OPINION: LEGITIMATE POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Remember when the Trump administration was telling Americans that an “invasion” of migrants was going to threaten our very existence in mere days. Yes, a caravan of mostly women and children was going to take your freedom in the fall of 2019. A year earlier, Mr. Trump told us to vote for Republicans or run for our very lives. So here we sit in 2022, a year past the insurrection and what the Republicans are now calling “Legitimate Political Discourse.” The GOP, at one point, was good at setting others’ hair on fire, knowing deep down inside, it was all a deadly game; uranium tubes, weapons of mass destruction, MS13 everywhere, and now the Big Lie.
The difference is that they now seem to be drinking their own Kool-Aid, ehh(Flavor-Aid).
I struggle to understand what the Republican party stands for other than controlling mom, black history, and M&Ms. Ronna ‘Romney’ McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee and the niece of Senator Mitt Romney, deleted her family name at the behest of Donald Trump. As a part of the RNC censure of Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the Republican Party’s official stance, is that beating police officers, setting off smoke bombs, and fouling the halls of Congress with human waste is Legitimate Political Discourse. They have launched attacks on Mr. Potato Head, Dr. Seuss, and the sex lives of candy. They were so busy they nearly forgot the war on Christmas.
We are riding the crest of impressive GDP numbers and wage increases that are helping to offset Covid driven inflation. All the while, President Joe Biden and the Democrats made infrastructure a reality, not just a week. Over the objections of the Republicans, Biden’s American Rescue Plan reduced child poverty and unemployment—to numbers not seen in forty years. In what seems related, the GOP’s purge of black voting districts and black history are eerie reminders of the ghost of Reconstruction. Replacing the phrase ‘race card’ with ‘cancel culture’ may be emotionally soothing but is still intellectual cowardice. My fears are not rooted in Critical Race Theory critiques or the babbling imaginings of Joe Rogan, who thinks predominantly black movie audiences are like the Planet of the Apes. My fears are for the shameless white Americans willing to fight and die for these ideas.
The right-wing has a multi-billion dollar media arm willing to do their bidding, and as we have found out recently, dispense advice. The right-wing media monster will lie to its audience if its recommendations are ignored. Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham purportedly heckled and jeckled Trump’s minions to get him to stop the carnage at the Capitol. When Trump ignored their pleadings, Hannity and Ingraham went on air to minimize the violence they tried to stop. That has led to an emboldened Donald Trump who implored his followers to “protest” the racist prosecutors who dare investigate his lawless behavior. “These [black] prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists, and they’re very sick, they’re mentally sick,” Trump said, before warning his audience: “In reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you.”
Mr. Trump never says he is innocent, just persecuted, which he believes justifies his tide of lies. Maybe Republicans should listen to the father of modern conservatism who said, “All that is good is not embodied in the law, and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws, but it needs strong mores” ~ William F. Buckley Jr.
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