• They call for abortions to be abolished and for ‘equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization.’
• They endorse Trump’s Big Lie by stating they reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election, and hold that acting President Biden was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.
• Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto,

“The Texas GOP can read the writing on the wall: Texas, a historically red state, is trending blue.  Republicans carried it in presidential elections by 15+ points in 2012, nine in 2016 and less than 6 points in 2020.  Texas Republicans are hoping that these far-right stances will help to drive their base to the polls not only in the 2022 midterms, but in the 2024 presidential election.” (Amanda McKay, Daily Kos, June 22, 2022)

The day when Ku Klux Klan members would no longer be stigmatized or politically marginalized has arrived.  One NFP congressional candidate in New York (the idea that anti-black racism is somehow confined to the deep South has long since been defunct) is on record saying black Americans are “held hungry and dumb.”  Carl Paladino is an obvious racist, but the worst part is that he is still widely supported in his congressional race.  He has said that blacks are “conditioned” to vote Democratic and that: “you can’t teach them differently.”

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CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE NFP’S DISDAIN FOR LIFE ON PLANET EARTH

Today’s NFP has made the word “conserve” from conservatism cognitively meaningless and has embarked on a full-steam-ahead plan to make our planet uninhabitable.  Conserving our resources, fighting pollution and battling climate change and other threats are not only not a part of their platform, they are actively working against them.  How ironic that they call themselves “pro-life” when their every utterance and action is to the contrary.

No legitimate scientist denies the reality that our planet is heating up or that this the major existential threat to our existence today.  MoveOn tells us: “Last week, the United Nations released its latest comprehensive report on the climate crisis, and there’s no sugar-coating the results. In the words of the U.N. secretary general, unless things change fast, we are ‘firmly on track toward an unlivable world.’

“The temperature in Antarctica just hit 70 degrees above normal.  Hydropower dams are shutting down because there simply isn’t any water left due to drought. And record-breaking wildfires have erupted in Siberia. 

“If you’re not freaking out about the climate crisis, consider this:  Massive ice shelves in the Antarctic are melting before our eyes. Entire towns are being destroyed by wildfire. Last summer’s heat wave in Europe killed thousands.

“And Republicans want to pour gasoline on the fire.  They’re not only opposing climate action, they’re pushing for increases in fossil fuel production by opening millions of acres of public lands to drilling and weakening the environmental protections we have now. It’s madness.

“But the most most important news from the U.N.’s latest climate report is that there’s still reason for hope.  In fact, even as the rest of the economy struggled through the pandemic, renewable energy sources like solar and wind continued to grow at the stunning annual rate of almost 10%.  Meanwhile, President Biden has proposed historic clean-energy investments to make the transition even faster, and we’re so close to passing the legislation we need to get it done.

“The truth is that the biggest threat to the climate might just be the Republican Party.  If we’re going to have any chance of preventing the worst effects of global warming, we cannot let the Republican climate deniers and Big Oil puppets take control of Congress.” (MoveOn, April 17, 2022)

The plastics problem is a case in point.  U.S. Pirg tells us: “It’s no secret that we in the United States have a plastic waste problem.  In 2018 alone, the U.S. sent more than 27 million tons of plastic to landfills.

“One contributor to this plastic waste overload is the prevalence of single-use plastics—such as foam takeout containers and plastic shopping bags.  But the companies that make single-use plastics don’t have to pay for their products to be picked up and processed.  That cost falls to us as consumers and taxpayers, instead.

“But what if single-use plastics makers were held financially responsible for the cost of cleaning up their products?  Not only would it shift the cost of handling single-use plastic waste off of consumers, but companies would finally be incentivized to switch to more reusable, recyclable and refillable alternatives.

“That’s why our national network has worked with lawmakers to re-introduce the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act.  This sweeping legislation would ban certain single-use plastics entirely and would shift more financial responsibility for cleaning up the others onto the companies that make them.” (Faye Park, U.S. Pirg, February 15, 2022)

Certainly a good cause.  Unfortunately, it’s exactly the kind of legislation that the NFP will fight at every turn.  Why?  Because it means people are telling them what to do.  

More alarming reports are coming in about how plastic is actually endangering our health.  Common Dreams reports: “A team of toxicologists found microplastics in nearly 80% of the healthy adult blood samples it analyzed, marking the first time that tiny polymer fragments—measuring less than 5mm in size—have been detected in human blood, The Guardian reported Thursday.

“‘Are these levels sufficiently high to trigger disease?  We urgently need to fund further research so we can find out.’  Using techniques that allowed them to detect particles as small as 0.0007mm, the scientists, whose research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Environment International, examined blood samples provided by 22 anonymous donors in good health and discovered microplastics in 17 of them.

“According to The Guardian, ‘Half the samples contained PET plastic, which is commonly used in drinks bottles, while a third contained polystyrene, used for packaging food and other products.  A quarter of the blood samples contained polyethylene, from which plastic carrier bags are made.’

