#republicans are a scourge

[anerdyfeminist]

How come so many of the worst republican bitches are bleach blonde?

[hellstobetsy]

I've occasionally complained that Leftists didn't seem to notice when Biden passed the Child Tax Credit, which cut child poverty in half, and thus didn't mobilize to save it from expiring. Well, a long-term renewal just made it through the House, and Senate Republicans are making noises about killing it because it would make Biden look good if Biden was allowed to cut Child Poverty in half again, so now would be a great time to call your Senators and make some fucking noise.

[15millionfireflies]

I would make such a great fascist

[anexperimentallife]

JD Vance Just Blurbed a Book Arguing That Progressives Are Subhuman

As I keep pointing out, anyone who has studied 1930s-40s German history will tell you that today's GOP is cribbing directly from the Nazi playbook. Even their "support" of Israel's genocidal colonialist settler state (and lip service "support" of non-Israeli Jews) is primarily rooted in a combination of antisemitism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia. (Gift link at the bottom of the article excerpt.)

Michelle Goldberg writes:

---

In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”

Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.

Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.

Vance provided the first blurb on the “Unhumans” book jacket. “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people,” he wrote. “Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Other endorsements come from Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., a key figure in his father’s presidential campaign. The foreword is by Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist.

Now, it is always possible that Vance recommended “Unhumans” without actually reading it, a practice that’s not unheard-of in book publishing. But unless and until he credibly distances himself from it, we should take him at his word that he shares the book’s analysis. After all, some of the language in “Unhumans” resembles his own rhetoric.

“The great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists must occur on all terrains of society they currently possess and on those they aim to seize,” write Posobiec and Lisec, adding, “It is achievable but only with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.” (They mean Joseph McCarthy, another of the book’s icons.) Compare that to what Vance said on the alt-right podcast “Jack Murphy Live” in 2021, when he argued that Republicans, upon taking power, should purge their opponents the way Iraq’s government once purged members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left,” said Vance. “We need like a de-Baathification program, but like a de-wokification program in the United States.” He argued that “we don’t have a real constitutional republic anymore,” suggesting that Donald Trump need not be limited by the norms of republican governance. Trump, said Vance, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” And if the courts try to stand in his way, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

You can and should laugh at Vance’s melodramatic self-importance and creepy subcultural fixations. (On “Jack Murphy Live,” Vance respectfully references Curtis Yarvin, a right-wing blogger popular in reactionary Silicon Valley circles who calls for replacing democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy.) It’s good that Democrats have found, in the epithet “weird,” simple language to describe the 4Chan side of the Republican Party. But in the Venn diagram between “weird” and “dangerous,” there’s a lot of overlap.

“Much like the United States founding fathers, Franco and his fellows saw themselves as rebels intended to overthrow a corrupt, tyrannical government that aided and abetted murder and rape as well as other repugnant sins,” write Posobiec and Lisec. We should take seriously the possibility that Vance and his fellows see themselves the same way.

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/opinion/jd-vance-fascism-unhumans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.A04.-t6I.Jie2a3Abas5a&smid=url-share

[ladiablesse]

republicans: haitians are a degenerate cannibalistic subhuman scourge on the earth and should be forcibly removed from our society

liberals: haha silly old men,,,,donald trump thinks haitians are cannibals because they eat oranges and he’s mr. orangeman hahaha,,,can’t wait to see what SNL has to say about this!!

[whatbigotspost]

LET’S GO ABOBOS!!!!!!!!!

But for real, one of the few bright spots in the US political landscape at present is that voters keep telling republican pro life assholes how wrong they are.

[mariacallous]

K-12 education has captured its share of headlines over the last few years. Schools—and, specifically, local school boards—became a lightning rod for anger about the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. From the first weeks of the pandemic, Republicans accused Democratic leaders of being too slow to reopen schools. That accusation gained potency as evidence mounted that schools hadn’t been the vectors of COVID-19 transmission that experts initially feared. Sensing vulnerability, Democrats became reluctant to engage on K-12 issues, and Republicans such as Glenn Youngkin showed that Democrats wouldn’t put up much of a fight if education became a battlefield for culture war conflicts. The result was a dizzying, maddening stretch where schools were embroiled in controversies over critical race theory and transgender students’ rights when education leaders needed to focus on pandemic recovery.

