Over on the Facebooks I have dedicated the last six months or so to exposing the stupidity, grifting, and overall malevolence and incompetence of the Republixanazi administration. I know it’s not pleasant, but if I can make a few thousand people aware of the issues we face, so be it.

Of course, I occasionally wonder how many of those people have muted or blocked me because OMG it’s relentless, and I’m pretty sure all the MAGAts fled long ago.

Except for one.

This person is not stupid and is fairly well read, but their head is so far up MAGA’s ass that they can hear a hamberder coming a small intestine away. They were regularly chiming in on my posts, spouting the most baseless crap ever, just the usual MAGAt shibboleths and bUt BiDens and Whataboutisms. After a week or so of this, I simply challenged them to put up or shut up: Names, dates, headlines. Give us facts, yo, not just snide MAGAt “comebacks.”

(Yes, I am using the singular ‘they’ to halfway shield their identity, which will enrage them even more when they eventually come across this post.)

You will be astonished to learn, I’m sure, that they have failed to provide any actual documentation of anything they’re sure is true. Not once. I even started tagging them to goad them into reacting, but no — they don’t got the goods. In the last week or so, they haven’t even made the effort to snark, because they know they don’t got the goods. I wondered if they had unfriended me, and I checked; no, we’re still ‘friends,’ so I decided to check out their page. Maybe, just maybe, they weren’t snarking because they were having an existential crisis discovering that their God Emperor was, shall we say flawed?

Alas, no.

First, a metaphor: the Wax House.

If you build your house out of wax, because, hey, it’s beautiful with all the golden sunlight illuminating your walls and everything, you’ve committed yourself to a lot of work to keep it that way. That same sunlight might melt your home, or a casual tree branch or rock could crack your foundation.

So you add another layer two of wax. You build a wall around it. You construct a large dome of wax over it for extra protection, but that just creates more work, doesn’t it? But you keep at it, adding more and more layers to your protection, until the house no longer receives that golden light but you have to protect your Wax House, and on it goes.

Hold that thought. Here’s what I found on this person’s feed.

Oh my. Right off the bat, accusing “the left” with the right’s prime shibboleth “Ooh, look at the tolerant left.” This is exactly their position, that free speech means that they should be able to spout the most repulsive racist, classist, ablist, keep adding the -ist’s, crap imaginable, and if we point out they’re being dicks they scream YOU’RE THREATENING MY RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH.

::snork:: Good old Maggie. You could always count on her for a viperish, peevish lie. (See here.)

This one almost made me break my cover and comment with:

Something about Democrats always having to fix Republican economics, and that over 25% of our current debt is due to Turmp’s insane tax cuts for the rich. And he wants to increase them.

So let’s revisit our Wax House metaphor. Our friend has built a wax house of right-wing beliefs, and they are forced to contort themselves into gigantic pretzels to protect that wax house from anything that doesn’t make the wax house happy. This is a “closed belief system,”  in which people cocoon themselves in whatever makes them feel… important? better than? and then shut the door, ignoring the actual real world of sociology, science, economics, whatever — because even the tiniest sliver of reality is enough to start melting that house.

Let’s see some of the other things that this person clings to:

I love this one. It encapsulates the MAGAts determined deflection away from any cracks in the wax. The country isn’t “squealing,” of course, we’re screaming at the destruction of our government by right-wing psychopaths: agencies, grants, support, departments, research, history — all gone. Our screaming is not what is destroying our democracy. (Our guest MAGAt of course cannot keep from ejaculating that aMeRiCa iS nOt A dEmOcRaCy KENNETH, one of their top ten shibboleths.)

These are fun. Rhetorically, this is known as a Gish Gallop, the right’s preferred strategy for talking at anyone who disagrees with them: You simply yammer on and on, flooding the air with one specious argument after another so that when you’re done, your respondent has very little way to respond, since 1) you’ve thrown too many topics into the conversation, and 2) for each of those topics, they have to deconstruct your lies and fallacies before they can even begin to address the actual topic.

But we’re not having to do this with a yammering MAGAt in the room, so let’s deconstruct this.