“’Our study is the first indication that we have polymer particles in our blood—it’s a breakthrough result,’ Dick Vethaak, an ecotoxicologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and expert on the health risks posed by microplastics, told the British newspaper.  ‘But we have to extend the research and increase the sample sizes, the number of polymers assessed, etc.,’ he said, noting that additional studies are in progress.  It is certainly reasonable to be concerned,’ Vethaak continued.  ‘The particles are there and are transported throughout the body.’

“The Guardian reported that as they travel through the body, microplastics ‘may lodge in organs,’ though ‘the impact on health is as yet unknown.’ Nevertheless, ‘researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.’

“Global plastic pollution—recently characterized as a life-threatening crisis by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a United Kingdom-based nonprofit—is so pervasive that minuscule polymer particles now contaminate every corner of planet Earth, from the tallest mountain peaks to the deepest parts of the ocean and the most remote islands.” (Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams, March 24, 2022)

Plastic is an existential threat to all of us, but is hardly the only threat to our health and well-being.  Mercury is extremely toxic, and it is also just about everywhere.  Daily Kos informs us just how dangerous mercury is to our health and well-being: “From coal to table.  We have toxic mercury in our food—from fish to rice—because of pollution from coal-fired power plants that is belched out into the air.  It then rains down on our waters and moves up the food chain. 

“Moms Clean Air Force has been fighting for more than a decade to cut toxic mercury pollution—along with more than 80 other toxic air pollutants, from arsenic to acid gases—from coal-fired power plants.  And medical researchers have learned more about how mercury damages the developing brains of babies and children.  The bottom line: there is NO amount of mercury that is safe for a child’s brain.

“Last week, EPA announced a proposal to reinstate the legal foundation of the standards that limit mercury and other toxic pollution from coal-fired power plants.  This proposal is a public health necessity.  It will shore up the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which have helped slash mercury pollution from coal plants by more than 80% in the decade since the standards were first enacted.” (Dominique Browning, Daily Kos, February 22, 2022)

Considering how beholden the NFP is to corporate polluters, it doesn’t take too much imagination to predict how they will respond to this and other similar proposals.

The tobacco industry has not gotten the attention other polluting industries have, despite the dangers to human life and the environment it poses.  Care2 Action Alerts explains: “A new report paints a damning picture of the environmental impacts of tobacco farming.  In a single year, the industry is responsible for the deforestation of over 600 million trees, the use of 22 billion tons of water and the emission of a whopping 84 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  It is the time the heaviest hitters in this industry—who have spent decades ravishing the health of the planet and people’s bodies—take responsibility for the devastation they’ve produced.

“Ironically, the tactics of climate denialism have come directly from Big Tobacco’s playbook.  For decades, tobacco corporations lied to governments and misled the public about the potentially fatal impacts of smoking.  Energy companies then used the exact same strategies to muddy the science on global warming, even though climatologists have been certain that the planet is heating up and humanity has played a role in this heat by emitting greenhouse gasses for nearly half a century.  Now, this climate denialism is working to the advantage of Big Tobacco, who is partially responsible for climate chaos.” (Care1 Action Alerts, June 17, 2022)

I have covered the dangers of fracking in earlier articles, but U.S. Pirg has more important information on this topic: “Untold amounts of fracked gas and its main component, methane, are leaking from pipelines and storage tanks into our atmosphere.  That’s a serious problem when methane has 84 times the global warming power of carbon dioxide, and it’s especially a problem when the oil and gas industry isn’t even tracking or reporting how much of it is being leaked.

“And now, the United States is gearing up to build even more fossil fuel infrastructure.  This just doesn’t make any sense—not when we can’t afford to allow any more planet-warming emissions to enter our atmosphere.  There’s a gaping hole in the oil and gas industry’s monitoring of methane emissions.  While methane detection technology is accessible, companies are not required to collect this data, and federal regulators almost never ask for it.

“In fact, some scientists believe that the U.S. is miscalculating how much methane is released by as much as 50%.  Without accurate data, we can’t effectively take action and control how much methane is released.  And even with companies that are doing their best to be mindful of methane emissions, gas infrastructure will still leak it into our environment.

“It’s clear we need to end our country’s reliance on polluting fossil fuels—and the first step we can take is to put an end to the billions of dollars the U.S. government gives away to the fossil fuel industry in the form of tax breaks, incentives and other subsidies.” (Faye Park, U.S. Pirg, May 26, 2022)

Environmental Action tells us of one of the most dangerous pollutants: “A 67-foot tear ruptured the Big Cowboy fracked gas pipeline in March, and in the two days it took to repair it, it leaked 52 million cubic feet of methane into the atmosphere—the equivalent greenhouse gas pollution of a year’s worth of driving from 16,000 cars.

