The Big Distraction

While this country continues – systematically and on a daily basis – to fail its regular citizens, the GOP continues its Trumpist bandwagon to divide the country by distracting everyone with the shiny objects that make up the culture war.

If contemporary Republicans are to be taken seriously, the very fabric of our nation is at risk of being destroyed because a beer brand sent a can of beer to a transgender woman influencer. If contemporary Republicans are to be taken at face value, Target associates should be threatened with murder because the company is allegedly selling bathing suits that encourage “tucking” by boys so they can pass as girls. (The fact that this is just a lie does not matter. It sounds true). If contemporary Republicans are to be given a millisecond of your attention, asylum seekers are no different from “illegals” and must be hated when not feared, but excluded either way.

On the other hand, we have Republicans in congress who gleefully helped Donald Trump add fully a quarter of what constitutes today’s sovereign debt, but now refuse to raise the debt ceiling to pay their own bills because they believe it will hurt Joe Biden and the Democrats.

The Republicans do not care to make America better – they now care only to make America a safe space for their nominally Christian white supremacy. In order to do this, they now openly embrace fascism and say democracy is a failed experiment.

None of this is an exaggeration, as evidenced by the links accompanying each allegation.

Yesterday, sunshine fascist Florida Governor Ron DeSantis began his run for President. I do not know how it will fare because I have long ago stopped pretending to understand what motivates the Republican rank-and-file, apart from its reliance on hatred, division, and the culture war.

I heard him say via a radio report that, “the woke mind virus is basically cultural Marxism.” These are words that mean nothing in that order. This is just shorthand for the terminally online alt-right whom DeSantis is courting. “Woke mind virus” is a term used by cis-gendered older white people to express their misunderstanding, hatred, and fear of anything and anyone even mildly supportive of any ethnic, religious, racial minority or non-gender-conforming person. It is what fuels “all lives matter” and the so-called “Moms for Liberty.”

This is P.W. Botha’s Republican Party. They are the Christianist minority. If they don’t like it, it must be abolished and destroyed. They will bully and legislate the “woke” until they are too afraid to show up or speak up. They will take their AR-15s and threaten to murder the “woke”. They will erase the “woke” because they are little more than nihilist eliminationists pretending to be patriots.

“Cultural Marxism” – can you imagine Karl Marx, a bourgeois German philosopher of the mid-19th century having any inkling of what culture would be like in 2023? This term is not new. It was coined a couple of decades ago by the likes of Botha fan Pat Buchanan. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory because somehow the Republicans have magically paired an obsessive support for Israel with a pretty transparent fundamental anti-Semitism.

This is, I suppose, what one gets when one marries a political party to one set of religious sects and a gun lobby.

I am not someone who thinks that the squad are especially influential or persuasive, but they are pretty good at messaging. I am also not someone who thinks it’s cool to shit on Biden because he’s old. He won in 2020 precisely because he is not busy wasting time on Twitter. But I am someone who believes that immigration is a positive, regardless of someone’s visa status. I believe that gay and lesbian and trans and bi and any other queer or non-gender-conforming person has as much of a right to live a happy life, free from discrimination or violence as any other person. I believe that democracy is good, and that people who say “we’re a republic not a democracy” are idiots, because we are both – a democratic republic insofar as we have a popular vote and no monarchy.

I just sometimes wish that all of this idiocy and hypocrisy would end. This country – where guns are the biggest killer of children – is so deeply sick yet here we are talking about underpants sold at Target and a pretty pedestrian brand of beer.