It wasn’t enough for Texas Republican Tony Gonzales to remind CNN viewers that Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is known to have “paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties” or that Bob Good (R-VA) endorsed a “known neo-Nazi” running for Congress, he also publicly referred to them— and vacate the chair ringleader Moscow Marge— as “scumbags” who resemble members of the KKK, not only in ideology but in the way they are disrupting smooth governance. “These people used to walk around with white hoods at night; now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime... For some reason these fringe people think they have the high ground. They do not. I assure you the rank and file members that normally are kind of easy going… those days are over; the fight is here. If someone’s gonna poke you in the chest, the way you take care of a bully, is you bloody their nose. And that’s where we’re at.”
On Friday, Politico noted that mainstream conservative Republicans are siding with Mike Johnson over Gaetz, Good, Greene and the other nihilists and Kremlin stooges… although it’s worth noting that in the final vote for Ukraine funding, more House Republicans (112) voted with the extremists than with Johnson (101). The radicals are flipping out because he worked across the aisle to pass the national security bills on Saturday. They hate bipartisanship; American voters love it.
“We're asking the impossible,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) said in an interview. “And that's not fair to Mike Johnson. It wasn't fair to Kevin McCarthy. It's not fair to anybody.”
“We've got a group of members who refuse to allow the floor to function. And, obviously, the speaker’s to be commended for finding a way forward,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD) in an interview. “We can worry about the political crap later.”
…But it was a common refrain from the conference’s governing wing: Conservatives gave the speaker no viable alternative— especially now that Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) are explicitly threatening his gavel.
Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR) said Johnson’s been challenged like no speaker before him.
“Mike Johnson deserves better support, but I for one am just very, very proud of what we would all refer to as a profile in courage in the face of these kinds of threats,” he said.
…“Mike Johnson is a friend of mine. He's a brother in Christ. Love him to death. I don't agree with his play calls,” said Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), one of the more mild criticisms we’ve heard about Johnson recently.
Ogles isn’t actually anyone’s brother in Christ; he’s a corrupt white nationalist who lies as much as George Santos and who is only in Congress because a hyper-partisan state legislature gerrymandered up Nashville so that it is now divided up among three backward rural red districts drawn to elect right-wingers. Over the weekend, A.R. Moxon wrote about the kind of fake Christian Ogles and his Hose colleagues are: Americans Who Want To Kill Americans. Like Ogles, “Many Nazis,” he wrote, “consider themselves Christian, which means that the bigotry in their hearts and the violence that they intend is the thing they worship as their God, which whatever you might think about Christian tenets isn't a Christian tenet. On the other hand, I can't help but notice that a frightening number of Christian institutions and leaders and parishioners don't do much to differentiate themselves from these Nazis, at least not in the way they use their religion as a rationale both for their bigotry and for practicing the popular traditional form of violence known as supremacy. Perhaps it's that these non-Nazi Christians are just too polite to publicly disagree with the Nazis who claim to share their religion. Perhaps it's that these non-Nazi Christian just agree with the Nazis too much to disagree. Who can say? Inner lives are so unknowable. Anyway, after the Nazi invasion [of Charlottesville in 2017] the white Christian president (by which I mean to say the president who exclusively represents the interests of white supremacists and Christian supremacists) defended those invading Nazis as ‘very fine people,’ though some will tell you that he was only defending the non-Nazis who marched with the Nazis with mostly the same objectives for doing so as the Nazis, and when those people tell you that, they will expect you to find it to be a meaningful distinction.”
Moxon didn’t use Ogles as his example. He focused on Arkansas Senator (white supremacist and closet case) Tom Cotton, who told his social media followers that protesters blocking roads because of American support for genocide are “terrorists and criminals, that anyone encountering them should ‘take matters into their own hands’ to remove them from the roads. In case that wasn't clear enough, he subsequently went onto TV and told his interview (along with people who still watch TV) that he thought the protesters ought to be treated like political agitators for justice tend to get treated in the state of Arkansas. In case you're not familiar with the history of the recent struggle for civil rights, the way political agitators for justice tend to get treated in the state of Arkansas is they tend to be murdered. And just so there could be no doubt Cotton specified that he thought they ought to be thrown off of bridges and have their skin torn off and so forth. Senator Tom Cotton has what you might call a zest for the murder of U.S. citizens, if you didn't know. For example, some years back, he wrote an op-ed in our increasingly fascist-friendly paper of record, the New York Times, calling for summary public military execution of the thousands and thousands of protesters who were at the time demonstrating against grotesque police brutality. And Cotton is a leader within our nation's white Christian party, so all of this should perhaps not be such a surprise to decent normal people, but I would argue that it should remain a shock. I would like to make it clear that that Tom Cotton, while perhaps distinguished by his enthusiasm and forthrightness, is in no way alone in his murderous desires.”
Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick was the recent subject of a viral video in which he casually suggests that the only thing we have to do to end crime forever is to lock up the 15% of people nationwide who apparently do all the crime. That's quite a claim, and a rather speciously-sourced statistic, but as final solutions go you have to admit that it is as bold as it is stupid. Anyway, I'm certainly not the only person to point out that this would equate to about 50 million people imprisoned, and that it is remarkably if not coincidentally close to the percentage of Black Americans nationwide, but it's indisputably true that this 4000% increase in the United States' already globally high incarceration rate would be boom business for our private prison industry, which benefits from our justice system's turning the penal system over to the private sector, with its profit motive and its desire for never-ending double and triple digit growth. Our incarceration profit system disproportionately imprisons people who are Black (that is to say, they are not a made-up thing called "white") by 5x, and it opens prisoners up to disenfranchisement and slave labor and brutality and early death, among other things, and the same government that allows all this also built the statues celebrating the men who murdered their fellows to defend and expand slavery…
Patrick's suggestion would equate to concentration camps, as would any attempt to round up and imprison 15% of a country's entire population, much less one as large as the United States. But it's not just his suggestion, because Patrick belongs to the white Christian party, whose corrupt pig-brained leader was appointed by God and which has documented their plans for sending roaming bands of law enforcement and militias around to round up people they deem "illegal," and their plans for establishing permanent rule over the constitution and democracy and law and everyone else, and their plan to create a state of fascist domination that would deliver state violence on a scale that I honestly don't think any of us is capable of imagining.
And if you're thinking, "well, doing that would require a massive and unconstitutional seizure of power," don't worry! They've documented their plans for all of that, too!
…The name for the group of U.S. citizens who more or less would like to be permitted to murder their fellow citizens… is "Republican." You could also say "evangelical Christian" or "conservative" or "confederate" or "MAGA" or "white supremacist," if you like; there are plenty of synonyms, all of them identifying groups made comfortable by the thought of imprisonment and bad use and death coming to others they deem unworthy of life. I'm told that it would be beyond the pale to say "Nazi," because there is apparently an important distinction to draw between Nazis and people who want exactly what Nazis want and pursue those things using the exact same methods and language and rationales, but give themselves non-Nazi excuses for doing so, and if I ever remember what that distinction is, I'll let you know right away, because I am a huge fan of precision and nuance.
…I think it's worth saying it again: it would be good if the election empowered Americans Who Want to Kill Americans as little as possible.
(This is different from saying that the Democratic Party will save us, and silly things of that nature. We can get into all that some other time. Today I'm talking about the Americans Who Want to Kill Americans.)
If Americans can murder their fellow citizens using the existing rules and institutions, they'll do it. If they can't, they'll corrupt those rules and seize those institutions. And if they can't do that, then they're pretty clear about their intentions: they'll follow Master Tom Cotton's instructions and take matters into their own hands, because what they want is hard use and brutality and murder to come to those of their fellow citizens they believe deserve it, and if our institutions stop delivering those things to their liking, then they'll attack the institutions, by which I mean they already have.
More and more, they're talking now about waging some form of something like war, though perhaps it won't look like war as we're used to seeing it. It's not too hard these days to find somebody openly agitating for secession and civil war, and here I'm not just talking about Republican governors or conservative propagandists, but also rank-and-file members of the white Christian party, who seem to take comfort from thinking of how many members of the military and our military police are conservatives or white Christians or white supremacists or whatever, and also of how many massacre weapons they all own and how much massacre they would be able to deliver if their fellow citizens, who don't deserve life, ever try to threaten their existence by replacing them— in other words, by insisting on existing in public as if they are equal human beings whose lives hold equal value, even though they aren't Christian or a made up thing called "white."
I think the Americans Who Want to Kill Americans expect to use the election and the planned and published takeover that would come after to establish the fascist domination of creepy religious bigots that they crave. But if they can't, I think a great many of them—far more than we'd want!—hope and intend to deliver stochastic white supremacist terrorist violence on a scale that I honestly don't think any of us is capable of imagining, including even them.
Meanwhile, “Kevin McCarthy is having a grand old time,” wrote Mark Barabak yesterday. “He’s traveling the country giving six-figure speeches, playing pundit and elder statesman on TV, holding forth at high-brow political forums and, not least, plotting vengeance against those behind his unceremonious ouster as House leader,” albeit fellow Republicans, not Democrats… ‘He wants to hold to account those who pushed him out,’ said a Central Valley political operative, who has a decades-long relationship with McCarthy.”
And on Saturday, Robert Tait noted for British readers that Moscow Marge was ramping up her jihad against Johnson while using false Kremlin-produced talking points to discredit Ukraine as part of her war against the GOP Establishment. “‘The Ukrainian government is attacking Christians, the Ukrainian government is executing priests,’ she said. ‘Russia is not doing that. They’re not attacking Christianity.’ (In fact, according to figures from the Institute for Religious Freedom, a Ukrainian group, at least 630 religious sites had been damaged or looted in Russia’s invasion by December last year.)”
UPDATE: GOP Anger Against The Putin Wing Builds
On CNN today Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) had something to say about the Moscow Marge-Matt Gaetz Russo-Republicans: “I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the speaker over it. I mean that’s a strange position to take… I think they want to be in the minority too. I think that’s an obvious reality.”