democracy – Kevin Trent Boswell

Pattern Recognition

This photo of the State of the Union address should tell you everything you need to know.

Notice that, despite the almost two hours of rambling lies, every Republican politician present stands and applauds and smiles.

But you still think that the Republicans are going to do the right thing and impeach? Even though impeachment has never removed a president from office. Even though this one has been impeached twice already.

You still think they are going to support the use of the 25th Amendment?

By the way, I don’t expect anyone to actually read the links I provided on these two issues, because Americans can’t be bothered to read, which is why we’re here.

Republicans have systematically destroyed our educational system over decades of voting against funding it, precisely so that we would arrive at this moment. They wanted an uneducated, easily-led population, and they got it. And it’s our fault. Yes, ours, because we don’t read anything unless we have to. Well, guess what—now, we have to.

You think Republicans are going to suddenly change direction and stop supporting the agenda of hatred and authoritarianism and ripping the Constitution into tiny pieces?

Even if they did, what would it matter, if they are still there when the dust settles?

They obviously WANT all of this. They’re not simply being polite or playing politics. They want this madness. They want fascism in America.

You watched as the Supreme Kangaroo Court tried unsuccessfully to put a leash on the monster it created.

The only way you get out of this mess is through violent revolution.

You’ll be tempted to tell yourself that violence is what I’m hoping for. But that’s stupid. I’m going to be 53 years old this year, and I have a long list of things I would rather be doing, and none of them involve a revolution that will undoubtedly sow chaos and destruction in our lives in ways we can’t even imagine.

But I know what the alternative looks like. It looks like North Korea. It looks like Cambodia, or the current events in Iran. It looks like Hungary and Russia and Turkey. It looks like the dozens of other authoritarian regimes around the globe. It’s far uglier than any civil war.

It’s an intolerable day-to-day dystopian nightmare.

Even if the president and the vice president and half the current Republican Congress were suddenly gone, you would still have a huge problem in this country.

Because scenes like the one in this photo don’t just happen. There’s still massive support for this bullshit. The most dramatic polls say that only 68% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the president.

Think about that for a moment.

That’s a problem. That’s a huge problem.

You have huge numbers of Americans who refuse to fact-check anything. They still get their news here:

That should tell you that nobody is getting out of this the easy way.

Despite Jon Oliver’s criticism of right-wingers saying “Civil war is inevitable,” I assert that any reasonable person, a person who’s head is not buried in the dirt, should come to precisely that conclusion.

There’s no reasoning with people this hateful and stupid. There’s no debating, no middle ground to be had.

That’s not my choice. It’s their choice.

You cannot reason with someone who doesn’t understand logic and rejects facts.

Continuing to insist that diplomacy always wins the day isn’t merely naive, it’s outright dangerous.

Nobody is getting a pony.

Authoritarians don’t allow free and fair elections.

If you are still telling yourself the lie that they can’t stop the elections, then you’re delusional and you are missing the point.

They don’t have to stop the elections.

They only have to interfere with them, sway the elections through gerrymandering and other tactics, dissuade people from voting through intimidation, stop the counting of votes, deny the results, and there are other methods that we won’t even discuss.

You’re not voting your way out of this.

And you’re not going to learn to live with the new order; it’s going to be absolutely insufferable.

If you want to watch a really fantastic movie that perfectly illustrates how intolerable fascism is, while also managing to make you laugh and smile, then watch this on Netflix:

The Penguin Lessons

You won’t believe what I’m saying. You’ll continue to watch and wait and complain and do nothing. You’ll be nervous but hopeful when the midterms are closer.

But then, you’ll watch them go sideways. And then you’ll act like no one warned you that this could happen.

You’ve been repeatedly warned.

You’ve heard it before—you want to know what you would have done in 1930s Germany?

You’re doing it right now.

All because you never took the time to study history, the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I and II. You never read the writings of the Founding Fathers. They warned us that we would have to fight the same battles again in the future.

