The National Republican Campaign Committee, the Republican political organization with members who demand absolute fealty to a tax-dodging charity-embezzling rapist, intends to campaign against a Democratic Iraq War veteran through ad campaigns repeatedly emphasizing to their rapist-worshipping base that the Democratic candidate is gay.
The NRCC's website "instructs outside groups to include reminders of [Texas candidate Gina Ortiz Jones]’ sexual orientation" in their advertising, reports HuffPost. That is what, in the year 2020, Republicanism is clinging to as their top-tier attack fodder. Our fine Republican candidate may have embraced corruption, embezzlement, rape, and incompetence on such a scale as to cause 180,000 American deaths and counting, but watch out, our Republican voters. We hear tell that other candidate is gay.
It seems pointless to even bother condemning the NRCC here. The group has long been at the forefront of political grotesqueries; racism, misogyny, homophobia, religious exclusion, and bigotries of all other types have long been staples of Republican national campaign mailers. "Instructing outside groups" to run with ads and mailers showing pictures of Jones with her partner is the typical means by which the NRCC hopes to encourage the sort of unhinged, vitriolic attacks from far-right organizations and hate groups that the NRCC cannot quite get away with running itself.
It just seems odd, is all. This focus on sex, and implication of impropriety, hauled out yet again in the same exact manner it always is, untethered from the rest of the national reality.
This is the same week, after all, that the biggest evangelical advocate for Donald Trump specifically and Every Last Republican in general was exposed as allegedly having a "business partnership" with a strapping young poolboy that included the prominent decider of morality watching from a corner as the poolboy repeatedly had sex with his similarly evangelical wife.
Oh, but a Democratic candidate is gay. That's what House Republicans are going on about this particular day and week.
Mind you, the Republican Party's currently worshipped leader, the one the party has gutted principles for and reformed itself to support, still stands credibly accused of raping a woman in a public space. He has admitted to a pattern of sexual assaults. He paid off a pornographic film actress, illegally, to hide a sexual encounter that itself bordered on assault while his wife was home with his newborn child. Not only do all House Republicans know these charges—they have gone out of their way to protect Trump from them.
Oh, but some other American is gay. The Texas base will surely be alarmed by this assault on the traditional heartland values, the party values that the poolboy guy and the rapist represent. Make sure to put it in the mailers, says the team that demands absolute fealty to the rapist.
There was Roy Moore, of course. You might remember Republican Roy Moore, a perpetually lawbreaking religion-obsessed ex-judge who ran for office yet again in the Trump era and who was an accused stalker of underage girls. A pedophile, one accused of assaulting one teenager in a cabin, and another in an alley-parked car. National Republicans had not much to say about Moore, as Moore's Republican allies held press conferences to declare that lawbreaking alleged pedophile Moore was a religious man and therefore Good, and that attempting to have sex with underage girls was, in fact, a proper conservative and Biblical tradition.
The base was supposed to look past those things. Because Moore may have been a pervert, a lawbreaker, and would-be child rapist, but not gay.
Dennis Hastert comes to mind. Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was a power figure, the very personification of anti-Clinton Republicanism and political power. And he was sent to prison as a serial child molester in 2016 after admitting that as a high school wrestling coach he molested multiple young boys in his care.
It was simply presumed that the Republican base would look the other way on that. That they would learn of it, but think nothing in particular of it. Draw no lessons. Probe no further.
It's Americans who engage in long-term commitments with partners they love who are supposed to angry up conservative blood. That’s the thing the NRCC is confident will angry up conservative blood.
And indeed, the emphasis of the NRCC is look the other way. It might as well be the party motto at this point. One of the newest power brokers among House Republicans is Rep. Jim Jordan, who stands accused as a college wrestling coach of looking the other way after his athletes complained to him of molestation by the team's doctor. There are witnesses who say Jordan was told, and knew, and did nothing.
This is not a Hastert case, an after-the-fact revelation. House Republicans elevated Jordan to his current omnipresent position as shouting, semi-official House Trump defender after these allegations came to light. The charges were not just ignored; Jordan's blustering, furious denials of the abuse his athletes faced became the new face of Republican crime-denial—a symbol of Republicans accused of crimes, with witnesses to back up the crimes, thumbing their noses at the accusations and simply, collectively, deciding that their new movement is immune to such scrutiny.
Jordan wouldn’t be in his current position in the party if he had not been credibly accused of enabling a pedophile. It was his ability to deny, his ability to simply declare that he didn’t care how many accusers he had or what the evidence was, that provided his qualifications for similarly shouting down other Republican crimes and scandals. He is House Republicanism.
So child molestation is allowed, and rape is allowed, and entering a financial arrangement by which a wealthy man's poolboy can be coaxed into a threesome with the movement's self-declared arbiter of moral righteousness is reflective of nothing in particular, but the NRCC does think their conservative base will get worked up over an American being ... gay. They believe the conservative base to be exactly that shallow and depraved, and far be it from us to argue that point. They are a professional organization, after all. They no doubt have more data on their base than we do.
There's nothing to be surprised about. It is the essence of fascism, after all. Fascism declares that it is the foreigners, the wealthy Jews, the homosexuals, and the social advocates who are the true enemies, the ones who will bring down the nation and its values. All of those things are now hallmarks of the conspiracy-laced party. Fascism also declares that people of good standing in the movement, people who are not the targeted other, can freely break both laws and the movement's own supposed rules of propriety because their value to the movement—their attained power—simply nullifies such concerns.
I mean yes, the political arm of House Republicans is inhabited entirely by human shitstains; that goes without saying. Bigots, criminals, and outright traitors to the nation can find plentiful election support in this crowd. But that the Trump-enabling fascists would still seize upon "my opponent is gay" as the central focus of an actual political campaign is not surprising. We find ourselves here every other week, after all. This is how the party of justified assault, ignorable rape, and patriotic extortion spends its days. They comment on how their own biracial children are "statistically" more likely to be criminals. They shout speeches from within other planes of reality, ones in which a national pandemic is a hoax of the elites and Dear Leader’s greatness is sweeping away all that is frightening and bad. They break federal laws on campaigning from government perches with abandon, and mock those who object. They do crimes, and get caught, and get pardoned as reward.
Have fun with your little mailers, kids. Have fun egging your always-eager "outside groups" and hate-mongers into grotesque attacks that even you know you can't quite get away with, from your own perch. And God help you.
