Every day it seems to get worse.
Every day, there is a new outrage, a new assault, a new torrent of lies. Every day our beloved country seems to fall deeper down a rathole from which there will be no escape. The MAGA movement, created (in part) and abetted by the Right Wing Propaganda Machine and a vicious, dark complex of Right-wing “think tanks” and “Christian” Right organizations, is destroying the very fabric of America. It’s time for us to admit it: A great many Americans hate the entire concept of the democratic republic. They want a Right-wing dictatorship, and they will use any tactic they can to achieve one.
And if we let them win in 2024, they will get what they want.
As other diarists have noted, Trump’s interview with Time magazine was nothing less than horrifying:
What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.
And Trump ONCE AGAIN threatened violence if things don’t go his way:
This is in addition to his despicable threat of a “bloodbath” if he loses, and to the many other occasions on which he has uttered threats.
And make no mistake: IN THE RIGHT-WING VISION OF AMERICA, WOMEN WILL BE THIRD-RATE “CITIZENS”:
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Banks tried to worm his way out of it later, but he said what he said.
ITEM: Have you suffered the tragedy of miscarriage? YOU ARE UNDER SUSPICION IN RED STATES.
For one thing, there are the miscarriages. Care for patients experiencing spontaneous pregnancy loss has been dramatically reshaped in hospitals across Republican states. The treatment for a miscarriage is to evacuate the contents of the uterus, either with a minimally invasive surgery or with medication, and these interventions, as it happens, are identical to those used in voluntary abortions. But with ambiguous, as-yet-uninterpreted but strongly worded laws now in effect in anti-choice states, providers don’t know what they are permitted to do for miscarrying patients. Many bans have so-called “life of the mother” exemptions, but these are vaguely worded, and carry strong penalties for providers if they get it wrong. How sick does a patient need to be before a doctor can abort the pregnancy that is killing her? Does she need to be dying? How close does she need to be to death?
These are not hypotheticals: since the Dobbs decision, accounts of dangerously delayed miscarriage care have been reported with alarming frequency. Providers are postponing life-saving abortions, often until a fetus dies on its own and cardiac activity can no longer be detected – an emotionally fraught and physically painful process that can take days or weeks. One woman in Texas told CNN about having to carry a dead fetus that her body would not expel for two weeks, as she searched in vain for a provider who would take the legal risk of giving her a D&C.
ITEM: They have big dreams:
Texas Republicans Met with a Group Advocating the Death Penalty for Women That Get an Abortion
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Virginia Republicans reject menstrual app privacy bill
A push to shield menstrual app data from search warrants failed in the General Assembly this week after Gov. Youngkin's administration said it opposed the change.
Why it matters: As many as a third of women use apps to track their periods, data that abortion rights supporters fear could one day be used to enforce post-Roe abortion restrictions.
State of play: The Senate passed legislation preventing authorities from obtaining that information, which is currently not subject to any privacy protections, last week in a 31-7 bipartisan vote.
What they're saying: Before the bill was voted down by a GOP-controlled committee in the House on Monday, Youngkin's administration went on record for the first time opposing the measure, per the Virginia Mercury.
And of course, women should be good little obedient girls. From one of the leaders of Project 2025:
Truly, a sick fuck of a human being.
Our lovely House speaker gets in on the act:
Let’s not kid ourselves: Christian Dominionist fanatic Gary North said it clearly:
“We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”
And what should be the penalty for “violating god’s law”? STONING TO DEATH.
Why stoning? There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost...executions are community projects--not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do `his' duty, but rather with actual participants...That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians.
Certain Religious Right figures have disavowed this, but their actions speak louder than their lying, hypocritical words. Major efforts are underway to defund and/or destroy public schools in Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, and other locales. Right-wing fanatics openly call for the destruction of the public school system and its replacement by “Christian” madrassas.
The Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction wants to CONVERT public schools into little Fundamentalist indoctrination centers:
And of course, the Radical Right wants to wage all-out war on the LGBTQ community.
Shortly after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) appeared to express support for Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion that the high court could review other precedents that may be deemed “demonstrably erroneous,” including those affecting the LGBTQ community.
One of the cases mentioned by Thomas was Lawrence v. Texas, which prevents states from banning intimate same-sex relationships. The landmark 2003 ruling struck down a 1973 Texas law that criminalized the act of sodomy. But as Roe was overturned, Paxton said he would defend the state’s defunct sodomy law if the Supreme Court were to follow Thomas’s remarks and eventually revisits Lawrence.