“Methane warms the atmosphere at a rate of 84 times that of carbon dioxide, and it reached record levels in 2021. This dangerous greenhouse gas is fueling the climate crisis and threatening our planet.  The fossil fuel industry is just not caring for its wells or checking for methane leaks the way it should.  A former Exxon engineer even admitted that when the corporation went all-in on fracked gas wells, it didn’t track methane leaks.In fact, there is no widespread monitoring for methane leaks.

“What we do know is that much of the methane that leaks into our atmosphere comes from abandoned or low-performing wells and pipes.  Some estimates show that wells accounting for just 6% of production leak half of methane emitted into the atmosphere.

“This is an untenable situation.  As temperatures rise and ecosystems are affected, wildfires are decimating forests and water supplies are dwindling. Endangered species are losing their habitats.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that cutting methane pollution now will have a strong impact on our warming climate, which is why it needs to happen right away.” (Environmental Action, May 19, 2022)

U.S. Pirg tells us of yet another ecological disaster right at our doorstep: “Large-scale factory farms and confined feedlot operations have become the biggest source of water pollution in the United States.  Factory farms not only withdraw immense amounts of water each year, but they are now the largest source of water pollution in the world—and they’re doing so with relatively no oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“The waste from these farms is releasing large amounts of chemicals, organic matter, drug residues and other sediments into water bodies—all of which has adverse effects on our health.

“The EPA is responsible for taking adequate action against industries that pollute our communities and our bodies, but it has yet to respond in a way that is up to par.” 

“Factory farms, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs, generate millions—if not billions—of gallons of waste each year.  In fact, the largest factory farm has been known to generate up to 369 million tons of waste per year.  And while every animal produces waste, this level of highly concentrated manure can wreak serious havoc on the health of the environment and on the public.

“When massive amounts of fertilizer, animal waste and other pollutants aren’t managed properly, they foul our waterways and release harmful chemicals like ammonia and methane into the environment.  Extended exposure to these potent chemicals can result in serious health consequences such as asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia and other respiratory diseases.

“Additionally, animal waste can leach toxic heavy metals and nitrates into waterways.  Elevated nitrate levels in our drinking water can be dangerous for our health, and even cause low oxygen levels in infants and low birth weight.” (Faye Park, U.S. Pirg, March 8, 2022)

U.S. Pirg ran an article on the way farm food is fertilized: “Tons of the food we eat is being fertilized with sewage sludge contaminated with toxic ‘forever chemicals.’  Wastewater treatment byproducts called biosolids are used as fertilizer on millions of acres of farmland nationwide.  But a recent study revealed that all of that sludge is likely contaminated with a toxic class of chemicals called PFAS. The chemicals have been found in crops, animals, water and even humans on farms where the biosolids were used.

“Growing crops with contaminated sludge isn’t just gross—it’s dangerous.  PFAS chemicals have been linked to immune issues, birth defects and some kinds of cancer.  How do PFAS chemicals make their way into fertilizer in the first place?  The fact is, these chemicals are pretty much everywhere.

“PFAS, or per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of more than 12,000 chemicals that are used to make products water, grease and stain-resistant. The chemicals are found in countless products, from the wrapper around your fast-food burger, to the waterproof coating on your raincoat, to industrial firefighting foams.

“The industries that create and use PFAS in their products often discharge the chemicals into our nation’s sewer system—meaning they end up in our wastewater treatment plants, and ultimately in the sludge sent to farms as fertilizer.  Right now, testing sludge for PFAS isn’t required, and regulators don’t closely track where it gets spread—but a recent report estimates that at least 20 million acres of farmland have been contaminated.

“Awareness about this problem is spreading.  In April, Maine became the first state to ban the practice of spreading sludge as fertilizer after discovering PFAS contamination on farms and in farmers’ blood.“But we won’t be truly safe until this toxic sludge is banned everywhere.  Crops grown in one state can be shipped and used all over the nation.  A ban at the federal level is the most effective way to protect ourselves from the dangers of PFAS-contaminated farmland and crops.” (Faye Park, U.S. Pirg, May 28, 2022)

Public Citizen tells us of the NFP’s efforts to discredit the World Health Organization: “The far-right is trying to discredit the World Health Organization (WHO):

• World health leaders met last week to improve the global COVID-19 pandemic response, save lives, and prepare to better respond to future pandemics.
• Excessively nationalistic responses to the pandemic led to millions of avoidable deaths worldwide.  People are still dying due to unequal access to life-saving vaccines.
• So the WHO is working to strengthen coordination among countries and President Biden recently announced the United States is sharing COVID-19 medical technology with the WHO, for global use and manufacture.
• But right-wingers like Tucker Carlson—host of the most-watched cable ‘news’ program in America—are fearmongering to destroy trust in the WHO.

“Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the WHO during the worst pandemic of our lifetimes.  He sent a signal to the global community that America couldn’t be counted on to lead during an international crisis!  We’re grateful that President Biden rejoined the World Health Organization and has announced a commitment to share vaccine technology with the WHO to benefit the rest of the world.  But the Biden Administration needs to take even bolder action to support the WHO, save lives across the world, and make America a leader against future pandemics.” (Public Citizen, June 4, 2022)

But it’s not just human life that is in danger because of stupid and dangerous policies.

