Right now #NotDying4WallStreet is trending. Last night it was Logan's Run.
I’ve been excoriating one Donald J. Trump, ImPOTUS, in diary after diary for his malignant narcissistic personality disorder, for there being no bottom to his depravity, for the threat he is to the USA and the human species.
I’ve been remiss. He is far from alone. Whatever blood he has or will have on his hands is on the hands of every toady who supports him, every senator who voted not to remove him, every department head who follows his destructive orders, every propaganda operative who praises him, every shadowy 1% family or oligarch from whatever country who gives him money, and every burn-down-the-world moron who voted for him.
But in particular, it’s on the sociopathic hands of the Republican Party, the political power nexus of American evil.
You are not there for the GOP, any more than you are for Trump; he’s just more obvious about it than most.
You do not exist except as a source of wealth, whether by your work or your spending, or a threat if you step out of line. Something either to be controlled or removed. Why else would the GOP try to use a pandemic as a method of shoveling even more of the tax burden from the wealthy onto everyone else?
Now GOP mouthpieces are running interference for the Oval Office Virus’s attempts to abandon social distancing by sinking even lower than he has, at least expressly. They’re justifying it with a proposed American Holocaust.
You’ve already seen Texas GOP Lt. Gov.-thing Dan Patrick saying seniors would (translation: should) be willing to die to “save” the economy. He’s worried, of course, that people will see that capitalism isn’t set up to work for them. In saying this, he has provided the most shining example of how it isn’t, and has got Americans talking about a general strike on twitter.
And he’s encouraged more of these robotic-minded, heartless scum.
This tweet was deleted (which is why it’s a photo in someone else’s tweet). But it was written and posted. Its author had to be ratioed to learn there was something wrong with it. That’s because there’s something wrong with him. 2.5% of the population is 5 out of 200 Americans — you probably know that many if you count acquaintances — sentenced to the gruesome coronavirus death for being “expensive to maintain” and “not productive.”
2.5% is about 8 million people. That’s why I’m willing to use the word Holocaust. They are not there for this guy, or Trump, or Patrick, any more than the Jews and others who died in the Holocaust were for Hitler and his minions. Because something was very wrong with Hitler and his minions, same as with this guy, Trump and Patrick.
I’m going to coin a term: pathological hypocrisy. That’s hypocrisy so extreme that a normal mind would not be capable of producing it. These are the same people who screeched about “death panels,” who yowled “the government will decide whether your granny gets to live,” when Barack Obama took steps toward universal healthcare, which every other developed nation on the planet has. This isn’t just garden-variety hypocrisy. No, I’m going to go further, I’m going to call it sociopathic hypocrisy. It is beyond the capacity of a healthy mind and its presence in a person proves unfitness for power of any sort.
This is also a party and media noise machine spewing a constant stream of pathological lying. George W. Bush lied the nation into killing millions of Iraqis and tens of thousands of Americans in a fake-news war. Those deaths were not there for Bush, Cheney and gang, and except for a few administrative pawns, they all got off scot-free. If only it were only Trump.
Long before Trump’s blatant, sexually-predatory sexism, the GOP teamed up with the religious right to try to maintain or tighten male control over female bodies. Long before Trump’s rampant racism, Republicans were dogwhistling with, for example, the Willie Horton ads, to gain power in a nation in which the residues of slavery-justification are still a cultural force.
The rise of the right-wing noise machine whose core was Fox “News” and right-wing talk radio was enabled by Reagan getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine, which should be brought back.
Attempting an election cheat by stealing Democratic information wasn’t originated by Trump-aiding hackers, Russian or American: it was started by Richard Nixon’s gang of burglars, with much lower technology. He was forced to resign, but otherwise got off scot-free, pardoned by a fellow Republican, of course.
Trump is just the culmination, the logical extension of the darkest side of the American soul at work gaining power and wealth by fucking over others.
This is not a political party in the normal sense of a group of people united in a particular political vision. It’s a club of sociopaths who are united in placing the interests of themselves over all else. It is a tribe in the darkest sense, calling only its own members people. In its mind, the rest of humanity, even the people it is supposed to be serving, simply are not there except as source or threat. You and your needs and dreams and health and life, along with those of billions of other human beings, are nothing to these people. To them, you and everyone else are simply not there.
We all need to stop unconsciously normalizing the entire Republican Party, comforting ourselves with thoughts like “they’d never stoop so low,” “they’re people and people can’t be that bad,” etc. Yes, they can, and yes, they would and do. GOP Senators, except one, voted lockstep to keep a malignant narcissist who has committed crimes beyond counting in office. All over the nation the GOP is working to destroy America’s most sacred value — democracy — by gerrymandering, voter suppression, and legislating away powers of legitimately-elected governors. You could easily think of umpteen more examples. Them saying kill the elderly so we can keep making money is only the latest.
The media needs to get off the both-siderism. There aren’t two equal sides here, any more than “sexual predator” and “victim” or “white cop with gun” and “unarmed black kid” or “slave-owner” and “slave” are two equal sides. (Notice which side the GOP is on in each of these examples. Notice how sexual predation by male management against women employees has been part of the culture of Fox “News”. It all goes together.)
If you strip it down to its core, politics is really very simple. There are two kinds of politicians: 1) those who want to decrease income inequality and all the other inequities, and tell the truth about what they are doing because it is good; and 2) those who want to increase or at least preserve income and other inequalities, and lie about they’re doing because it’s bad. They claim to be good by using lies like “trickle-down economics,” “job creators,” even “conservative” (if they wanted things to stay the same they wouldn’t be pushing for greater inequality or to destroy democracy.)
To be in this tribe, you have to be anti-social at heart. You have to not care about other people, because if you care about other people you’ll care about other people as a whole. To be in this tribe you have to be willing to agree to sell your soul for a bigger house, fancier car, more expensive clothes and higher status, as if these things matter. You have to agree to be the sort of person who’d kill 8 million grandparents for Wall Street without a thought except whether it makes you look good or bad, in return for plentiful funding from your fascistic 1% masters — and think you’re a worthwhile person living a productive life.
Normal people don’t do that. Normal people do not advocate such things.
Enough normalization of the criminally insane, enough both-siderism and whataboutism about evil. These things are all lies. Media, get it straight and quit lying to your consumers. Americans, wake up and quit lying to yourselves. Knowledge is power, and the start of the solution to this problem is understanding it. When you do you’ll get it, and when everyone gets it the country and world will be fine: “I will not vote for anyone for whom I am not there.”
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