The Religious Right has been engaged in a monstrous project in Africa to destroy abortion, birth control, and gay people themselves. Uganda is a prime example:
The irony, though, is that the United States has also played another role in the situation. While right-wing Republican lawmakers in various U.S. states are currently engineering a new wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation, a slate of proselytizing, activist U.S. religious groups have for years campaigned in parts of Africa, especially in countries like Uganda, and sown the seeds for even more hard-line measures there.
In 2020, London-based OpenDemocracy found that more than 20 American religious organizations advocating against LGBTQ rights, safe abortion, access to contraceptives and comprehensive sex education had spent at least $54 million furthering their agendas in Africa since 2007. Close to half that figure was spent in conservative, predominantly Christian Uganda alone, where religious advocates advocate for gay “conversion therapy” and tout supposed success stories of “ex-gay” people.
Is there any doubt—IS THERE ANY DOUBT—that all of this is a rehearsal for what LGBTQ Americans can expect if the Radical Right wins this year? Btw, Ted Cruz wants us to forget this incident from November 2015, but I haven’t:
Last weekend Senator Ted Cruz, along with fellow GOP presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, spoke at a conference in Des Moines headed up by a man who advocates the execution of gay people -- per his interpretation of the bible -- and who made his call for mass extermination once again, onstage at the event, the National Religious Liberties Conference. Pastor Kevin Swanson has said in the past that Christians should attend gay weddings and hold up signs telling the newly married gay and lesbian couples that they "should be put to death." He was an advocate of Uganda's infamous "Kill the Gays" bill, which he saw as a model.
At the confab over the weekend, where he introduced Huckabee, Jindal and Cruz to the audience -- and where Ted Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, an anti-gay Tea Party crusader, was a star speaker -- he reiterated his death penalty call, adding that homosexuals should first be given some time to repent before the executions begin.
Kevin Swanson saying that parents should drown their children rather than let them read Harry Potter. No joke.
Finally, remember what Trump’s own lawyer at the Supreme Court, who is himself a viciously hate-filled opponent of women’s reproductive rights, claimed as Trump’s right under “Presidential Immunity”:
--ASSASSINATE POLITICAL RIVALS
--STAGE A MILITARY COUP
--CREATE A FRAUDULENT SLATE OF PRESIDENTIAL ELECTORS
--SELL NUCLEAR SECRETS TO A FOREIGN ADVERSARY
And remember—Trump’s lawyers have argued that Trump IS NOT BOUND TO UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION. From 2023:
Donald Trump has sought to have a lawsuit filed against him in the state of Colorado dismissed, by arguing that, as president, he was not required to “support” the US Constitution.
The bizarre legal defence, put forward by the former president’s attorneys, comes in response to a suit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which seeks to have him disqualified from the ballot in the state under the 14th Amendment.
A clause of the amendment, which passed into the Constitution in 1868, bans those who “engaged in insurrection” against the United States from holding any civil, military, or elected office without the approval of two-thirds of the House and Senate.
Mr Trump’s lawyers are arguing that the phrasing of the clause – section three – does not apply to all officers of the United States, “but only those who take an oath ‘to support the US Constitution’”.
“The Presidential oath, which the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment surely knew, requires the President to swear to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution — not to ‘support’ the Constitution," said the filing, obtained by news outlet Law and Crime.
Trump also asserted that since the 2020 election was “stolen” the Constitution should be terminated.
Enough.
By god, enough is enough.
You may consider me a broken record on Get Out the Vote. There’s a reason I’m this way. And I need to state some hard truths.
SIGNING AN ONLINE PETITION DOES VERY LITTLE.
LIKING A POST ON DKOS (EVEN MINE!), FACEBOOK, OR TWITTER DOES VERY LITTLE.
“DEMANDING” BETTER BEHAVIOR FROM RIGHT WING MISCREANTS IS LAUGHABLE.
Only VOTER MOTIVATION and MONETARY CONTRIBUTIONS can do the job!
Here is a link to my latest GOTV effort. I hope you’ll look at it and spread it around.
It is our sacred duty to save our country from the fascists who seek to strangle it to death. Those of us on Daily Kos know how grave the danger is. We must help spread the word, and beat back the Right Wing movement that craves a dictatorship. We must roar it out from depths of our being:
WE CHOOSE FREEDOM! AND WE WILL WORK TO SAVE IT!
Let’s go for it