1. baby

Dear MAGAts: It’s an embryo, not a baby. A baby is a human you can hold in your arms and love. An embyro is something different. bUt ThE hEaRtBeAt KENNETH — let’s kill this shibboleth right off: THERE IS NO HEARTBEAT. There is an electrical signal from a clump of cells that will become a heart, but they are not a heart. bUt YoU cAn HeAr iT oN tHe uLtRaSoUnD KENNETH — no, you can’t. You can hear the synthesizer sound medical engineers have decided to add to those electrical impulses, because it’s a lovely sound, isn’t it — BUT IT ISN’T A HEARTBEAT.

Maybe this helps:

2. how much money you should earn

LOL wut? I’m not sure what this one is. Probably something to do with taxes, which drive the MAGAts insane. How dare they be required to contribute to the welfare of our nation and — quelle horreur! — OTHER PEOPLE KENNETH! Or it may be about that outrageously generous minimum wage of $7.25/hour that hasn’t been raised since 2009, 16 years ago. Thankfully, costs have not risen in the least in those 16 years. [N.B.: The “minimum wage” is now officially below the U.S. poverty level. See also. And, MAGAt friend, this is what I mean by names, dates, headlines. Evidence.]

3. what energy source you should use

This is their tired old “drill, baby, drill” shibboleth. All of Turmp’s bizarre whining about shower heads and toilet flushes and forest management and windmill cancer is part of this idiocy. Listen up, MAGAts, no one is telling you which “energy source” you must use, and the only reason anyone is telling you you should use renewable energy is just trying to keep you from perishing in an apocalyptic wasteland. But you do you.

4. what words you can say

Yeah, kind of like kindergarten: “Billy, you can’t use those words in class. Mrs. Jones, Billy absolutely cannot call Susie a shithead.” (See “free speech” above.)

5. what they can do to your kids without your permission

Like what, bubba? Is this the old “my kid went to school a boy and came home a girl” bullshit? Is it a sideswipe of any school activity that threatens to expose their kid to… oThEr PeOpLe KENNETH? Run away! Run away!

6. how you must refer to what a person wants to identify as

Syntactical fluidity is beyond the average MAGAt. Let’s translate that garble to “how you must respect another person’s identity,” because that’s what actually torques them. We call it politeness; they call it unpardonable coercion, fullscale communism if you wanna know, as if they knew that that meant.

7. who can own a gun

And then every MAGAts favorite hill to die on — because guns, get it? — the Second fupping Amendment. Do I think that people who need psych evaluations should have a gun? No. Do I think that abusive spouses should own a gun? No. Do I think anyone who has proven to be dangerous to themselves and others should own a gun or even have access to one? No. I’m not at all sure why our MAGAt friend thinks they should.

Having fun? One more and we’re done.

It has somehow become gospel that when Ron DeSantis illegally flew some undocumented immigrants and dumped them in Martha’s Vineyard (because take that, libtards, how do you like them apples har har), the very rich and liberal residents of the Vineyard clutched their pearls in horror at those, those filthy illegals </BlancheDuboisVoice> (because that’s MAGA’s reaction) and immediately “deported” them to Somewhere Else to dispose of them.

Only that’s not what happened. Yes, DeSantis did put these people on a plane, lying that they were being taken somewhere where they’d be assisted in getting settled, with job training, shelter, appropriate paperwork, etc. When they were delivered to the Vineyard, no one knew they were coming and it took a moment for everyone to respond. Which they did by… providing food, shelter, clothing, counseling, transportation to somewhere that actually had the resources to support these people, unlike the island of the Vineyard, and — wait for it — a fast-track to citizenship, since they were now victims of a crime, DeSantis.

For a fuller, and funnier, report, see Wonkette.

There was more our friend’s feed, and I had a hard time making myself look away from the wreckage of a mind like that, but Jebus H. Cthulhu, the appalling messiness of the thought processes, the whole closed belief system, was compelling, pathological even. But I got away safely, I think.

In summation, our MAGAt friend has put so many protective barriers around their wax house that they can no longer see the sun, but that’s okay because everyone knows that SoLaR pOwEr iS a HoAx KENNETH, HENNGH?

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

You may have read, a couple of weeks ago, about how our mighty macho warfighters at the Department of Defense banned dangerous books from their overseas school libraries.

