Where's the Bottom?
Remember this?
It feels like a long time ago but this all happened a few weeks ago. Armed domestic terrorists invaded one of the three branches of our government, determined to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Their motivations were varied: some wanted to simply stop the votes from being counted, others wanted to assassinate members of Congress and hang the Vice President.
This isn’t overblown liberal hysteria. Hundreds of people have been arrested with more to come. Some are facing very serious charges that could see them spend years, even decades, in prison. The attack was planned weeks in advance and the police had advanced warnings about it. People died as a result of this insurrection, both during it and in the aftermath. The attackers had been encouraged to riot for years by Republicans and MAGA-adjacent instigators who used violent rhetoric to feed them lies. The woodpile was stacked high and doused with gasoline by these traitorous villains and on January 6th, the MAGA-in-Chief lit the match.
I sincerely believed that I was witnessing the end of the GOP that day. Surely, once Americans saw the violence and destruction that right-wing fearmongering and lies had wrought, they would reject the party and its representatives wholesale.
Stupid indeed, Forrest.
What a difference a month makes.
On the heels of the terror attack at the Capitol, news came out that members of Congress may have actually helped the insurrectionists by giving them private, prohibited tours of the building just days before. And during the attack, some of them actually tweeted out the locations of targets. Don’t take my word for it. The tweets are still up!
This is Lauren Boebert, a freshman Congresswoman from Colorado. She’s got quite the backstory. She has a lengthy criminal history, with arrests for disorderly conduct, reckless driving, interfering with police, assault, and others. Her husband is a treat too with a rap sheet that includes whipping his dick out at two women in public and domestic abuse. They both LOVE guns. So much in fact that she was caught just days after the Capitol attack trying to carry a firearm into Congress. Boebert is the WORST kind of person. She’s uneducated and ignorant about so many things. She received her GED only a month before running for Congress. And while a lack of education should never be used against a person or prevent them from having a say in America’s policies, there is something to be said for being willing to learn new things. Otherwise, you might end up in a Twitter fight with a Parkland student like so:
Yikes.
I’ll spare you the rest of her Twitter feed. Mostly it’s full of overblown nonsense, election lies, and transphobic crap. There’s plenty of violent rhetoric about guns and never backing down to liberals which is exactly the kind of mindset you want from someone we’re being told we need to “reach out to” and “find consensus” with.
That particularly classless tweet was aimed at David Hogg, a teenager who had the audacity to be a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and, after seeing 17 of his classmates mowed down by gunfire, become an activist for curbing gun violence. Crazy, I know. Kids these days. So sensitive.
Boebert here seems to be challenging David’s “toughness”, implying that he didn’t face down the killer and do more to stop him. Contrary to conservative conspiracy theories, that shooting DID happen and David WAS in the school when it did. He is a child survivor and for his trouble, he’s received death threats and been subjected to harassment, including one conservative commentator fantasizing about shoving a hot poker in his butt. Cool group of people you have there, GOP!
Hogg is back in the crosshairs of conservatives this week because of another lunatic freshman Congresswoman, Q-Anon believer, and overall terrible human being Marjorie Taylor Greene. This piece of garbage actually harrassed David on the street before he was scheduled to testify to Congress several years ago when he was still a child.
Here, she spews all sorts of anti-Semitic lies and nonsense. When people went through her social media history, there were multiple instances where she condoned and supported executing Democratic members of Congress. She even blamed wildfires on a SECRET JEWISH SPACE LASER! This crap would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. But she is a representative of the people who stormed the Capitol. She encouraged them and helped fuel the lies that led to unprecedented, historic violence. Her slavish loyalty to MAGA and the gun nuts (in a Venn diagram a perfect circle) has led her to spread the ridiculous notion that the shooting in Las Vegas that killed 60 people and wounded hundreds was staged.
These are just two examples of the kind of people that Republicans want to represent them. It doesn’t matter that they lie. It doesn’t matter that they spread baseless, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. It doesn’t matter that their violent rhetoric has led to actual deaths. It doesn’t matter that they seem to have no idea how governing works or what its purpose is. Forget that they have no real ideology or policies. There is just something about these gun-loving white women that drives their supporters wild.
And that something is white supremacy.
OMG, Matt, AGAIN with the white supremacy?
Yeah, again with the white supremacy. I’ll make you a deal: I’ll stop talking about it when the threat of a white supremacist mob storming our nation’s Capitol didn’t happen less than a month ago. I’ll stop talking about it when we hold the people responsible for it, responsible for it. I’ll stop talking about it when we begin to have real conversations about dismantling systemic racism. I’m sure it was just a coincidence that out of the dozens of congresspeople who have tried to hold their colleagues responsible for their words and actions, that MTG just happened to confront a newly elected Black woman:
And that’s what all this boils down to. Moderate and conservative white people cling to white supremacy and all the privileges it provides them and their children. They do not see it as supremacy. Instead, it’s merely what they’ve always known, experienced, and enjoyed. A veil has two sides — one that blinds the wearer and one that hides them from reality. It is in the tearing away of that division where we will find equality.
I go back to my original question: where is the bottom for you people? It wasn’t electing a racist, misogynist, sexual assaulter. It wasn’t when people marched with torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us”. It didn’t come when 400,000 of our fellow citizens died from COVID. The bottom was nowhere to be found when the President incited a mob of terrorists to storm the Capitol and shut down democracy. And it hasn’t come as members of congress harass children, spread lies, and work to undermine our system of government.
Irrational conservative hatred for progressive policies outweighs just about any other concern these “Americans” claim to care about. Gone are the days where we debate where we should build the new school. Now, we debate whether the school should exist at all and if it must, how many armed guards there should be and what time daily prayer begins.
For years, we have been told about a fictional Republican “civil war” that never existed at all. There aren’t two groups of conservatives battling for power within the party. It’s the same group of race-baiting fearmongers that have always been there. MAGA has simply allowed these people to voice their nonsense in public and without the requisite shame usually reserved for the crap they believe and espouse. They say the quiet parts loud and are damn proud to do so.
None of it helps. None of this leads to better governance or an improved society. America falls further and further behind the rest of the industrialized world in just about every aspect. Conservatives have no plan. They offer no solutions. Their only idea is to maintain white supremacy.
And to that, there is no bottom in America.