04.04.15
White Christian and Heterosexual People’s Protection and Freedom Act
It’s what the Republican Party will be counting on in 2016. As it did in all of the last elections.
The fringe crazy is a mainstream power and there’s no arguing with it. All across the fractured country, in state legislatures controlled by the radical Republican core, they continue to pile up and pass legislation that is plainly insane and unconstitutional.
All of it, from the banning of non-existent shariah law, to the anti-gay pieces disguised as religious freedom laws, to nullifications that insist the state government can choose to ignore federal law and regulation, to even the weirdest matters, like law to look into protecting the individual state from electromagnetic pulse attack by terrorists or Iran, tends to pass.
Newspaper editorial sections and alt weeklies in a couple of big cities in red states cluck and call it hateful but it goes forward, anyway. And the next election, more fascists are elected, not less.
Follow it to an endpoint and it’s catastrophic.
American collapse was always going to be unique to its own historical nature and a Stillson as President with control of Congress is not a faint possibility. Hillary Clinton could badly damage the Democratic Party merely being herself, a wealth centrist who stands for nothing except power and not-the-crazy-person.
I’ll come at it from another angle.
Decades ago I worked at a newspaper in an area that was red Pennsylvania. It still is.
I was assigned to cover a local meeting around the time of the first Iraq war. I sat in a cinder block hut on the edge of some little town for hours as one of the local burghers kept bringing up emergency preparations. In case, you know, if Saddam Hussein hit the local part of Interstate 81 with Scud missiles.
Everyone pretty much ignored him because he was crazy.
Just before the war broke out another reporter at the paper, an acquaintance of mine, came to my desk to ask who he could call in my ring of contacts at think tanks in DC who could provide comment on what Saddam Hussein might attack in the Lehigh Valley.
He knew he’d been assigned a ludicrous task. I laughed and told him I could give him some names but that everyone would say the same thing, that there was nothing in the Lehigh Valley to be attacked nor was there anything in Hussein’s arsenal that could reach it even if there was.
Some type of story was cobbled together, for the sake of the local angle and to humor a couple reactionary and stupid people. But they were still just the fringe. They didn’t drive elections. They didn’t create law.
The result, the national shaming of Indiana notwithstanding, today: The controls are all destroyed, replaced with purposeful unreason.
A couple weeks ago Paul Krugman called ours the post-truth society.
It’s normal and easy for the insane right to find a “think tank??? in DC with “experts??? who will tell them, yes, their hometown is at risk.
Not just from one thing, but from many. And they will do it in great detail in any media form you like. They will even send custom-made teams to red state local government meetings to give lectures on such matters.
Yes, shariah law is being instated across the land. Yes, American civilization is threatened with total extinction by Iran. They’ll use the electromagnetic pulse!
All the old reasonable people have been swept away or marginalized and replaced by “experts??? who cater to the insane right’s network of beliefs. And it’s been financed and guaranteed by America’s billionaires and huge corporations.
And this is why the Democratic Party and the left have often failed so abjectly. They have no answer to it.
The fascist right has made a gigantic industry of it. It has monetized its culture of fear and paranoia, as well as used it as a hard weapon to defeat progress.
The left, on the other hand, doesn’t financially support its “experts??? and troops with any kind of the same fervor or hard resources. Crowdsourcing for the left doesn’t work as well as plutocrat money from the the right.
Yes, white Christian America. You have much to be afraid of but the Republican right will protect you. It will write hate laws to stop the homofascists.
It will enact law for the purpose of vilifying small urban Muslim populations.
It will disenfranchise non-white poor people because they’re dangerous.
Food stamp benefits will be rewritten so that the few dollars a day can only be spent on kohlrabi, water and unleavened bread.
If elected to the Oval Office, Iran will get bombed, ISIS will get bombed more, everyone who threatens “freedom” and can be made to look scary to the right wing white tribe will get bombed.
You’re not irrational if the thought of Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States brings on headache and nausea.
Excerpts, from press on her campaign headquarters in Brooklyn Heights, enough to trigger the gag reflex:
The Heights site offers opportunities for almost any mood the candidate might find herself in over the long course of the campaign. In search of patriotic inspiration, she might cast her eyes south to Liberty Island, where the green statue tirelessly hoists her torch. To reflect on the marvels of engineering of which man is capable, she might contemplate the bridge that tied the suburb to the city in the wake of the Civil War. If she’s hungry, there’s Shake Shack. — The Guardian
Critics said the campaign’s location in an office building some call the “Morgan Stanley building,??? in one of New York’s richest neighborhoods is hardly edgy.
“It’s located just a short ride across the bridge from Wall Street,??? America Rising, pro-Republican political action committee said. “This is all terrible news for Elizabeth Warren Democrats!??? — NY Daily News
The median household income in the area hovered above $100,000 in 2013, about double the national median, according to government data.
The neighborhood’s amenities and proximity to Manhattan have attracted celebrities. Comedian Lena Dunham moved to the area last year. Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, an Academy Award winner, also bought a home there with his poet wife.
Saint Ann’s, a private school with arts-intensive programming for pre-school through high school students, charges upwards of $25,000 per year and is popular choice of parents in the moneyed, creative class … —Reuters
Here’s the non-choice: Hold your nose and vote for Hillary Clinton because the alternative is the complete implementation of the White Christian and Heterosexual People’s Protection and Freedom Act.