Conservatives aren't even hiding it anymore in call for an 'end to democracy'

— Why are conservatives calling for the end of American democracy? At the CPAC meeting this week, a well-known rightwing influencer, Jack Posobiec, went off on a rant about how important it is for conservatives to band together to end democracy in America and, presumably, replace it with Christofascism like in Russia. “Welcome to the end of democracy!” he declared. “We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here,” he said as he held up a cross. “That’s right, because all glory is not to government, all glory to God.”

This, frankly, should not be surprising. It was 1951 when Russell Kirk, the godfather of the modern conservative movement, published his book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot in which he laid out the importance of “classes and orders” in society. (I detailed Kirk extensively in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.)

The middle class was growing like a weed back then — this was before Reagan kneecapped the labor movement — and Kirk warned that if too many people got into the middle class and were no longer “the fearful poor” that there’d be chaos in America. He warned that women would no longer respect their husbands, racial minorities would forget their “rightful place” in the social order, young people would defy their parents, and society would go to hell.

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The solution, dictated back in the late 1700s by British conservative Edmund Burke, was to gut the middle class and return to the “normal” social form of a small number of really rich people at the top, a tiny middle class of doctors, lawyers, and professionals who served the morbidly rich, and a massive class of the working poor. This was the world

Charles Dickens wrote about in almost all of his novels, and, when the 1960s happened and women, students, and minorities rose up in protest, became the world that Reaganomics was established to return us to. Gutting the middle class, eliminating the social safety net, and “restoring order” to society is still the conservative mantra, now heavily overlaid with rightwing Christian ideology. So Posobiec’s proclamation that it’s time to replace democracy with strongman authoritarianism should surprise exactly nobody.

— Biden imposes more than 500 new Russia sanctions after Navalny’s death. Promising that Alexi Navalny’s life and work won’t be forgotten and his death won’t go unpunished, President Joe Biden yesterday announced more than 500 new specific sanctions on Russia and their business partners around the world. US sanctions have taken a bite out of Russia’s economy since Putin’s brutal invasion, bombing, and rape campaign against Ukraine, but their economy has done well nonetheless. This may change that, as these sanctions are far more extensive and draconian than previous efforts. But don’t expect them to stop Putin: only defeat on the battlefield will do that, which is why “Moscow Mike” Johnson and his treason weasels in the GOP are doing everything they can to help out the Russian army.

— Texas says to hell with the kids and to hell with the grocers who’d provide their food. Billionaires hate paying taxes. It’s probably related to the Hoarding Syndrome that made them billionaires in the first place: if they hadn’t been born wealthy or gotten incredibly lucky, they’d probably be living in houses or apartments filled with newspapers and empty tin cans from floor-to-ceiling. But because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery, those morbidly rich people have a lot of political influence.

And Texas Republicans are happy to oblige them, cutting back on any programs for the working class or poor that may require funding with tax revenues. Their most recent target is poor children. The Federal Government is offering states a $120 pre-filled charge card usable for food for Texas’ 3.8 million low-income kids to eat during the summer when school lunches aren’t available, but Texas’ Republican administration just told the feds they don’t want the money — an estimated $450 million — even though it won’t cost the state a penny.

They’re concerned it might raise the federal taxes of Texas billionaires, and we can’t have that. It’s the same reason Texas has removed over 2 million people, many of them children, from their Medicaid roles in the last two years. “To hell with the kids” is the new Texas motto: the morbidly rich, after all, need every penny they can get!

— Is a Fukushima or Chernobyl-style meltdown the next way Russia intends to kneecap Ukraine? When Russia first invaded Ukraine two years ago today, the Zaphorizhzhia nuclear power plant — the largest in Europe — had ten external power lines running to it to provide power for cooling its nuclear fuel. Thursday, they lost their last backup line and now have one single wire that’s keeping the plant from melting down. Europe, particularly southern Europe, is getting very, very nervous, and with good reason. In addition to highlighting how dangerous nuclear power can be, this situation also shows the world the unthinking brutality of the Putin regime.

