What happened on January 6 was a military operation. To the
insurrectionists, the besieging of the Capitol was the storming of the
Bastille—a revolutionary act. “Insurrection,” after all, is a violent
uprising against an existing government. There was fighting that horrible day: hand-to-hand combat. Blood was drawn. People lost their lives.
The
irony is that the insurrectionists did not need to ignite a new Civil
War. The new Civil War was already upon us. It predated January 6. And
it rages still. This is an information war, a narrative war, a war waged
in the press and on cable news shows and across social media platforms.
The battlefields are not Antietam, Gettysburg, and Bull Run, but
Facebook, Twitter, and Clubhouse.
In this new Civil War, states
do not secede from the Union; instead, citizens divorce from reality,
inventing their own alternative universe, in which Donald John Trump,
not Joe Biden, is the rightful President of the United States; in which
Biden’s son, not Trump’s, is exploiting his father’s office for personal
gain; in which MAGA Republicans, not Democrats, care about the rule of
law and the wellbeing of the people. Biden stole the election! Trump
will return to Washington to be sworn in again, in fulfillment of the Q
Scripture! Then he can continue his clandestine operation of rooting out
the pedo sex trafficking ring! Save the children!
If the
battlefields are virtual and fuzzy, the battle lines are clear. On the
opposing side is an entire political party that is full-tilt
authoritarian—a Confederacy of Fascists. Gone is the GOP of Lincoln and
Eisenhower and Reagan. What remains is a zombie party, which looks the
same outwardly—we all recognize the pickled husks of Mitch McConnell and
Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley—but is hellbent on the annihilation
of democracy. This is no longer about right versus left, management
versus labor, Medicare expansion versus tax cuts, “cancel culture”
versus “woke.” This is a fight against tyranny, simple and plain.
Everything else, everything else, is just noise.
Reality
check: The Republican Party has no substantive platform. It has no
policies beyond voter suppression, gerrymandering, and looting the
Treasury for its billionaire whoremasters. It quashes dissent, it
cheats, and it steals. And when legislation comes up that will actually
help people, it obstructs. The Republican Senate under Mitch McConnell
is a kidney stone, an aortal blockage, a banana in the tailpipe, that
ship in the Suez Canal. It has been this way with Washington Republicans
since Newt Gingrich was House Speaker.
Malfeasance is now standard operating procedure for the GOP. This is
the reality. Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor, went on TV a year
ago and said that seniors should be willing to die for the economy. “There are more important things than living.” Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican Party!
All
of these GOP clowns and their Republican-controlled statehouses have
crafted a fresh batch of voter suppression laws, most notably the one
signed into law last week by prick-faced election thief Brian Kemp. We
all know the new Georgia law bars the handing out of water to voters
waiting on line, but it also—this is important!—cedes power to the state
legislature to overturn election results if the preferred candidate doesn’t win. That’s tyranny, in black and white. (That’s also what should have been the front-page headline, but of course it wasn’t.)
The
scales of the federal government are inherently weighted in the GOP’s
favor. Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota, each with a population
well below a million, each staunchly red, have two Senators each—same as
true blue California, with its 40 million residents. What the
Republicans will do, if these laws are allowed to stand, is craft new,
even more repressive laws to ensure they stay in power indefinitely.
They have made no secret of this. It’s happening right now, in Georgia
and other statehouses across the country.
As a minority party, the
GOP as currently constituted can only survive by minority rule; thus,
it seeks to establish a Russia-style oligarchical system here. Joe Biden
and the Democrats cannot compromise with a party that wants to shit-can
democracy. We don’t negotiate with terrorists. The current GOP must be
destroyed, laid to waste, so that a new conservative party, one that
doesn’t oppose universal suffrage, one that doesn’t want to kill us all,
can take its place. Which means a stake must be driven through the
heart of the filibuster. End forever that noxious vestige of whitewashed
racism.
We have less than two years to put safeguards in place to ensure the survival of our democracy. There is no time to waste.
Not
that the media has any fucking clue of the stakes, or even the battle.
These Beltway fops only care about presidential press conferences and
their own book deals. Just as the press is only now figuring out that, oh yeah, oops, Donald Trump did have ties to Russia and organized crime, and what do you know, he was
a thief and a con man, so the MSM is still covering the two parties
like it’s 1964. How many articles have there been criticizing Biden for
not being “bipartisan?” As Eric Boehlert has pointed out, 70+ percent of Americans favored the $1.9 trillion relief bill. That’s as “bipartisan” as it gets. It’s the Republicans in Congress who are out of touch. But the buffoonish Beltway press paints a completely different, and counterfactual, picture.
It
is up to us, I’m afraid, to fight this new Civil War, this battle of
narratives. We must disseminate the truth we insist on, and ensure that a
government of the people, by the people, and for the people does not
perish from this earth.
