GOP decay

I publish columns by Texan Allen Clifton because he often says what I am thinking. Strange how that works. Once this reign of error by Trump and the sycophantic GOP is over, Allen will be regarded as one of the many heroes of America, who helped to bring our great but flawed nation back from the brink of destruction by speaking truth. The Republicans have so abused the truth I wonder if they even can recognize it any longer. What a pathetic group of spineless greedy enablers they have become.

Let's make one thing perfectly clear: Donald Trump didn't change the Republican Party; he just brought to the surface what so many conservatives had spent decades denying was true.

The racism, bigotry, self-centeredness, out-of-control spending, anti-Constitutionalism, anti-democratic tendencies, perpetual victimhood, and never-ending hypocrisy.

Sure, Trump is all of those things — but the GOP has been all of those things for a very long time.

I wrote my article The Republican March Towards a Society of Sociopaths years before MAGA existed. I wrote The Cult of Republicanity well before Trump was anything more than a loser who called into Fox News to whine about Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Even when I was fairly young, I remember being confused about how Republicans could claim to be the party of "fiscal responsibility" while viewing Ronald Reagan as the "conservative icon" when he nearly tripled the national debt during his eight years as president.

How can you be "fiscally responsible" yet go into massive debt?

Now Trump is on pace to add more to the national debt than any president in history, and you don't hear a peep from Republicans about the need to be "fiscally responsible."

Newt Gingrich was House Speaker during the impeachment of Bill Clinton over a consensual affair — yet Gingrich cheated on both of his wives.

Gingrich's replacement, Dennis Hastert, later admitted to sexually abusing several underage males while he was a high school wrestling coach.

But this was the party of "moral, Christian values"?

Now we have Trump, who has literally cheated on every single one of his wives and has had nearly 30 women accuse him of sexual assault.

It's the party that, in 1989, elected David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the KKK and well-known white nationalist.

The GOP is the party that reinvented itself during Richard Nixon's presidency with a plan called the "Southern Strategy," designed to pander to white resentment, particularly in the South and rural areas, as those voters felt "betrayed" by the Democratic Party's embrace of equality for Black Americans.

It's the party that smiled as it unethically and unconstitutionally denied Barack Obama's presidential right to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court after Scalia passed away — claiming a nonexistent "precedent" against replacing a justice during an election year — then completely contradicted itself a few years later when Republicans rushed to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg after she died just a couple of weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

Yes, Trump is awful. He always has been. As I've said many times before, my disdain for him has nothing to do with politics. I couldn't stand the piece of crap long before he took over the GOP. He's been a horrible person his entire life.

But he didn't "change" the GOP.

He simply brought to the surface and exposed the many truths about it that people like myself have been pointing out for years.

That's why I've said Donald Trump is many terrible things, but one "good" thing he did was prove that the accusations and criticisms folks like myself have made against the Republican Party all these years were not without merit.

Allen Clifton (and he now has a Substack)

Border Patrol

Down here in deep South Texas, we see Border Patrol agents almost every day. And almost every week, we hear a new story about what a Border Patrol agent has done, whether it's getting busted for smuggling drugs, taking bribes, smuggling immigrants, beating the shit out of immigrants, or outright killing them. The Border Patrol down here has a mean reputation of pushing their privilege to the max. Almost anyone can get hired by the Border Patrol because their standards are so low. I hear a bunch of them left the Rio Grande Valley to join ICE. Watch out, America. 

Don’t worry, America.

You can cancel the panic.

It wasn’t an “illegal alien.”

It wasn’t a gang member.

It wasn’t someone climbing a wall or hiding in a clinic.

Nope.

It was Bart C. Yager

A U.S. Border Patrol agent from Willcox, Arizona.

Charged with 19 felonies, including:

Child sex trafficking

Rape

Prostitution

Fraud

The man who was guarding OUR border… was allegedly trafficking children.

Let that sink in.

But please, go on…tell me again how undocumented immigrants are the REAL problem.

If his name were José, he’d be deported, doxed, and demonized before sundown.

If he were undocumented, he’d be labeled a “national security threat” and paraded on every conservative network for a week.