Now, as memories of the pandemic recede, the politics of education are changing. Democrats are talking more about schools, emboldened by the selection of a former schoolteacher, Tim Walz, as Vice President Harris’s running mate. Republicans, for their part, have harnessed discontent with public schools into an aggressive push for private school voucher programs that threaten America’s public education systems.

The platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties, along with the education-related portions of Project 2025, provide a glimpse of where K-12 education might be headed.

The Democratic platform

The Democrats’ 2024 platform is light on specifics, with more attention to the current administration’s accomplishments and the would-be Harris administration’s support for some broadly defined goals (e.g., reducing chronic absenteeism). To some extent, the lack of specifics stands in contrast to both the Democrats’ 2020 platform—which, for example, pledged a tripling of Title I funds for high-needs schools—and more detailed 2024 proposals for early childhood education (e.g., free, universal pre-K) and higher education (e.g., free community college). 

The 2024 platform does contain relevant, specific ideas outside of its “Education” section. For example, Democrats propose rebates for school districts that purchase electric school buses—an idea grounded in research on the harms of students’ exposure to toxins. They also offer specific proposals to reduce gun violence (amid a scourge of school shootings) and to strengthen civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ children and students of color (frequent targets of culture war attacks).

Notably, some of the platform’s clearest statements on education describe what Democrats oppose. That includes private-school voucher plans and policies hostile to transgender youth that have become increasingly popular among Republican leaders.  

The Republican platform

Republicans’ 2024 platform is also light on policy specifics. The platform has a few ideas that have long been cornerstones of GOP education politics. That includes ending teacher tenure—an idea that would require local or state action and confront fierce opposition from teachers’ unions.

The platform has language about resisting political indoctrination in schools—while seeming to propose some indoctrination of its own. This includes proposals to “support schools that teach America’s Founding Principles and Western Civilization” and “promote Fair and Patriotic Civics Education.” Along similar lines, former President Trump recently described a bewildering plan to create a credentialing body to “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children.”

Substantively, the most important part of the Republican education platform might be its support for universal school choice. In about a dozen states, Republicans have recently created or expanded education savings account (ESA) programs that make public funds available to pay for private school or other educational expenses. Critics of these programs—myself included—argue that they violate our basic traditions, benefit the wealthy at the expense of others, and are not well supported by research.

Project 2025

If the Republican platform is light on policy proposals, Project 2025 certainly is not.

Along with my colleagues Rachel Perera and Katharine Meyer, I recently wrote a more detailed piece that analyzes Project 2025’s education proposals. Project 2025 proposes severe cuts to the resources and protections available to the country’s poorest, most marginalized children. For example, it proposes to eliminate the Head Start program (for young children in poverty), discontinue federal Title I funding (for schools that serve low-income children), and kneecap IDEA (federal legislation that supports students with disabilities). It’s especially harsh on transgender children, with proposals aimed at reorienting civil rights enforcement around “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory” and stripping Title IX protections from transgender students.

In other words, Project 2025 sets its sights on the programs that serve America’s neediest students. It would essentially terminate the federal government’s long-running role in addressing inequities that arise in locally governed school systems.

Notably, many key Project 2025 proposals would require an unlikely degree of congressional cooperation. This includes some of the highest-profile proposals, such as eliminating the U.S. Department of Education (a vaguely defined idea that’s unlikely to materialize in its most extreme form). Still, a second Trump administration could enact some Project 2025 proposals unilaterally. That includes rolling back civil rights protections and replacing civil servants in the U.S. Department of Education with political appointees after reinstating Schedule F.

Taking stock

It’s fair to say that Democrats’ plans for federal education policy are modest. Democrats aren’t proposing a markedly stronger role for the federal government. On K-12 education, Democrats remain in a mostly defensive posture as they offer a more “conservative” agenda that protects against the GOP’s increasingly radical efforts.

Just what those GOP plans might be—and just how radical they are—depends on whether the true Trump administration plan is the Republican platform, Project 2025, or some combination of the two. That remains to be seen.