— Florida surgeon general defies science amid measles outbreak. In a pathetic and unsuccessful effort to court the Qanon vote for his presidential bid, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis put an unqualified crackpot physician in charge of his state’s health system. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has been trash-talking vaccines ever since they became the favorite whipping boy for conspiracy nuts across America.

Now, with vaccination rates collapsing, the state is enduring a measles outbreak, and Ladapo went so far as to tell parents last week that they could send their sick unvaccinated kids to school. Measles is one of the most contagious viruses in the world: 20% of unvaccinated people who get it end up in the hospital. Five percent of kids who get it develop pneumonia, the main way kids die from measles.

And one in a thousand kids who get it end up with brain swelling that’s so bad it leaves them permanently mentally disabled and/or deaf. Somebody needs to tell DeSantis his campaign is over and he can now fire Ladapo and put somebody on the job who actually understands public health. It’s amazing how much damage to the public Republicans will welcome if they think it will help them gain political power!

— Texas Republicans nearly killed another woman this week. Twenty-five-year-old Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz was excited about becoming pregnant until the physicians at Texas Health Arlington Medical Hospital discovered it was an ectopic pregnancy: the blastocyst was forming outside her uterus and, when it ruptured, would kill her. Nonetheless, the physicians at the Arlington hospital refused to perform surgery to remove the threat to her life, presumably because they were afraid of being prosecuted by Texas Republicans. The following day she found another hospital that would do the procedure, and it was just in the nick of time: it had already started to rupture and she was mere hours away from death. While her situation made a national story in The Washington Post, Texas Republicans remain unmoved and say they have no intention of changing their draconian anti-woman laws. Because, after all, it’s just women’s lives, right? They don’t count. I’ve been saying it for years: if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

— Alabama Justice Parker, who ruled embryos are children, wants preachers running America. The Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, the same day they handed down a ruling that defined fertilized embryos as “children,” went on a Qanon show and laid out his beliefs. Christopher Mathias reports for Huffington Post: “As reported by Right Wing Watch, Enlow (the show’s host) has claimed that Trump ‘is on assignment’ from God to work with the angels Michael and Gabriel to take down George Soros and Bill Gates, among others; he has claimed that Russian President Vladamir Putin is fighting ‘Luciferian pedophiles’ in Ukraine, in a battle to stop them from deploying vaccines and 5G that would turn people into transhumanist semi-robots; and he has claimed that the majority of other world leaders are ‘satanic’ pedophiles who ‘steal blood’ and ‘do sacrifices.’” And these people argue that they should be running the world?

— Tennessee Republicans vote affirmatively to force 8- to 12-year-old girls to carry rape-caused pregnancies to term. Earlier this week, Tennessee House Republicans voted unanimously to force girls under 13 to carry pregnancies to term, even though pregnancy can be fatal for girls that young. Democratic Representative Gloria Johnson had introduced HB2603 that would allow for girls under 13 to get abortions, but not even one Republican would support the legislation, which died as a result. Once again, Republicans don’t give a rat’s ass about kids — or at least they don’t care about female kids — when they can instead pander to patriarchal religious zealots. Sick.

— Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert: Vindicated! ADHD is an Evolutionary Success! Hunters of the world, rejoice! We’re not defective; we’re just different — and different in a way that can be incredibly useful and helped the human race survive for millennia. A new study finds that in a real-world situation, people with the characteristics of ADHD are more successful “hunting and gathering” than those without ADHD. It’s fascinating and substantiates my 1996 theory that ADHD is simply a set of characteristics left over from hunting/gathering times:

— Geeky Science! Tart cherries can help reduce inflammation and pain. A new study of athletes using tart cherry juice to reduce muscle pain and inflammation finds the liquid (10 ounces, twice a day) is as effective as 800 mg. of Ibuprofen. It’s amazing how many ways nature provides for us!

— Do conservatives want to end recreational sex? The Heritage Foundation featured a tweet (or x or whatever you call it) of a woman arguing that it’s time to “re-wild sex.” By that, she means we need to get rid of condoms and birth control, so the threat of disease and pregnancy will again discourage people from having recreational sex. Yes, they even said that they want to “end recreational sex.” These conservatives just never stop trying to figure out ways to run the lives of the rest of us.

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