If he were Black, there’d be a Blue Lives Matter rally staged next to his mugshot.

But he’s WHITE.

He’s local.

He wore a badge.

He probably went to church, voted “law and order,” and waved a flag on the Fourth of July (and voted GOP)

So now it’s:

“Due process.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

“Not all agents…”

Where are the MAGA hats now?

Where’s the “law and order” crowd?

Where’s the outrage from the Save the Children warriors, the same ones who swore pedophiles were hiding in pizza parlors and underground tunnels?

Oh, that’s right… they only seem to care when the suspect has an accent, BROWN SKIN, or a last name they can mispronounce on purpose.

When the monster looks like one of their own, the pitchforks vanish, and the “concern for children” magically disappears.

This isn’t one bad apple.

This is the orchard, the pesticide, and the cover-up.

This is what happens when a uniform becomes a shield instead of a responsibility.

You built a wall to keep rapists out.

But you forgot to check the ones you gave a gun, a badge, and a government salary.

So, go ahead, wave your flags.

Salute your “heroes.”

Build your walls.

Just know:

The real threat WASN'T crossing the border.

It was already GUARDING it......

Signed by Bob Kelly, another American patriot.

indigenous

What this country did to the indigenous Native Americans was horrible. The natives had a functioning society, were responsible stewards of the land, and mostly friendly, at least until the white man began stealing all their land, killing them randomly, and pushing them onto reservations. And there was a lot of raping of Indian women, which goes without saying. 

Was the treatment of the natives better or worse than the way the white man treated blacks? Stealing them from their homes, chaining them up, whipping them, making them work for no pay, and of course raping of their women. 

Those two sins left an indelible mark on this country, and we are still mistreating the Indians and being racist as fuck to the blacks (and browns, and practically any other immigrants.) Yeah, this country has its warts all right. Cancerous warts.

Racist: "Native Americans hadn't even invented the wheel yet, you f*cking moron!"

Stacey: "Listen you racist demon, the wheel wasn't useful for Indigenous nations whose terrain, engineering priorities, and modes of transport didn't f*cking require it! They were over here building agricultural systems so advanced Europeans literally wrote journals trying to figure out how they were not starving.

They had governance models so sophisticated that your degenerate thieving-ass genocidal Founding Fathers plagiarized them. They practiced medicine that kept them alive longer than Europeans choking on their own filth during the same period. 

Europe lost half its population to dysentery, famine, and rats because they didn't wash their nasty ass. But, yes please, do tell me more about who was "civilized."

Your entire worldview depends on pretending white folks "built civilization," but Europe was a non-bathing muddy backwater while the "wheel-less" Indigenous societies you're mocking were developing astronomy, hydrology, architecture, and trade networks stretching thousands of miles. Unlike your ancestors, they weren't dragging their belongings through filth or relying on livestock to haul their existence around. They engineered everything from aquaducts to multi-story cities without resorting to the crude technologies Europe clung to.

White Europeans didn't "build" sh*t! They arrived, stole land they didn't know how to cultivate, kidnapped people who actually had engineering and agricultural knowledge, forced them to build the economy, and then slapped their names on every damn thing. Your racism isn't scholarship, moron!"

- Dr. Stacey Patton

The first settler-colonialists wouldn't have survived their first year here without Natives coming to their aid. They even created a holiday to commemorate this. They call it Thanksgiving.

#IndigenousHistoryOfTheUnitedStates

The Collapse

Humans just love a good doomsday story, don't we? Especially if there's a lot of death involved, right? Even when it's real? About all I can tell you is that the piece below was written by "Jessica." 

{Editors note: I believe it's important to stay connected to hope and solutions while facing the reality of collapse.} 

Every single day, someone pops the question.

When is the collapse going to start?

This question comes up all the time on Reddit, in private chats, on social media, in the comments section of articles about doom…

It sits on the tip of tongues. It lurks in the back of minds. Even those friends and relatives who don’t believe in that “doomer nonsense” still crave an answer, even if they don’t want to talk about it.

It’s an interesting question that generates a lot of different answers, depending on who’s talking. Some say 2030. Some say 2050.

And then there’s the related question: What form will it take?