I have covered the issue of extinction faced by North Atlantic right whales in previous articles.  Here is a brief update from Care 2 Action Alerts: “The beloved and majestic North Atlantic right whale is still on the brink of extinction, and time after time when legislation is proposed to protect it, U.S. Congress fails to act.  But the whales cannot wait any longer—there are fewer than 340 whales remaining in the wild, and some recent birthing seasons have ended without a single newborn calf. 

“The two leading causes of death among right whales are human-induced and thus, preventable: collisions with vessels and entanglement in fishing gear.  If humans are the cause of such dramatic and devastating population decline, humans are responsible for acting and saving the whales that remain.” (Care 2 Petitions Team, March 23, 2022)

Care2 Action Alerts provides us with some startling facts: “Last year, U.S. Wildlife Services killed a jaw-dropping 1.75 million animals.  That is the equivalent of 200 animals killed per hour.  Dozens of species, including important native wildlife, have felt the harrowing effects of this blood-soaked program.  From gray wolves to foxes, black bears to bobcats, alligators to armadillos, and more—animals around the country are being terrorized and slaughtered.  Staff are supposedly pursuing this literal killing spree as a way to maintain some sense of ‘balance’ between agricultural profits and local ecosystems.  But culls are not only cruel; they’re also ineffective.

“Nearly 65,000 coyotes have been slaughtered, some of them chased down and shot by people in helicopters.  Imagine how terrifying that must have been.  Even pet dogs have been the victims of such violence, by accidentally wandering into traps or eating poisons laid out.  We need the U.S. federal government to fund vital programs such as healthcare and food assistance.  So why is it spending money on campaigns to slaughter animals instead?” (Care2 Action Alerts, April 5, 2022)

Common Dreams explains the role the Supreme Court is playing in destroying the planet: “Here’s how environmental law is supposed to work (in super-simplified form):

1. Congress passes a law that says, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency should limit the damage that carbon dioxide in the environment causes to the planet.  Congress (the Constitution’s Article I branch of government) defines the broad goal of the legislation, but the Executive Branch (Article II) has the responsibility to carry it out.
2. The EPA, part of that Executive Branch and answering both to the law and the President, then convenes panels of experts.  They spend a year or more doing an exhaustive, deep dive into the science, coming up with dozens or even hundreds of suggestions to limit atmospheric CO2, ranging from rules on how much emission cars can expel to drilling and refining processes that may leak CO2 or methane (which degrades into CO2), etc.
3. The experts’ suggestions are then run past a panel of rule-making bureaucrats and hired-gun rule-making experts for the EPA to decide what the standards should be.  They take into consideration the current abilities of industry and the costs versus the benefits of various rules, among other things.
4. After they’ve come up with those tentative regulations, they submit them for public review and hearings.  When that process is done and the rules are approved, they make them into official EPA rules, publish them, enforce them, and the CO2 emissions begin to drop.

“This is how it works, a process that simply comports with common sense, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1984.  It’s been this way for a century or more.  Congress passes laws that empower regulatory agencies to solve problems, the agencies figure out how and put the rules into place, and the solutions get enforced by the agencies.

“Now comes a group of rightwing Supreme Court justices including Neil Gorsuch, whose mother tried to destroy the EPA when she ran it (and had to resign in disgrace) during the Reagan administration.  In addition to Gorsuch, the Court also has Amy Coney Barrett whose father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades, and John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh who are all on the court in part because of support from a network funded by fossil fuel billionaires and their industry (among others).

“The ‘novel’ argument that a group of Republican states’ Attorneys General are advancing, and Neil Gorsuch has already endorsed in a lower court ruling before he was placed on the Court, is breathtaking.  It could end most protective government regulations in America.  They’re arguing, essentially, that the EPA (and any other regulatory agency) can’t do all the steps listed above: instead, that detailed and time-consuming analysis of a problem, developing specific solutions, and writing specific rules has to be done, they say, by Congress itself.  In other words, Gorsuch says, Congress itself—not the EPA—must evaluate the science and then write the rules.

“As if Congress had the time and staff.  As if Congress was stocked with scientific experts.  As if Republicans in the pockets of fossil fuel billionaires wouldn’t block any congressional action even if it did.

“Back in 1984 the Supreme Court concluded, in their Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council decision, that it only made sense that Congress would set goals and regulatory agencies, stocked chock-a-block with scientists and experts, would do the science and write the rules.  That doctrine is called ‘the Chevron deference.’  Courts should defer, SCOTUS said, to the regulatory agencies, since they’re the ones with the expertise.

But Gorsuch has argued, essentially, that making rules—even the detailed scientific minutiae of rules—should be done by Congress instead of the EPA, and that agencies like the EPA should simply play the role of cops on the beat, enforcing those rules.

“He wants to overturn Chevron v NRDC.