[saintmeghanmarkle]

Even the republicans and anti-monarchists have had it with Meghan's lies! How "...the grim triumph of the race grifters" affects us all. by u/Mistressbrindello

Even the republicans and anti-monarchists have had it with Meghan's lies! How "...the grim triumph of the race grifters" affects us all. This is an interesting article because it is suggesting that smearing the royals has political consequences and is a shameful "watering down" of racism. Anti-monarchists in the UK have previously been supportive of the couple but are portrayed here as sick of this ridiculous "circus". While I have always expected the right wing Daily Mail or Telegraph to support the monarchy, left wing Spiked criticising the Sussexes is a new departure. You don't have to be pro-monarchy to be sick of what Meghan has done to her family(ies). On Endgame they say:"..as chance would have it, the only royals to come out of Endgame unscathed are Harry and Meghan. Apparently, even a news man as dogged as Scobie couldn’t dig up so much as a trowel-full of dirt on the notoriously grounded and uncontroversial couple.I know what you’re thinking. Why don’t we just ignore these tawdry wankers? And you’re right. Indeed, even some of Harry and Meghan’s former liberal cheerleaders have been quietly backing away from the crime scene in recent months, seemingly – finally! – realising that they fell for a couple of chancers pushing a story they wanted to hear: of racist royals and our rotten old institutions....Even if they won’t openly admit it, it is slowly but surely dawning on the liberal-left types who once backed the Sussexes that they are an absurd couple with a complicated relationship with the truth..."This all matters. Not for the royal family’s sake. Again, I would struggle to care less. (I’m sure the palaces are ample comfort for being called names.) But what we are witnessing is the shameful watering down of racism, a social scourge we must always take deadly seriously, to a form of etiquette (at best) and a weapon (at worst) – as something to be used to have out family beefs, drive book sales or bring down institutions you already dislike.Deeper than that, we’re witnessing the triumph of a new racial narrative – which paints Britain as racist and rotten to the core, in which people are full of bigotry and bias even if they don’t realise it, and in which we must forever interrogate our ‘privilege’ (unless you’re a certain Duke and Duchess, who are the real victims in all this)."Lol! I've quoted big chunks but the article is worth a click - especially if you're British and sick of the whole British people/tabloids/royals etc are racist diatribe. I'm glad former fans of TW are as fed up of this.The full article from Spiked: https://ift.tt/uhA8EbD post link: https://ift.tt/rvtYkPe author: Mistressbrindello submitted: December 01, 2023 at 05:28PM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit

[georgefairbrother]

On March 30th, 1979, BBC News reported:

"...Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Airey Neave has been killed by a car bomb as he left the House of Commons car park. The bomb, said to be highly sophisticated, exploded as Mr Neave began driving up the exit ramp…So far two groups, the Provisional IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army, have claimed they carried out the killing…"

Airey Neave suffered catastrophic injuries and subsequently died at Westminster Hospital. The assassination coincided with the beginning of the general election campaign, and he was set to be Northern Ireland Secretary in the event of a Tory win. He was known as a proponent for using strong military force against Irish republican paramilitaries. The INLA (who it appears were the real culprits), in their justification, described this as 'rabid militarist calls for more repression against the Irish people'.

Margaret Thatcher, Tory Opposition Leader, described Airey Neave as 'one of freedom's warriors. Courageous, staunch, true. He lived for his beliefs and now he has died for them'.

Labour Prime Minister (although not for long), Jim Callaghan, promised that 'No effort will be spared to bring the murderers to justice and to rid the United Kingdom of the scourge of terrorism'.

Airey Neave was a decorated World War Two veteran (MC and DSO) who had achieved the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He was the first British officer to escape from Colditz Castle.

In April 2019, The Express and other media reported that the investigation into the assassination would be reopened, with focus on a person of interest named Harry Flynn who’d been previously identified as the INLA’s chief of staff. According to the Belfast Telegraph, Britain had attempted to extradite Flynn from France in 1987 where he was serving five years for gun running, but 'failed as his crime was deemed political'.

As of 2019, according to reports, Flynn was aged 65 and ran a pub in Mallorca. There doesn’t appear to be any further reporting on this, so we can assume the case is still open.

[arpov-blog-blog]

Trump news: Forget Project 2025. Steve Bannon is laying out what’s really coming.

..."As the man who constructed the intellectual framework of the MAGA movement, Bannon had for years preached the importance of building a populist message with broad appeal across many demographics. His ideal GOP would keep its focus on battling the “elites” rather than get distracted by culture-war squabbles; scorn squeamish centrists too afraid of violating democratic norms to shake up or burn down the governing institutions; and reject the old ways of conservatism in favor of extreme isolationism. This, he prophesied, would lead to an unbreakable coalition that could fundamentally reshape the nation’s politics for the next half-century.