Maybe the financial collapse will start before the ecosystem collapse, or vice versa. Maybe a heatwave like the one in The Ministry for The Future will kill millions of civilians. Maybe a flood will wash away an entire country, not just a third of a country like Pakistan. One person I know said they plan to start taking people in “when things start to get seriously bad, for real.” When someone asks me when the collapse is going to start, I think what they really mean is this: When’s it going to affect me?

Because the collapse has already started.

It’s been going on for a few years now, depending on which experts you’re interviewing. Scientists quietly admit we’ve already crashed through the 1.5C safeguard, set at the Paris Accords last decade. Carbon emissions haven’t peaked. Companies like Microsoft and Google are blowing off their pledges, because they want to create robot secretaries and interns. And sexbots.

Men in their 20s are spending thousands of dollars a month on AI girlfriends. Isn’t that a pretty good sign collapse has started?

We’re living through the hottest summers in human history. Wildfire smoke blankets North America every other summer. Cactuses are falling over dead from the heat. Urbanites are passing out on sidewalks and winding up in the ER with contact burns. They’re not safe walking down the street in their hometowns. One state responded by canceling mandatory water breaks.

Wouldn’t you say collapse has started?

There’s a certain kind of person I’ve met in my conversations about collapse. When you tell them collapse has already started, they correct you. They don’t mean the collapse in general. They mean “the real” collapse, in other words, the one that matters to them. They want to know about that one. Nobody knows.

My family lived through an F3 tornado. We lived through a hurricane. We drove through a wildfire. We’ve put quite a few notches on our collapse bedpost. When I pick up my phone, I can scroll my own doom.

And yet, it doesn’t feel like collapse. Not yet.

Millions of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans feel the same way. They still wake up and go to work. They still go out for dinner and drinks. They relax and watch Squid Game. If you start to get worked up and overshare, your condescending friend Ben can take you outside to touch grass.

For many of us, it’s easy to pretend collapse isn’t happening.

So, it’s more like: When does collapse become impossible to ignore?

When does collapse get so bad they can’t look away anymore? When does it get so bad they can’t distract themselves with scandals, with gossip, with retail therapy? When does it get so bad, it feels bad all the time?

That depends.

Some of us already can’t look away.

It doesn’t matter if we stop doomscrolling. It doesn’t matter if we turn our phones off. It doesn’t matter if we go outside and touch grass. The awareness breathes through us all the time, even when we ignore it long enough to enjoy a meal or spend an evening with our families, or just screwing around.

We’re living in a fascist regime, and we know it. We’re living through the end of public health, and we know it. According to Gallup polls, 41 percent of Americans still believe we’re living in a pandemic (they’re right), and even more (53 percent) admit their lives haven’t returned to normal.

We have a convicted felon for president, who may or may not have staged his own assassination attempt for votes.

We have an alcoholic Fox News host in charge of our military, and he doesn’t know how to use a phone. We have an anti-vaxxer in charge of Health and Human Services, and he publicly reminisces over the days when “everybody got measles.” We have a TV doctor in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, and he once had to testify before Congress about hawking dangerous supplements.

The political collapse has started, that’s for sure.

And our celebrities, oof. From actors to fantasy authors, so many of them turned out to be liars, grifters, bigots, and predators. Those Marvel movies don’t feel so great when you realize our version of Tony Stark not only backed a fascist felon for president, but topped it off with a Nazi salute. Pop stars who used to weep over school shootings fly around in space now, taking selfies. As the world burns, they cheerfully announce they bought their masters.

The cultural collapse has started. That’s for sure.

There’s at least one genocide going on right now, and most of the world still manages to look away. Countless innocent civilians are dead or “missing.” Don’t you think they’re dead? They were murdered.

For anyone who believes collapse hasn’t started yet, or “the real collapse” has yet to come, I’ve got a question for them.

What would be bad enough?

What has to happen for the collapse to officially begin? What event would qualify? Temperatures are soaring above the limits of human survivability across the world. Every year is now the hottest year in recorded history. How hot does it have to get before millions of us start dying? How many people have to crank up their AC before their city’s grid gives out?

When is collapse going to hit each of us, personally? It depends.

