The Georgia Republican Party couldn't quite manage to ratify their own party's platform last Saturday because, as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, by that point in the state party's convention, too many delegates had wandered off for drinking parties or whatever the hell it is that Georgia state party delegates do on Saturday nights that's more important than sticking around for the voting part of their jobs. The state party is expected to belatedly approve the document and maybe it will eventually appear on the party's website.
That will make this ungodly collection of every far-right paranoia you've ever heard of the official Georgia Republican Party platform, yet again confirming that Republicanism isn't so much a political movement at this point as a cult. The platform is a mess, consisting of every social paranoia Newsmax, OAN, or your racist uncle has ever so much as mentioned.
After the usual token opening blurbs and a section on "Election Integrity" that demands English-only ballots, an end to early voting, an end to automatic voter registration when getting a driver's license, and an explicit county right to ban "Dominion" voting machines—hello, Fox News!—we get to the meat. There's a section calling for Georgia to "actively cooperate" in "securing" the southern and only southern border. The usual drivel about "school choice," which started out as the means by which southern white parents could dodge desegregation of public schools and remains exactly the same thing a half-century later.
Then we start getting to the shrieking about purely invented culture war stuff, and it's clear that the party is just a gibbering collection of grievances at this point.
"The official position of Georgia schools shall be that there are only two sexes, biological males and biological females," and, "We oppose transgender normalizing curriculum and pronoun use." It's not just "Critical Race Theory" that makes an appearance, but "The 1619 Project,” “DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity," "Social Emotional Learning," and "Drag Queen Story Hour" come up, too, all of which are pretty much shorthand for "right-wing propaganda hack Christopher Rufo is my guiding light and I will promote whatever he says in whatever words he says it because I, as a lowly Georgia Republican, have no brain for doing brain-thinking on my own."
There's a specific section banning state funds from being used to "enable participation with, or show support for" what they call "Globalist Organizations," like the World Health Organization or the United Nations. These are paranoias from the decaying John Birch Society but filtered back through thinly veiled "globalist" rhetoric to make it even more clear that Georgia Republicans mean it in an antisemitic way. Opposition to the "Great Reset" and "(Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG)” seem to be there to fill out somebody's bingo card.
There's a nice little section in which the Georgia State Republican platform appears to refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the current president of the United States, griping that "President Trump" did a thing, but it was "immediately suspended by the current occupant of the White House." Gotta make sure everyone knows Georgia conservatives aren't fully on board with recognizing the legitimacy of the United States president, as if anyone anywhere has been unclear about that for the last two hundred damn years.
There's a very evasive section opposing the removal of "any" monuments or other honors honoring "veterans of any conflict," which would almost pass as a phrase not specifically intended to protect traitors of the Confederacy if they didn't tack on a reference to racist traitor monument Stone Mountain at the end of it.
Oh, and there's a total abortion ban, and the traitor-promoters have the unmitigated gall to toss it in alongside the declaration of the "basic human right" to refuse to consent to any vaccine, or to masking, even during a pandemic, or to any quarantine of anyone with an "active contagious infection," and these fuckwits are absolutely 100% going to bring back polio, turn it into a new state pandemic, and then blame the federal government for all of it. There's a section demanding a "study committee" to examine the COVID-19 response and why unnamed meanies were "downplaying infection-acquired immunity." There is a ban on prescribing puberty blockers because screw you, and tacked on at the end, there's a call to "Protect Georgia Food from Vaccines," and you just know that one is because some QAnon-riddled dish towel was ranting about Bill Gates and 5G and that "globalists" were trying to hide vaccines in their morning Cocoa Puffs.
Gibberish. That's what's to be taken from the soon-to-be-official Georgia Republican Party platform; almost every plank is paranoid, jingoistic gibberish copy-pasted from the fascist propagandists who don't give a flying damn about government or national defense or any of the rest of it, they just want to make sure their fellow Americans are harmed, good and hard and plenty, if those Americans are not loyal cultists through and through. It’s no wonder Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brand Raffensperger didn't even attend their own party's state convention. This isn't the riffraff of the base; these people are at least committed enough to Republicanism to pretend to be "delegates," at least until Saturday afternoon rolls around and they've had enough pretending at civics for the day. And there's nothing they can think of that needs fixing in the nation, nothing at all, except to make sure that "Drag Queen Story Hour" and "CRT" and "Globalist Organizations" get what's coming to them. The party is for nothing; it's only against whatever the last non-Republican said, anywhere, ever.
These people would absolutely have a heaping bowl of polio if some random "liberal" government official asked them, for the love of God, not to do that. That's all they live for now. That's all they are.
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This week on "The Downballot," we're joined by guest host Joe Sudbay and law professor Quinn Yeargain for a deep dive into major political developments in three states. First up is Arizona, where a key GOP retirement on the Board of Supervisors in jumbo Maricopa County gives Democrats an excellent chance to win their first majority since the 1960s. Then it's on to Arkansas, where citizens are working to overturn a Republican bill that purports to ban "critical race theory" in public schools by qualifying a referendum for the ballot. Finally, we hit Michigan, where Democrats just advanced a measure to have the state add its Electoral College votes to a multistate compact that would elect the president by the national popular vote.