The Bare Minimum Standard Question for Republican Candidates
Businessman John Cox is appearing with a thousand pound bear as a campaign gimmick. Former Mayor Kevin Faulconer has given up on “ReOpen California” and started with “thousands of felons are coming.” Caitlyn Jenner has decided to turn against trans youth participation in sports.
All these candidates for California Governor, and for that matter any other seat, need to be asked one simple question: Where do you stand on the allegation about the 2020 election being stolen from Donald Trump?
It’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t question. Say “yes” and open yourself up to accusations of being a fringe candidate. Say “no” and the fringe will come after you.
“Maybe” should never be an option when asking this question, simply because the answer reveals so much.
The fringe is ramping it up in California. Schools are being picketed by COVID conspiracists. MAGA mini rallies are being planned. Tucker Carlson on Fox is getting even loonier.
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It used to be you could always critique Republican strategy and tactics by saying it reflected the view of monopoly capitalism. No more.
The party of “free enterprise” has become an advocacy organization for oligarchy. The closest example that comes to mind as to what they seek is the Russian Federation, the state that emerged in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union.
Seven decades of communism taught the people who’ve ended up running that country some important lessons, especially the one about the undesirability of trying to maintain the illusion of having a defined political organization run the show. (The Chinese, by integrating their military, have had more luck.)
What’s evolved in Moscow and environs is more akin to a nationalist version of organized crime. Fealty to a hierarchy of individuals who accumulated wealth and power through a racket where they write the rules as needed is the lynchpin of Russian society.
What modern day Republican leadership in the US of A has grasped is the need for relentless discrediting of any institution or individual posing an obstacle to their accumulation of wealth and power.
Some of this has been easy for them, given the individualism baked into our national identity, even as they take it to extreme levels.
What started as a movement for “less government” has now become a cover for acts of corruption and hostility toward a wide variety of institutions.
Thus you have Texas Senator Ted Cruz in a Wall Street Journal column openly warning CEOs opposing Republican threats to voting rights that they will be excluded from his party’s pay-to-play legislative operation. There was a time when this sort of admission would have been unheard of.
“This time,” he wrote, “we won’t look the other way on Coca-Cola’s $12 billion in back taxes owed. This time, when Major League Baseball lobbies to preserve its multibillion-dollar antitrust exception, we’ll say no thank you. This time, when Boeing asks for billions in corporate welfare, we’ll simply let the Export-Import Bank expire.”
The quest to woo segregationist Democrats in Southern states dating from the 1960s has evolved into acceptance and elevation of white nationalism as a core ideology.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is leading a GOP effort to protest a proposed Biden administration rule promoting education programs that address systemic racism and the legacy of American slavery, calling the guidance “divisive nonsense.” (In case you missed it, the right has been very upset in a cancel culture kind of way with the New York Times 1619 Project.)
https://twitter.com/Rana_MFW/status/1387753172580675587?s=20
At the core of our developing democracy has been societal agreement about the value of universal public education. Now that institution is treated as an obstacle to the kind of one-party rule envisioned by the right.
In Virginia, Republican candidates for office are circulating the disproved claim that state education officials are scheming to ban the teaching of advanced math in high schools.
Nationwide, GOP propaganda efforts include claiming the Critical Race Theory is a “Marxist” plot. (Yet none of them can accurately describe it.) And we shouldn’t forget the transgender youth endangering locker rooms everywhere.
The long-simmering discontent among conservatives seeing public education as cultural indoctrination has morphed from supporting vouchers and (mostly) ‘separate but equal’ charters to outright calls for the elimination of “government schools.”
https://twitter.com/irishrygirl/status/1389212604967661571?s=20
The days of the GOP claiming to be representative of mainstream morality along with being the party of law and order are gone, having been replaced with an ethos saying ‘it’s okay if we say it’s okay.’ Anything, and I mean anything, is ok.
Child molestation, child pornography, sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking, sexual harassment, and enabling all of the above by Repubicans and prominent supporters are amply documented in a series of more than 500 Tweets by the host of Common Ground Media. I quit looking after seeing the 40th linked news account referring to acts involving children.
Here’s a video with a review of some of the bigger names…
https://twitter.com/LibsInAmerica/status/1388450629396406275?s=20
It’s amazing to see the number of big name Republican politicians who are okay and/or actively abetting the whitewash of the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol.
You’d think the numbers might sway them: 444 rioters arrested (so far), 147 GOP votes to overturn the election, $30million in property damage, 2.3k National Guard troops deployed, 140 officers injured, 3 officers lost and 244 years of peaceful transition of power—gone.
https://youtu.be/AetJ4-pFmsg
Finally on the list of all the things Republicans are doing to us is their complicity in the COVID-19 crisis. Misinformation, lies, and making disobeying public health measures a litmus test for political correctness have been their gifts to the American public.
And now, apparently it’s going to be the gift that keeps giving; the light of the end the pandemic tunnel --herd immunity-- is now thought to be unattainable.
From Laura Clawson at Daily Kos:
Nearly half of Republicans still say they don’t want to be vaccinated, while parts of their party—like the Nevada Republican Party—are leveraging vaccine opposition for partisan gain. Republican officials across the country have downplayed the threat of the virus and refused to embrace public health guidelines, leading to nine out of the 10 states with the highest cases of COVID-19 by population being Republican-led, and Republican-controlled states also dominating the list of states with the lowest vaccination rates.
Anti-vaxxers continue to thrive on social media, often driven by profit motives. On top of all that, the U.S. continues to contend with serious inequities in vaccine accessibility, leading to a situation where, as ProPublica reported, “Counties with high levels of chronic illnesses or “comorbidities” had, on average, immunized 57% of their seniors by April 25, compared to 65% of seniors in counties with the lowest comorbidity risk.”
Add those things together and you get a situation where vaccination can give many people a strong level of protection and drive down overall rates of new COVID-19 cases, but herd immunity as it has been talked about over the past year—as the great hope for a return to normal—is not happening.
So, it only seems fair that all Republican candidates, whether they’re running for Governor or dogcatcher need to let us know where they stand. If they answer "yes," you'll know they support all of the above.
Charlie Pierce at Esquire:
It appears that the cult driving modern conservatism—and the Republican Party, which is its outward manifestation—has finally developed its infallible litmus test for its initiates. The cult is still based on monomaniacal loyalty to a vulgar talking yam, but now it has an article of faith through which that loyalty can be demonstrated.
These are the people who become, say, school board members, who later become state legislators, who later get elected to Congress or, at the very least, they pick the people who do. And right now, in many places, accepting the verified results of the last presidential election means you don’t get invited to the county committee’s monthly bean supper—or to the next Inaugural Ball, for all that. Which means that the ultimate test of your partisan loyalty is the depth of your allegiance to a fantasy….
It’s really time for the elite political media to accept this as a given. There is no question worthy of being asked of Republican politicians except “Do you accept the results of the 2020 election?” It is the issue that touches all the others. We allow ourselves only two political parties and, if one of them is permanently delusional, the whole system goes out of balance.
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May 4th will always hold a special place in my activist memories. So at the risk of sounding like an old geezer saying “back in the day,” I’m leaving this montage of Kent State set to Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young’s “Ohio.”
https://youtu.be/GI7-m919ynU
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Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com