Last night on Chris Hayes’ show, former GOP strategist turned #NeverTrump activist Stuart Stevens slammed the Republican Party as an “autocratic movement” that no longer has any faith in the democratic process. “Look, Donald Trump is going to win the nomination. Donald Trump is what the Republican Party wants, and people need to accept that. Fox did not create Republican Party, the Republican Party created Fox. It's just a market response to what the Republican Party had become. I think that the party took a really different turn after Barack Obama was elected president. It used to be a conservative party. Fox was conservative, but in some framework of left and right in American politics. What it's become now is, the party has lost faith with democracy. They feel that democracy itself is failed because their candidates failed. If you really think back, they did not think Barack Obama was legally elected, they don't think Joe Biden was legally elected. The last legally elected president was George Bush. This is why I say the Republican Party has become an autocratic movement. Because when you lose faith in democracy, you start looking for an alternative, and the only hope that they have, because they have been overwhelmingly been Donald Trump's base, is to change how we vote, and that's what they're working on."
Stevens and his Lincoln Project cohorts are right to worry about how Trump has pushed the GOP further down the road to fascism. But Trump, like Hitler, didn’t do it alone. He had plenty of cronies in politics, Business and the media and, most importantly, among the easily-manipulated, dumbed-down Republican base. I’m not as sure as Stevens, though, that Trump is the greatest evil facing America. Yesterday Matt Gaetz was caught reading anti-American Chinese Communist Party propaganda at a House hearing on Ukraine. At the same time, Marjorie Traitor Greene was gaslighting another committee, introducing a witness— to the committee and to her own rabid Twitter followers— by saying “Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son’s murderers because of the Biden administrations [sic] refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s [sic] from murdreing Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl.” Spelling and grammar though wasn’t all the psychotic Traitor Greene got wrong:
And then there’s Ron DeSantis and his henchmen (ie- the Florida state legislature). This morning, Florida media introduced the rest of the world to state Senator Blaise Ingoglia, who was chairman of the Florida Republican Party and now represents a northwest district consisting of Citrus, Hernando, Sumter and part of Pasco county.
He’s best known for working to restrict voting rights in the state and this week he introduced a bill, SB 1248— the Ultimate Cancel Act— that would cancel the filings of any political party that previously supported slavery, automatically changing the registration of affected voters to "no party affiliation." That would be the pre-Civil War Democratic Party, long before the two parties switched positions and the GOP migrated into the party built on racism and anti-worker bigotry. Outlawing rival political parties was a giant step Hitler took in teh 1930's as he reached for the power of a dictator.
Ingoglia: “For years now, leftist activists have been trying to ‘cancel’ people and companies for things they have said or done in the past. This includes the removal of statues and memorials, and the renaming of buildings. Using this standard, it would be hypocritical not to cancel the Democratic Party itself for the same reason.”
On seeing Ingoglia's bill, Alan Grayson, the former congressman from Orlando, said, "Let’s see how much he is concerned about the evils of slavery. Does he support removing Confederate statues from the halls of Congress? No. Does he support teaching students about the evils of slavery in African-American Studies courses? No. Does he support reparations? No. Does he fight against Jim Crow laws that, to this day, prevent the descendants of slaves from voting? No. All he wants to do is separate those descendants and their political allies from their party, so as to denying them their Constitutional freedom of association. He is... a racist.
The Florida Democratic Party— yes it still exists, if just barely— responded that “Presenting a bill that would disenfranchise 5 million voters is both unconstitutional and unserious. Under Ron DeSantis, Senator Ingoglia is using his office to push bills that are nothing more than publicity stunts instead of focusing on the issues that matter most to Floridians, such as reforming property insurance, addressing housing affordability and combating climate change. The sooner DeSantis and his puppets in the legislature learn that Florida is a Democratic Republic and not a Banana Republic, the better it will be for all Floridians.”
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