Jailing Teachers, Doctors, and Pregnant Women - That’s the Plan

According to Heather Cox Richardson (please read her Letters from an American - she is thorough and illuminating) MAGA Republicans are moving even further right. If you check out FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver's website, Democrats are losing ground in the polls, largely because of inflation and rising gas prices - which, suspiciously to me, just started reversing course in time for the election.

This is no time to worry about inflation instead of the future of our country. I'm not saying inflation isn't important, we all suffer from it, especially those of us with lower incomes. The Biden Administration is doing a lot more to fight it than the MAGA crowd will.

For example, the Inflation Reduction Act provided for roughly $3 Billion of relief for agriculture, most of which is going to debt relief for small farmers - those who have already received their packages have gotten between $52,000 and $175,000 in debt forgiveness. Republican congresspeople who complained about $10,000 student debt relief also voted against the farmers' relief and now refuse to comment on it.

The most important part of Ms. Richardson's Letter today is as follows:

"This same anti-immigrant, nationalist isolationism fed the rise of the MAGA Republicans. They joined with the supply-siders to create today’s Republican Party, and today’s illustration that their ideology cannot survive contact with reality sparked an astonishing leap to the right.

In The Federalist, senior editor John Daniel Davidson announced, “We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives.” “The conservative project has failed,” he wrote, “and conservatives need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” Western civilization is dying, he wrote, and to revive it, those on the right should “start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.”

They should, he said, stop focusing on the free-market economics and supply-side principles of the Reagan years and instead embrace the idea of wielding government power as “an instrument of renewal in American life… a blunt instrument indeed.”

Davidson embraces using the power of the government to enforce the principles of the right wing, bending corporations to their will, starving universities that spread “poisonous ideologies,” getting rid of no-fault divorce, and subsidizing families with children. “Wielding government power,” he writes, “will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code.” Abortion is murder and should be treated as such, parents who take their children to drag shows “should be arrested and charged with child abuse,” doctors who engage in gender-affirming interventions “should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked,” “teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.”

“The necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary,” he writes. And for those worrying that the assumption of such power might be dangerous, “we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.”

What Davidson is suggesting, of course, is indeed radical: it has most of the hallmarks of fascism. Other Republican lawmakers are also embracing that ideology lately: today, Florida state representative Anthony Sabatini approvingly quoted Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco, saying, “I answer only to God and to History.”'

This should motivate the living daylights out of anyone who cares about freedom in America. For the love of our children's future, inform yourself and everyone you know, then VOTE.