It depends on where you live. It depends on how much money you make. It depends on how old you are. It depends on whether you have health insurance. It depends on whether you have a chronic illness. It depends on your gender. It depends on your race. It depends on your nationality. It depends on your religion.

I know one thing: No celebrity or politician is ever going to declare the beginning of collapse. No network is going to announce it on the news. There’s never going to be a history book that says collapse started on a given date.

The Weather Channel probably isn’t going to say, “We have no idea what’s going on now because fascists gutted the programs we rely on to predict storms.” It’s just not going to be there one day, and strangely enough, by the time that happens, a lot of people aren’t going to care that much.

In complexity science, there’s this thing called shifting baseline syndrome. Things just gradually get worse, and everyone gets used to it. Collapse happens, but it’s so slow that hardly anyone really notices.

Maybe for someone, collapse starts when their hot water heater breaks, and they can’t afford to fix it. Maybe it’s when the cheapest coffee they can find costs twenty bucks a bag, and they start to ration it. Maybe it’s when their parents can’t afford a retirement home, so they have to move in with their kids.

Even as global disasters and water wars kill millions, plenty of yoga moms and golf dads will be sitting in the drive thru at Chick-Fil-A, without much concern for anyone else, bitching about egg prices, blaming immigrants and trans teachers for their problems, hiding in their air conditioned bubbles, and defending Elon Musk online to whoever hasn’t been locked up yet.

When you think about those Gallup polls, all those Americans who still feel as if life hasn’t gotten back to normal, maybe that’s not just a virus. Maybe that’s collapse. If you think life just feels different, if you’re just not looking forward to the future like you were, that’s collapse.

Honestly, the typical American could wake up covered in dust every morning and still think they’re going to be a billionaire someday.

So, when is the collapse going to start? Beats me.

Collective Evolution

Jason Mcphail

Jason is another non-rightwingnut that writes on the internet. It's good to see so many thoughtful people stepping up and speaking out. It's still very sad to see and hear conservatives spouting nonsense and hatred for liberals. What did liberals ever do to them? Probably nothing, except try to help others. 

So it's a good thing to find people like Jason on the internet. I truly believe that there are more of "us" than there are of "them," but we don't usually take to the airwaves to vent, unless things are really bad. And right now, things in the US are pretty bad. One of our two parties is living in fear of Trump and has lost its spine and mind. The other party - mine - has not totally figured out how to beat back this maniac, but we are getting there.

Jason Mcphail

First it was the democrats. Then it was the Muslims. Then it was the anti fascists. Then it was the immigrants. Then it was the leftists. Then it was the democratic socialists. Now it’s the communists. Everyone is a dire threat suddenly.

Christians, they are using you. They are playing on your fear. Listen to them talk. Look into their eyes. Listen to them justify atrocities at every turn. Listen to them never take accountability for anything.

They want you to believe that this country was founded by godly evangelical Christians. Guys, 41 of the 56 “founding fathers” owned and participated in human trafficking. You can be mad at me for saying it, but when they prayed, do you think God told them it was ok to participate in human trafficking? They literally bought, bred, beat, and sold other human beings.

This administration is using God as a prop. The pledge of allegiance didn’t even have “under god” in it until 1954. Do you know why it was added? Look it up. It’s happening again, right now. Israel did not even become a country until 1948. But somehow you are being brainwashed into believing those are Gods chosen people and that destruction will come to you if you speak up against them shooting pregnant women in the stomach. I’ve literally seen IDF soldiers online bragging about killing children. Saying they are future enemies.

It’s time to show who you really are. Be good to other people. Stop using the legal system to justify your hate for other humans because your life isn’t working out the way you had planned. It’s not their fault. If you truly believe that one day you will stand before an almighty creator and give account, if you truly believe that, how do your think he will look at you when he reads back things you wrote and believed in?

When you defended a man who redacted the names of people who raped children to death. When you defended an organization that pulls over a U.S. citizen on his way to work and murders him in cold blood. When you defended rapists and pedophiles and made victims feel like there was no hope of justice for them? When does the victim shaming stop?