“This would cripple virtually every regulatory agency in Washington, DC, from the EPA to the FCC to OSHA.  Every rule made by any of them (and dozens of other agencies) could be thrown out under a direct court challenge, and, unless Congress specifically replaces those rules by passing new laws themselves, those rules will cease to exist.

“Chaos hardly begins to define what could be the result.  It’s exactly what Steve Bannon said the Trump administration was planning to do: ‘Deconstruct the administrative state.’

“The United States (with 4 percent of the world’s population) has produced more greenhouse gasses than any other nation and continues to be one of the planet’s major emitters.  Blowing up the EPA’s CO2 rules would guarantee the future profits of the fossil fuel industry—the group that partially bankrolled Gorsuch, Roberts, Barrett, Alito, and Kavanaugh’s ascent to the Court—and also speed up the destruction of our atmosphere and the life on Earth it supports.

My bet is that if they’re going to do this (the New York Times this week is speculating it’s probable) in the West Virginia v EPA ruling that’s expected any day, and that they’ll drop the decision on the same day as their abortion or gun rulings, guaranteeing that most people won’t hear a thing about it.” (Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams, June 21, 2022)

This article ends with one final Supreme Court ruling which proved just how beholden the right-wingers on the court actually are to corporate polluters.  Hip Hop Caucus provides the details: “The fight for climate justice was just dealt a huge blow.  Today, the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. EPA to limit the federal government’s ability to regulate carbon emissions—effectively removing protections from air pollution and climate change that we have been fighting for decades.  Pollution and other climate poisons come for Black and Brown communities first.  The climate crisis is not an equal opportunity oppressor, and our people will be the ones to bear the brunt of the effects of pollution.  By giving a green light to polluters, the Supreme Court has once again put corporations over our communities.” (Rev Yearwood, Hip Hop Caucus, June 30, 2022)

Progress America adds: “The Supreme Court just announced a shocking decision that attacks the EPA, undermines the bipartisan Clean Air Act, and sets a dangerous precedent that could severely inhibit the federal government’s ability to act in the public interest.  The Clean Air Act really matters.  It has allowed the EPA to prevent mass pollution and provided an important tool to protect Black, Brown, Indigenous, and frontline communities that bear the worst impacts of pollution and climate change.

“This decision is only possible because of GOP operatives’ decades-long scheme to pack the Supreme Court with illegitimate extremists and weaken the federal agencies that keep us safe—all to line the pockets of Big Polluters.  The supposedly nonpartisan court is just pushing through what past Republican Congresses have tried and failed to pass.

“This isn’t some abstract legal decision.  These limits to the Clean Air Act mean more emergency room visits, more respiratory illnesses, and more early, preventable deaths.  This dirtier air will hit our children, our grandparents, and our frontline communities first and worst. It also means more climate-fueled disasters.” (Jamaal Raad, Progress America, June 30, 2022)

Given all this, anyone who thinks the NFP politicians or the illegitimate justices on the Supreme Court care about people, the Constitution, or life itself is in a state of perpetual denial.

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CONCLUSION

“We can and must go beyond underwriting authoritarian regimes by buying their fossil fuels, destroying the environment, and exacerbating the climate crisis with domestic drilling.” (Win Without War, April 12, 2022)

This statement might well serve as the rallying cry of progressive Democrats.  The NFP, whose only agenda is to block anything the Democrats come up with, will fight it tooth and nail; like religions, the NFP is a party of death.  

The fact that the NFP is a danger to our country is obvious to any thinking individual.  Common Dreams lists forty reasons why: Voters need to visualize and understand what happens when violence-prone reactionary authoritarians replace democracy with despotism.  The evidence is voluminous, though rarely is it thematically connected.  Campaigning against ‘dangerous extremists’ does that.  What else can you call political leaders who condone overthrowing a democratically elected government, incite white nationalists yet don’t disavow their violence, allow Covid-19 to spread and kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, want to imprison women who have abortions, support unbridled access to automatic weapons, ignore the climate crisis, menace LGBTQ youth, and routinely disregard norms and laws?  And are led by an ex-president who—in a first—put his vice president’s life in jeopardy.

“Republicans respond indignantly to any single example of GOP extremism by resorting to a grab bag of rehearsed misdirections—lying, denying, cherry-picking, gaslighting, what-abouting, culture-warring, or simply counterattacking Biden, Blackness, and wokeness.  Already they’re polishing up their Hunter Biden talking points and dismissing January 6 as sort of a ‘third-rate burglary.’

“The last defense of GOP extremism is simply to change the subject. ‘People really care about inflation, crime. etc.’  Of course they do—and they should.  And it’s politically effective to list that day’s inflation rate and pump price and pretend they are Biden’s fault.