You might suppose, if you are of a proper turn of mind, that maybe the Pentagon had become concerned about our troops (who have after all volunteered to have themselves molded into mighty macho warfighters and are thus very impressionable) and were removing books by Andrew Tate, Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, or Paul Joseph Watson so that our guys won’t grow up to be pig-ignorant, violent, men’s-rights knuckledraggers.

But alas, this is what keeps Pete Hegseth up at night:

(Yes, that Julianne Moore.)

You can see why the Pentagon wanted to set this book on fire.

No, really:

“The single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength,’” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at an employee town hall at the Pentagon on Friday. “It served a purpose of dividing the force.” [from Wonkette’s always-exciting report]

Oh, you think the current Secretary of Defense is over-reacting? Just take a look here:

Can you imagine our warfighters, or — gasp! — their children,^[1] being subjected to this gag-a-maggot display of… DIVERSITY, KENNETH???

Somehow the U.S. that made movies about our boys in the trenches and always included a diverse American squad hunkering down on the battlefield — and having each other’s backs — has become this whiny, insecure, hateful reflection of the Republixanazi Party.

As for me, I immediately ordered the book, and such was the demand for this satanic children’s book that it took nearly a month to be printed and arrive.

At least our soldiers are protected from… other people?

—————

^[1] The children KENNETH!!

Members of our fascist party have taken to describing Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” attempting thereby to create the impression in the brains of amygdala-based lifeforms that it’s a scam and we need to “reform” it, by which they mean “destroy it.”

This has been a fever dream of our Republixanazi Party since Social Security was implemented 90 years ago. For some reason they cannot comprehend that providing a small sum for the elderly, the disabled, and the orphans is actually a good thing and can mean the difference between barely sustainable living conditions and absolute misery.

So let’s talk about their metaphor. Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme?

No. It is not. A Ponzi scheme is designed from the very outset to cheat its investors. Those at the bottom of the pyramid pay into the system, but they never see a return on their “investment” because it’s all a scam, remember? Only the rich assholes engineering the scam ever see any money out of it.

This is prima facie not how Social Security works. It’s not how it was intended to work. It intended to use the tax revenue from current workers to provide a monthly check to retired workers (and/or their dependents).

Yes, it is true that you — as an individual — do not “get back” the money you paid in. That money has already been spent to help others, and now others are paying to support you.

Is the system in trouble? A bit, and for the moment we will ignore the fact that Congress fupped over Social Security by raiding its bank account and never paying that money back. (Talk about Ponzi schemes!)

If the system is in trouble, you might think that smart people would examine the issues and come up with a solution. Indeed, many people have suggested several approaches to the problem, like here and here. As you will see if you click through, no solution is without its own problems — but they are solutions.

So the question arises, why is our Republixanazi Party  — if they’re so concerned that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme — not pursuing solutions?

(Answer key: Because they want to kill it and suck up your money through actual Ponzi schemes like the stock market.)

One more comment: Our Republixanazi Party sneeringly describes Social Security as an “entitlement,” playing with the pejorative sense of “entitled” to make us feel dirty about accepting these funds. The fact is, though, that we are in fact entitled to those funds; they are an earned benefit. We earned them. We are entitled to them.

Do not let the fascists lie to you. Resist.

The other day I received in the mail an envelope that encouraged me to claim this SPECIAL OFFER WITHIN 10 DAYS. Normally I just toss these sorts of things straight into the trash, since they are never anything I am interested in, but this time I just happened to see through the envelope window the phrase… PRESIDENT TRUMP TRAIN.

Well.

Breathlessly I tore open the envelope and was deluged with multiple forms and pieces of paper.

This opens up.

NOT AVAILABLE IN ANY STORE, KENNETH!

Notice how you don’t get your FREE TRACK SET until Shipment Two.

Of course this is a scam to separate the MAGAts from their money. How can I tell? See how that flyer opened up and there’s a foldover on the right? On the reverse:

That’s right, this crap is from 2016. They haven’t even updated the brochures.

Look, KENNETH, “gleaming gold-tone wheels.” Not gold, not gold-plated, gold-toned. Appropriate for that new President, indeed.

Then we start getting the details: You’ll get another train car every other month — but no clue as to how many this might end up being.