Bannon has three concrete goals. First, and most important, the mass deportation of every immigrant lacking permanent legal status who arrived during the Biden administration. This is key to his entire philosophy, and what he sees as the crucial differentiation that sets right-wing populism apart from left-wing populism: Immigrants, along with elites, are the scourge of working-class people, according to Bannon. It’s a broadly nativist pitch: Elites bring immigrants into the country to take jobs from working-class people, but immigrants should not be spared any mercy for unwittingly stealing jobs from real Americans. Bannon urged Trump to appoint a “deportations czar” to lead the campaign. Winters, at one point, dismissed the Republicans who focused on “immigrant crime” as thinking too small. “We’re not just removing criminals,” she said on a Saturday morning show. “We’re removing a monolith, a group of people who really are the antithesis of the populist agenda that undergirds the MAGA movement.”

[wagahai-da]

democrats are just theodicists who believe that bad things happen because the republicans are the scourge of god (democracy) sent to punish the non-believer (third party voters and electoral-skeptics)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The tipping point. ::  April 7, 2023

Robert B. Hubbell

         I cannot leave the events of today without comment. In three respects, America reached a tipping point on Thursday. It may take months or years for us to appreciate that fact, but historians will mark April 6, 2023, as the high water mark of the retrograde, anti-democracy movement of MAGA extremism.

         In particular, the naked racism of Tennessee Republicans in expelling two Black legislators but not a white legislator for identical conduct in protesting gun deaths of schoolchildren has removed any ambiguity about the racial animus of MAGA extremism. One commentator described the events in the Tennessee legislature as the birth of “the New Civil Rights Movement.” Because that second birth occurred under the scourge of gun violence directed at children, the merger of those movements will be unstoppable. We witnessed two powerful voices emerge in Tennessee on Thursday. They will become national leaders in a movement that will attract new constituencies to the civil rights, anti-gun movement.

         The second tipping point was the publication of the Pro Publica report that exposed the grotesque corruption of Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars (possibly millions) in the form of free travel from a Republican megadonor and failed to report those gifts as required. In truth, the corruption of Justice Thomas has been replicated by other members of the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court. We need only scratch the surface to find that corruption. There is no turning back. And make no mistake, John Roberts has presided over the open wound of corruption during his entire tenure. He must be held accountable for his dereliction of duty, as well.

         Finally, Idaho has criminalized the constitutionally protected right to travel across interstate lines. MAGA extremists have converted the Dobbs ruling that there is no right of privacy in the Constitution into a perverse mandate to deny Americans other rights that are plainly protected by the Constitution. They are doing so under the guise of regulating reproductive liberty. That strategy will lead to the demise of the GOP. Indeed, we have seen the seeds of their destruction in Kansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[thingsofimportanceanddelight]

All of this, but also, the influence of circular logic of Prosperity Gospel on Republican policy is so, so marked. "If you are Righteous and Deserving and Good, God will bless you with riches and nice things, and if you are Wicked and Unworthy and Bad, God will curse you with poverty and bad things. Therefore, if you have been blessed with riches and good things, it means that you are Righteous, and if you have been cursed with poverty bad things, it means that you are Wicked. Unless, of course, you are Righteous but have been cursed with poverty and bad things, in which case they are tests God has set for you to prove yourself Worthy. But in either situation, there is no need for anyone to provide help -- after all, God helps those who help themselves! -- because either you are being tested and must suffer for it, or you are Wicked and must suffer for it."

Just thinking about how republicans are going after normie sex shit like "internet porn" and "dildos" now

we fucking told y'all

[leftistfeminista]

In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”

Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.

Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.

[nando161mando]

Billionaires funded anti-vaxx disinformation campaigns to bring humanity's scourges back again.

Vaccines doubled the human lifespan in a century and billionaires hate the elderly.

https://www.thestreet.com/personalities/billionaire-investor-has-a-controversial-take-on-social-security-medicaid

Billionaires want the 19th century, when people died at 45, dying still in the traces.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/

https://www.sorryantivaxxer.com/

[whatbigotspost]

I think we can only survive together and most conservatives think they can only survive alone and that’s the basic difference that permeates everything in their shit world view. Not that anyone asked me.