“VIOLENCE

1. Studying domestic political violence from Columbine to the Buffalo and Uvalde attacks, the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that: ‘violent far-right extremists were significantly more likely to be lethal’ than left-wing extremists.
2. As a result of the January 6 insurrection, seven people died, 140 police officers were injured, some 840 rioters have so far been charged—yet the Republican National Committee criticized the Biden administration for ‘persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse’ and Trump called it ‘the greatest movement in the history of our country to Make America Great Again.’
3. Armed white militia invaded the Michigan legislative chambers in 2020 intending to kidnap or kill Governor Gretchen Whitmer because of their fury at her early Covid restrictions.
4. Reuters has documented at least 850 threats of vigilantism against state and local election officials in 13 states.  ‘After the president tweeted at me by name,’ testified Philadelphia Elections Commissioner Al Schmidt, ‘the threats became much more specific and graphic, and included members of my family by name, their ages, our address, pictures of our home.’
5. The New York Times analyzed pending gun-safety laws, and found that 446 people may not have been shot to death in mass shootings from 1999 to 2021 if such legislation had been in place.  Why should 18-year-olds be allowed to buy an AR-15?  The number-two Senate Republican, John Thune of South Dakota, said that many people in his state ‘liked to use them to kill prairie dogs and varmints.’
6. Asked by Bill O’Reilly if Putin was a killer, Trump replied, ‘There are a lot of killers.  What, you think we’re so innocent?’  He described Putin’s military threats before invading a peaceful Ukraine as evidence of ‘genius,’ then explained away Russia’s early military defeats as merely ‘a great negotiation that didn’t go so well for him.’

RACE

1. Blake Masters, the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona, was asked about the main problem behind mass shootings, and he replied, ‘Black people, frankly.’ (In fact, it’s three times more likely that a mass shooter is white than Black.)
2. Before he was endorsed for a New York State congressional seat by House GOP Leader Elise Stefanik, businessman Carl Paladino had said, ‘Hitler is the kind of leader we need today.  We need somebody inspirational [who] has been there and done that.’
3. An AP/NORC poll concluded that two-thirds of Republican voters believe in the racist ‘great replacement’ theory.  And a majority of GOP voters say that: ‘reverse racism’ is worse than ‘racism’—and earlier thought that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
4. Governor Ron DeSantis is applauded by Republicans for banning history books that, they argue, might make white school children feel bad about ancestors responsible for racism—while many also defend statues of Confederate leaders that no doubt make Black children today feel bad.
5. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, endorsed Trump twice.  Asked about being endorsed in 2016 by America’s most well-known racist, Trump replied ‘I don’t know anything about David Duke, okay?…I know nothing about white supremacists.’
6. ‘A notorious Hungarian racist who called Jews ‘stinking excrement,’ referred to Roma people as ‘animals’ and used racist epithets to describe Black people was a featured speaker at a major gathering of American Conservative leadership in Budapest this summer.’  The Guardian.

RULE OF LAWLESSNESS

1. Following the 2020 election, Republican officials in five swing states that Trump lost falsely declared that he won and that they were their states’ true electors.  These were rejected by the courts. Reporting by CNN and The Washington Post concluded that Rudy Giuliani was coordinating this scheme of ‘fake electors.’
2. Local Republicans in several swing states are now pushing for the power to award electors to the presidential candidate not with the most votes but to the one that the state legislature decides should have won.
3. Federal District Court Judge David Carter concluded in a March civil case that: ‘Attorney John Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,’ calling it a ‘coup in search of a legal theory’ that likely violated two criminal laws.
4. Nearly all elected Republicans agree that extensive voter fraud justifies voter suppression laws.  But 60 court decisions, every scholarly study, former Attorney General William Barr, and 50 secretaries of state determined there was no significant voter fraud in the 2020 election.  But that hasn’t diminished the two-thirds of Republicans who still embrace the lie that widespread voter fraud enabled Biden to win.
5. On the evening of January 6, 69 percent of House Republicans refused to vote to uphold Vice President Mike Pence’s certification of the 2020 presidential election results, which found that Biden won by 74 electors (and 7 million votes).
6. Ginni Thomas—who attended the rally on January 6 and tweeted “LOVE MAGA people!!!!”—pressured 29 Arizona Republican legislators to reverse their presidential certification of Trump.  Her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has not addressed this conflict of interest or recused himself when he was the sole vote to deny the January 6 committee access to subpoenaed Trump documents.
7. According to, respectively, The Washington Post and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Trump told over 34,000 lies and falsehoods in his one term in office and engaged in 48 likely acts of criminality—and still won 92 percent of the 2020 Republican votes for president.
8. The GOP president for four years milked the White House for money without objection from his party, charging the Secret Service $2 million to protect him on his own properties.  He and family were in an emolumental league of their own, as Jared and Ivanka earned a reported $640 million on the side, and CREW found that Trump was involved in over 3,000 conflicts of interest.
9. The Office of the NY State Attorney General filed fraud lawsuits that led to millions in fines and the dissolution of Trump University and the Trump Charitable Foundation, citing a ‘shameless pattern of illegality.’  Attorney General Tish James is currently investigating whether Trump engaged in wire fraud by raising $250 million from small donors that seemingly went to an ‘election fund’ that did not exist.
10. Donald Trump’s national security adviser, campaign manager, campaign treasurer, and personal lawyer were all convicted of felonies.  Trump then used his pardon power to whitewash crimes by allies: Eight of his first major nine pardons went to criminals who were either major supporters or prominent conservatives.  In 2022, he’s repeatedly hinted that if he became president again, he’d consider granting pardons to those convicted of January 6-related offenses.
11. Allegations of sexual assault have been made against members of both parties.  But Trump is the only politician ever who’s been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 40 women, according to the book All the President’s Women.
12. In his memoir, John Bolton wrote that for Trump, ‘obstruction of justice was a way of life.’  Mary Trump had a different take.  For him, she said, ‘cheating was a way of life.’

