Archives

Trump’s (And Putin’s) Goal Is To Destroy The Federal Government

Nov14

Trump selects Robert F Kennedy Jr to lead HHS, top US health agency

Trump appears ready to select Robert F. Kennedy Jr to head HHS. Nothing in your grocery stores can ever be trusted to be safe ever again.

I’ve been thinking so bear with me here. I said years ago (2015, when Trump first ran) that he was Putin’s man and that Putin was trying to engineer the same strategy against the US that the US had engineered against the USSR – support dissatisfied factions within the US, fund them, arm them if need be (easy in the US), and try to shatter the country into independent states (Balkanize it).

The goal, in my opinion, is to remove the United States as a nuclear threat on the world stage without an open war. The weapons lesson from the USSR is that the rest of the world will pressure small independent states to give up any nukes on their soil. That’s what happened to former states of the USSR.

Why does that come into play right now? Trump is nominating absolute morons to head government departments, plus Musk is leading a group whose goal is to cut 2/3rds of the government’s work force.

What does that mean? It means that the federal government will ultimately be viewed as incompetent and untrustworthy at anything. And what does that accomplish? Blue states, like California or New York will likely respond with their own agencies for environmental, food safety, labor, and other issues. But if the blue states do that, where will they get the money? They’ll threaten to stop sending federal taxes to Washington. And if they do that, then the “United” part of the United States is effectively over.

From there, it’s a short step to declaring outright independence because those states won’t need Washington anymore. In fact, if I were Putin and California declared its independence, I’d be among the first to recognize it. And then I’d whisper in Donny Numbnuts ear to “let them go” and “rule over the part that loves you”. California might even play the China card, forming a defense pact with China against Washington.

And from there, you slowly but surely end up with a denuclearized, Balkanized North America. Nobody would want a nuclear armed Wyoming. Nobody in their right mind would want a nuclear armed Missouri or Arkansas. And even as right wing as it is, Texas might see this as their shot at getting out from under Washington once and for all. The northeast would likely secede and form immediate ties to Europe and Canada.

We already know Michael Flynn plans to get rid of all but one of the 17 US Intelligence agencies. The United States will be effectively blind in terms of intelligence even if Trump does leave office in four years. And remember, Trump has already, since being elected, questioned whether the 22nd amendment even applies to himself.

In 2016, I said you were watching the death of America. Now we’re watching the corpse being eaten by maggots. Stop thinking this can be saved. It can’t. The future is going to lie in the blue independent states of North America, and most of the red states are going to be third world hellholes.

Conservatism Is A Tool Of White Male Patriarchy

Oct1

I’ve not written here in this blog for years, but I suppose I should start again. So here are thoughts from today.

Everything about American conservatism (and by extension, Libertarianism, which is a distinctly American creation) is aimed at conserving white male supremacy.

It always has been. Those of us raised with those “values” foremost in our lives have had to undergo deprogramming processes, because yes, inflicting that on people is a kind of programming.

It’s a programming that teaches that poverty is a moral failing and not the inevitable result of capitalism, in order to defend capitalism from charges of cruelty. It’s programming that has to constantly chant that women must be submissive, because if women being submissive were the natural order of things, it wouldn’t have to be indoctrinated into women their entire lives. It’s programming that requires scapegoats, to distract young white men from realizing that wealthy elites are picking their pockets too, just not quite as hard as they’re picking everyone else’s pockets. People of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people – anyone different enough that the wealthy can rapidly build a program (note that word) of easily disseminated but believable lies against is useful to the wealthy elites as a scapegoat to divide working class people.

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” ― Lyndon B. Johnson

Even “economic conservatism” is part of this preservation of the white patriarchy by ensuring that wealth already ill gotten is not to be attacked for being either an expression of too much greed or outright cruelty to those it was taken from. Note that I make a distinction between traditional economic conservatism and what I call “fiscal efficiency”. Government often is not the most efficient at its use of available funds to accomplish a task. The expanded Child Tax Credit that was enacted during the pandemic is a good example. It got money into the hands of families that needed it, lifted many children out of poverty, and avoided creating a large government agency to attend to that task by using information that the IRS already had to directly send checks to those families. Finding efficient ways to help government function isn’t limited to economic conservatism so it’s not part of that ideology.

We have a long road to travel as a nation but we have workable blueprints in front of us from other nations. We know that there are multiple different kinds of healthcare systems that are both more financially efficient than the “free market” and that ensure that everyone has coverage. Even Adam Smith noted that healthcare is not a normal consumer good.

And while I despise capitalism, I’ve not yet seen a working example of pure socialism or communism that works in a manner that makes any sense to me. So for now, I support the the concept of social democracies with tight regulation of economies, harsh limits on upper income levels, and the creation of national wealth funds. I completely support the 100% taxation of any assets that any individual has over $1 billion dollars. All such assets don’t have to be sold off but instead could be transferred to a national wealth fund to subsequently feed government budgets from dividends, stock sales, etc. If the size of such funds is problematic, they could be divided into multiple funds that have to compete with one another. There’s a lot of details to work out but other nations have national wealth funds that contribute to the overall good of the nation so why can’t the US?

In short, I’ve never seen one aspect of modern American conservatism that isn’t laser focused on preserving white male supremacy. Every aspect of conservatism has at least one side effect, if not more, that is beneficial to white male supremacy. Modern American conservatism, since at least the 1960’s, has been nothing but a tool of a primarily white fascist elite and with every passing year, that becomes more and more obvious.