I’m not saying become a democrat. What I am saying is that it’s time to lay down your political ideology and start loving and listening to people. A man cannot serve two masters. Be a real Christian if you are going to be one. Follow Jesus. Be a radical lover of humans. Because one day, you will look back at this era and realize how wrong you were.

“They should have come here legally.”

“Where’s the proof of pedos in office?” (It’s in the redactions.)

“The left are jealous and hate financial success.” (No, they just want things like education and health care.)

It’s time to let go of your hatred, look in the mirror, and decide, do you serve Trump, or Jesus. Because you can’t do both.

Bryan Andrews

A new "country" singer has arisen from Missouri, Bryan Andrews. He has a new "mix-tape" out called "Independence Day" with eight tunes on it, including an "Intro" and "Outro." If you are a lefty, you will appreciate all of these tunes. If you are a right-winger, what the fuck are you doing here? Get out and go listen to Lee Greenwood sing "Proud to be an American" again. Over and over. Where at least you know you're free? 

A link to YouTube and all eight tracks can be found here Worth your time. Bryan has a tour scheduled which you can find wherever tickets are sold.

Track listing:

Intro

Are We Great Yet?

Backwoods Backwards

The Older I Get

Not See

Yeehaw

Home of the Chained

Outro

Jim Hightower

Jim Hightower is a Texas treasure, loved by all except right-wing assholes.

What a show, huh? Big-name corporations went all out this July 4th with a patriotic ad blitz professing their devotion to America's democracy. 

But it amounted to a Firecracker of Hypocrisy, for many of these showboat patriots have been backroom funders of the President Donald Trump regime's repression of our people's democratic rights.

Also, there's an internal level of cynical dishonesty in their flashy show of support for egalitarian values. In the past few years, a clique of these Silicon Valley and Wall Street giants has been monkeywrenching the rules of their own corporate governance to crush the very idea of "shareholder democracy."

Yes, such a concept has existed, at least in theory. For decades, big business profiteers have been given special privileges over the rest of us by claiming to be "democratic enterprises," governed by masses of common shareholders who get one vote for each share of stock they own. (Actually, that makes a corporation more of a plutocracy, since the more stock you own, the more votes you get.)

Today, though, even plutocracy is too democratic for monarchical billionaire bosses like Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX. So, they've invented a super-class of shareholders — mostly themselves and their cronies. These elite owners get domineering voting power, exceeding all other investors combined. For example, Musk owns about 40% of the stock in SpaceX, but in his self-created system, he gets more than 80% of shareholder votes. Among other advantages, his skewed voting power makes Musk "unfireable" — unless he votes to fire himself. 

This is Jim Hightower saying ... Beware of billionaires professing any allegiance to America's democratic values. In fact, just beware of billionaires, period.

LET'S INCREASE SOCIAL SECURITY, NOT CUT IT!

Here they come again: Billionaires, wailing that Congress must — MUST! — act immediately to slash the monthly Social Security checks that middle-class and poor retirees count on.

Plutocratic elites and their anti-government ideologues periodically erupt in outrage that elderly Americans who've earned retirement benefits are depleting the Social Security Trust Fund. So, they exclaim, the government must cut the payments these old folks are getting.

But wait — it's not "the government's money." It belongs to the retirees themselves. They've paid monthly payroll taxes into the fund for years on the guarantee that they would later draw benefits out.

Maybe so, bark opponents, but the money well is going dry, so the only way to "save" the program is to chop payments owed to beneficiaries.

In three words: That's a lie.

What the superwealthy don't want us to notice is that the Social Security tax is spectacularly unfair. If your yearly income is less than $185,000 (which includes 95% of us) — every penny of your earnings is subject to retirement tax. But if you're paid a million a year, or a billion, or even more — everything over $185,000 is tax-free. Sweet! 

Wait, there's more. Instead of being paid wages, most uber-wealthy people draw their annual income from a Wall Street scheme called "unrealized capital gains." Big surprise — those gains are totally exempted from our nation's retirement tax.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... So, let's make Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and other tax-dodging billionaires pay on all of their income as the rest of us do. That's only fair. Then America can increase benefits so everyone can have a dignified retirement. Now that's true fairness!

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.