FULL FRINGE

1. J.D. Vance, Ohio Republican Senate nominee, said that he wanted ‘to make every executive branch employee fireable by the President. The Deep State must end and will be brought to heel.’  That would overturn a century of civil service law.
2. Doug Mastriano, the Trump-endorsed nominee for Pennsylvania governor, announced he might ignore the popular vote in awarding electors if he won and also compared the January 6 attack, which Mastriano attended, to the 1933 Reichstag fire.
3. Senate Republicans under Trump declined to follow the custom of only nominating American Bar Association-qualified judges.  The GOP confirmed Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a 33-year-old rated unqualified.  She later ruled that the Centers for Disease Control lacked the authority to impose a mask mandate on public transportation during a pandemic.
4. Forty-nine percent of Republicans, according to a You/Gov poll, think that Democrats are involved in ‘child sex trafficking.’  Representative Elise Stefanik called Democrats ‘pedos’—a core belief of QAnon.
5. In summer 2022, nearly all House Republicans voted against bills to put a $35-a-month price cap on insulin, get more infant formula on shelves, and reduce price-gouging by oil and gas firms.
6. When a University of Maryland poll asked ‘which world leader they dislike most,’  49 percent of Republicans cited Biden while only 23 percent named Putin.
7. In December 2020, Michael Flynn, who had been Trump’s national security adviser for nine days, urged Trump to declare ‘martial law’ so the military could take over all election machinery and redo the election.

HEALTH

1. At a time of increasing and deadly climate violence, the Trump administration eliminated 82 environmental regulations.
2. After Covid vaccines became widely available in the spring of 2021 and anti-vaxxers rallied against them, the 14 states with the highest rates of Covid deaths all had GOP governors.  Dr. Deborah Birx, head of Trump’s Covid Task Force, estimated that several hundred thousand of the 1 million who lost their lives from Covid died because of administration incompetence and anti-science beliefs.
3. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis defends Florida for being the only state not to preorder Covid vaccines for kids under five by saying, ‘Parents are really frightened about Covid for their kids…It’s because of media hysteria, it’s because of a lot of misinformation.’
4. Many governors of Republican-controlled states are trying to deny abortion access in cases of incest or rape and to prosecute and imprison women who seek abortions for any reason.
5. Most Republicans want to impose the religious belief that: ‘life begins at conception,’ although science says an embryo can’t live outside a woman’s body until the third trimester.
6. Republican congressional leaders oppose many new gun safety constraints because the founding founders created the right to a musket in a ‘well-regulated Militia’ at time when there were no police departments and no automatic weapons.

MEDIA

1. Tucker Carlson, the most popular right-wing TV host, said just before the invasion of Ukraine that: ‘I’m rooting for Putin’ and described the 2,000 people who attacked the Capitol as ‘sober, middle-class people who generally love America [and] believe in democracy and that it was taken from them.’
2. Most Republican leaders disparage opinions on behalf of marginalized people as ‘cancel culture’ or ‘wokeness’ while condoning the use of public money to retaliate against critics (Disney in Florida) and insisting that hate speech online is protected by the First Amendment, which only applies to government censorship.
3. Numerous former Trump officials have attacked him in books and statements as a public menace, including Mark Esper, Bill Barr, Omarosa Manigault, John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Fiona Hill, Alex Vindman, and Stephanie Grisham.” (Mark Green, Common Dreams, June 26, 2022)

This article provides a point-by-point proof that the New Fascist Party is a threat to America and the world.  The main question that needs to be answered is: Why is this fringe group controlling just about everything in these United States?  There are many other questions as well: How are they able to do so much gerrymandering without Democrats doing anything about it?  How has a party that does not represent the will of the people managed to call all the shots in Washington?  Why is there no indignation about the obvious racism and bigotry the NFP openly displays?  And finally, why do so many Democrats still believe that they can work with any of them?

Inequality Media Civic Action shows how out of step the NFP is with mainstream Americans: “If you ask everyday Americans what the most important problems we’re facing are, you’ll get answers like inflation, the economy, and the war in Ukraine.  So what are Republicans talking about?  ‘Don’t say gay’ and anti-trans laws.  ‘Cancel culture.’  Criminalizing abortion.  Banning books like Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust.