But you were so sure that we’ve evolved, become more educated, empathetic, and that we’ve “outgrown all that.”

You were wrong. Dead wrong.

But It Rhymes

In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom
that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy,
let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

It has been said that history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes perfectly.

There are many in this nation who are laboring under the delusion that they will sort out their political differences at the polls during the midterms and all the way out as far as November of 2028, as if that date were not an impossible millennium away.

Many Americans are, however, waking up to the fact that their vote is not going to matter as long as this regime continues its reign of terror. If the elections go forward as scheduled, the regime will simply seize the ballots, as they did in their recent dress rehearsal in Georgia.

Anyone who thinks that the seizure of those ballots was really about the 2020 election is not paying attention to what is happening.

But even those who are slowly rousing from their slumber and realizing that democracy is lying flat on its back, too many of these are failing to grasp the moral weight of the trial which this perilous hour presents us.

Let it be known by all Americans, this slide into tyranny will be nothing whatsoever like life under Communism. For the average despot is concerned mainly with holding onto power regardless of the consequences.

But it is the exceptional tyrants of history who we must be extra cautious of, those who are driven by two equally despicable motives, those of power and hatred. We have such a monster in our midst.

In the beginning, even Hitler managed to make things better for the average German citizen—the ones he deemed worthy in his warped view. But in the end, his hatred of the Jews drove him to fling even Berlin itself into the flames.

Many dictators at least somehow managed to strengthen their countries in some manner, before eventually destroying them through a toxic stew of avarice and hate.

But America’s current “leadership” is a comic farce, nothing but the rising costs of everything, the disappearance of all hope for a stable climate and the education of our children, senseless violence, and the emergence of World War Three being only a hair’s breadth away from us.

Absolutely nothing good has come from Republican governance. Nothing even remotely close to useful has arisen from this nightmare dystopian fever dream of useful idiots.

No, our dance with the Devil will be nothing like life under complicated figures such as Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Lenin, or Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Our American rendezvous with darkness will be more like the wholesale slaughter of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or the genocides which have so often ravaged African nations and Muslim countries. [See list of genocides.]

If you believe this untrue, then ask yourself why, why in the name of all things holy, would the “president” of the United States send innocent people to CECOT?

If this was not a litmus test for what is to come, then what else could it be?

The Southern States never fully yielded the war of 1861, and they vowed to rise and fight again.

And this is what we face now on this expanded ground, all of it stolen from Native peoples, and drenched in the blood of all races and religions.

And the festering boil of Neo-Nazi philosophy is even now raising its ugly head, right in front of us.

The pseudo “philosophy” of White Supremacy, an idea so thoroughly stupid that it may be adequately summarized in a mere Fourteen Words, is promising to annihilate all semblance of the country in which you have lived your entire life.

If these people (a bastardized word, as used here) should succeed in holding power in this nation, then we shall, all of us, have failed.

We will not have failed to win the midterms. We will not have failed to win the White House.

We will have failed the ultimate test, the test of Good versus Evil.

We will have quietly surrendered the last vestiges of our very humanity.

I beg you, do not surrender this effort unless you and I both are lying mortally wounded in the streets, having given what Lincoln called “The last full measure of devotion.”

Only then, will we have the justification of saying that we did our best to stem the tide of what can only be called the purest form of evil that we are likely to ever bear direct witness to with our own eyes.

Anything less is the failure which cannot be stomached, can’t be slept with, and cannot bear to look upon itself in the mirror.

The following quote is attributed to a French officer who was serving in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He was reflecting on the profound shift in the war’s purpose, following the Emancipation Proclamation.

It was no longer a question of the Union, as it was, that was to be reestablished. It was the Union as it should be, that is to say, washed clean from its original sin. We were no longer merely the soldiers of a political controversy. We were now the missionaries of a great work of redemption, the armed liberators of millions. The war was ennobled. The object was higher.

I’ll Just Leave This Right Here

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

by Julia Ward Howe

Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage
where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning
of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.