The Southern Strategy Is Real

Apr11

The Southern Strategy is real and I have the proof – a PDF of a May 17, 1970 NY Times article where they interviewed Kevin Phillips, the man who created the Southern Strategy for Richard Nixon.

Kevin-Philips-0908__067_bw_guestcrop-640x360

Kevin Phillips, the man who created the Southern Strategy

Here are some sample transcribed quotes from the article.

Kevin Phillips said, “All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even Jake the Snake [Senator Jacob Javits] only gets 20 percent. From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that … but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

Another quote from the article and this quote is FROM 1970!!!

“He doesn’t dismiss liberal fears that there is a potential for fascism in the new conservative majority. ‘The popular conservative majority now taking shape, like past popular movements, is vulnerable to aberration. With its important component of military, apprehensive bourgeois, and law and order seeking individuals, there is a proclivity and over-reaction to the liberal engendered permissiveness and anarchy of the sixties. This is a danger the administration should watch carefully.'”

The above comment is acknowledgement that they (Nixon and Phillips) were deliberately choosing to appeal to fascist tendencies in order to win political battles in the US. The GOP became a party of WILLING fascism in the 1960s when Phillips created the Southern Strategy and Nixon accepted it as his tool to power.

Read the entire article. It’s shocking, especially in light of the current presidency and where the Southern Strategy has brought us after 50 years. These ideas and more were also expressed in his book, The Emerging Republican Majority, written in 1969.

However, by 2006, Phillips seems to have realized just how dark a turn the path he laid for the GOP had become. In American Theocracy, the NY Times described his writings as:

“He identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration’s policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country’s immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.”

The Southern Strategy is real. The historical documents prove it. The man who created it now seems to recognize he created a monster. And the monster of the GOP, Donald Trump, is now destroying our nation while Republicans sit by unwilling to lift a single finger to stop him.

 

 

The Rise of Fascism In America

Jun19

Some of us have been discussing this since Trump was elected. Many of you out there have claimed that we’re reacting too strongly, that we’re not plausible, that we just “don’t like” Trump, and a million other excuses.

TrumpApologists

You can stop trying now. You Trump supporters need to look in the mirror. You are supporting concentration camps on US soil.

Let that sink in. You are supporting fascism in America.  And you are doing it willingly. Your protests at this point ring rather hollow since we told you before that this would happen! And you ignored it.

Warned in advance, you instead bowed down to the right wing talking heads, who lied to you repeatedly, and who even now refuse to stand up against Trump. “Trump’s media allies struggle to mold coherent defense of his immigration policy” reads the headline. And they can’t, really, because there is no coherent defense of actions that are intended to lead to genocide.

I can say that evangelical pastors seem to finally be standing up against Trump, but they were fine with everything else. They were fine with persecuting LGBT people. They were fine with Republicans openly talking about “camps” for Muslims. They were fine with persecuting Hispanics or anyone else with skin darker than their own.

But the children! This is where their “pro-life” lies hit the road. They don’t want those kids separated from their parents but they do want them deported, even though seeking asylum is not a crime!

None of those people were “illegal immigrants”. They were asylum seekers. And Jeff Sessions just declared that rampant violence and murder in your home nation are no longer valid reasons to request asylum in the US.

And Ted Cruz? He’s not trying to solve this in a humane manner. His proposal to add hundreds of immigration judges is just an attempt to clear the issue from the campaign trail, so he won’t have to talk about it in a race in Texas where Cruz might lose because of outraged Hispanic voters.

The interesting thing is to note that Trump opposes Cruz’s “solution”. Why would he do that? Because he wants the terror, fear, and confusion that his policy is currently creating. He wants threatened people fearful so they shut up. He wants allies of those threatened to also be afraid, so they might shut up as well. And he wants as many others to be outraged because he mistakes outrage for control.

He’s right, in a sense, because if your outrage does not have you right now questioning the legitimacy of the current US government, then your morality is sadly lacking.

We have Jeff Sessions openly talking about finding a “permanent solution” to the “immigration crisis”. Do you even understand how eerily close to Heinrich Himmler this sounds? I’ll tell you now that soon Trump and his cronies will be talking about how “expensive” holding these kids are, even as Fox News runs photos of immigrant children playing with toy guns and claiming the kids are a “threat” to society. They’re going to guilt white America over higher taxes needed to pay for this terror campaign, and white America will gladly oblige and demand no more spending!

What then? If you can’t provide them shelter, food, clothing, and medical care, what is the alternative? Why, to “dispose” of them, of course. We’ll see what euphemism they choose for this atrocity, but make no mistake, Stephen Miller, a known white supremacist and neo-Nazi is the man in the White House driving this bus. And he’s made it very clear he wants brown people expunged from the US completely, by any means possible.

Yet you, Republican voters, won’t vote for a Democrat because they’re “liberals”, as if that’s some dirty word, even as your own party commits atrocity after atrocity and gets worse with each passing week. You’ll believe that somehow you can change Trump’s direction, but you can’t. And by the time the terror has reached your doorstep, it will be too late, won’t it?

I am reminded of the words of JRR Tolkien, that he wrote for Gandalf the Grey, in The Lord of the Rings, when speaking to Frodo about frightening times in which to live.  “’I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”

And that is what we now face. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’” We must decide, and soon, and once we start down that road, there will be no turning back, because down that road we may face the choice that standing up for what is right, to stand against the persecution and murder of the innocent, could cost us our lives too.