“Sowing racism, homophobia, and transphobia creates life-or-death dangers for many people in our society.  But for Republicans, this manufactured culture war serves to divert attention from the economic plunder by the ultra-rich.

“Republicans want everyday Americans divided and living in fear of one another so we don’t unite behind higher wages, better working conditions, and a fairer economy.” 

“The culture wars now being orchestrated by the Republican Party emerge from the same narrative that economic oligarchs have used for centuries to divide and conquer working people.  Demagogues like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Tucker Carlson are selling the narrative that America’s dominant white Christian culture is endangered by Black people, immigrants, transgender people, poor women seeking abortions, and schools that teach about America’s history of racism.

“And the worst part is, it’s working, as polls continue to show working-class, rural voters drifting toward the Republican Party—even though the party of corporate tax cuts doesn’t give a fig about working people.  To fight back, we must both directly address the very real economic problems that working-class people are facing and actively defend the marginalized communities being attacked by these demagogues.  That means explaining in clear, easy-to-understand terms how corporate concentration and political corruption are the real threat, not queer and trans people, immigrants, or books about American history.” (Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, April 23, 2022)

The New Fascist Party is not a party at all: It is a totalitarian dictatorship doing everything in its power to destroy America.  Until Democrats and other non-NFP people start raising their voices loudly to demand their elimination as a political force, we will continue to slide further and further into a new Nazi dictatorship.  The NFP is the party of lies, hate, and fascism and until honest politicians begin saying as much, nothing will improve.  The NFP will continue saying the 2020 election was rigged, and that any future elections are also rigged—unless they win.  They will continue to say climate change is a hoax.  They will continue to ignore COVID-19 while perversely attacking those who wear safety masks.  They will continue to give tax breaks to multi-billionaires while making more and more cuts into programs needed by the vast majority of Americans.  They will continue to pass legislation attacking women, the LGBTQ community, blacks and other minorities, and anyone who opposes their policies in any way.  And, of course, they will continue to support anything and everything Donald Trump says and does.  They are a fascist organization, as any honest objective examination will make plainly clear.

Given the fact that one of the two major political parties in the United States has become a rogue party intent on changing our country into a fascist Fourth Reich, it is difficult to see much hope for our future.  If this were simply a fringe minority political party, it could be dealt with accordingly.  But that is not the case.  The NFP has completely taken over the former Republican party.  Perhaps most worrisome is the fact that there are millions of people in these United States that support them unquestioningly, no matter what they say or do, and no matter how much their actions hurt them.  The paradigm shift in this country is truly frightening: Many Americans now openly support a totalitarian government.  They have no problem whatever with overthrowing democracy, destroying political and religions opponents, marginalizing minorities and installing an American Reich, increasingly resembling Hitler’s Third Reich.  They support the NFP not because they think they will help them: They support the NFP because the NFP hates the same people they hate.  It’s as simple as that.

And these people call themselves patriots and “good Christians.”  

The Nazis of the Second World War had concentration camps that were used for slave labor as well as extermination of those deemed to be “inferior.”  If the NFP gains total power, they will begin opening American concentration camps.  Inmates will be Democrats and any others of “questionable” political leanings, religious dissenters, atheists and agnostics, foreigners, journalists, socialists, communists, and just about anyone else they don’t like or view as a threat.  Courts will exist, but juries will be gone and judges will all be fascist idealists.  People will be thrown into these camps on the whim of the NFP.  Can torture and death be far behind?

Guantanamo Bay remains open.  Amnesty International reminds us: “Guantánamo is a horrific symbol of torture, indefinite detention, and injustice.  But it’s more than a symbol: 39 men, all Muslim, are still held there in violation of international law, most without facing charges or trial.  Despite decades of promises by multiple U.S. presidents to close the facility.  Since 2002, hundreds of men and boys—all Muslim—have been detained, tortured, and denied their rights at Guantánamo.  Thirty-nine of them are still there.  The U.S. government must commit to truth, accountability, and remedy for the violations committed at Guantánamo, a process that will require transparency and reckoning.  President Biden must start by transferring detainees elsewhere and closing the facility.  One of the unlawfully imprisoned people there is Toffiq al-Bihani.  He was sent to Guantánamo in 2003, tortured by the CIA, and detained without charge or trial.  He is still being unlawfully held in Guantánamo today.  Almost twelve years ago, U.S. authorities determined that Toffiq could be transferred to Yemen if the security situation improves, or to another country.  Saudi Arabia, where he has eleven brothers and sisters, agreed to accept him, yet he remains detained today, more than a decade after being approved for transfer.” (Daphne Eviatar, Amnesty International, January 11, 2022)

There has been a lot of discussion about closing Guantanamo Bay once and for all.  Rest assured that if the New Fascist Party gains the complete control they want, new Guantanamo Bays will spring up all across these United States.  

And there will be no one left to speak up for human rights.