As for Trump’s “stirring messages of patriotism and American greatness,” I invite you to scroll back up and look at the close-up of the first three shipments. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN seems to be about it for stirring messages, but then again, the audience for this scam is easily impressed.

The audience for this scam is also easily stampeded. As amygdala-based lifeforms, they seek fear and anger to feed their brains, and so this whole pitch is designed to make their brains tingle with anxiety that they might miss out on this PART OF HISTORY.

YOU’RE SPECIAL. YOU’RE ENTITLED. DON’T WAIT! ALL THOSE OTHER SPECIAL, ENTITLED PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BEAT YOU TO IT!

And best of all: SEND NO MONEY NOW.

What’s not to like?

If you are of a suspicious mind, you might be wondering how much this costs. Does it say? Not on the big brochure. Not on the little folded note-size piece, that reiterates that YOU NEED TO HURRY IF YOU WANT THIS HISTORICAL THING. Not on the claim notice. Not on the generic Hamilton Collection flyer.

So many pieces of paper! It’s almost like they think the audience for this scam might not have the laser-like focus needed to read it all.

Ah, there it is, in the fine print:

That’s right, the charge for the first shipment is $89.99 plus $14.99, and wouldn’t you know it — you get all [redacted] pieces for the same attractive price, which is… do the math, carry the one… $104.98.

One hundred dollars for each of those HISTORIC train cars. That’s $314.94 just for the first three cars — and there is no indication of when (if ever) the shipments will stop. I’ll let you do the math for a decent-sized train set. (And The Hamilton Collection is a subset of The Bradford Exchange, which charges your credit card before each shipment. You’ll never even notice the money is gone, right?)

And HO scale?

That’s the one in front. Notice the hobbyist’s fingers at the right of frame. The gauge of the tracks, i.e., the distance between the tracks, is .625″, 5/8 of an inch. $104.98. Each.

So the Bradford Exchange has had these things sitting in a warehouse somewhere for eight years and has the chutzpah to pass them off as a fresh idea. And only someone who is too dumb to realize that if the Bradford Exchange still has these to sell after eight years, then maybe DEMAND DIDN’T ALREADY EXCEED EXPECTATIONS as might have been expected.

A Trump voter, in other words.

This popped up on an associate’s feed^[1] on the FaceTubes today:

I don’t have many rightwing nutjobs on my feed these days; I suspect they’ve weeded themselves out because of my relentlessly liberal posting of facts (which have a liberal bias, alas). It’s always a bit of a shock, therefore, when I see stuff like this.

This particular blob is of the sneering-at-POLITICALLY CORRECT/WOKE variety, and it’s a particularly stupid one. Let’s see if we can follow its logic.

• Bald people don’t need to use shampoo.
• People with hair do need to use shampoo.
• Bald people are offended if people who do need to use shampoo, use shampoo.
• THEREFORE, KENNETH, THE WOKE CROWD WILL cAnCeL SHAMPOO, KENNETH!

::sigh::

This is what passes for snark on the other side of the aisle.

(I am also perturbed by “At the rate we’re going” and “they’re,” implying that the whole PC/woke thing is an organized conspiracy against the Righteous, but we’ll let that pass for now.)

The problem with this blob is not its logical shambles. The problem is that the speaker/poster chooses to embrace the fact that it is not kind, it is not generous, it is not — dare I say — Christian to use terminology that demeans a marginalized person. It’s essentially a really dumb way to say, “We can’t even say n****r or f****t any more!” They’re mean, and they mean it, and they’re genuinely angry that the rest of us think they’re shitheads just because they’re mean to people.

I felt like replying with something like:

At least my snark punches up, even if it’s no more true than my “associate’s” snark.

—————

^[1] I can’t bring myself to refer to these people as “friends.”

I was all geared up to deconstruct the vicious rhetorical fuppery used by the appallingly incompetent Katie Britt, an actual Senator from Alabama, in her official GOP response to President Biden’s State of the Union address last week, but Gary Legum did a great job over at the inestimable Wonkette, so I’m going to take a different tack.

For those who are not going to click over to Wonkette, Legum’s analysis of Britt’s Big Lie about the 12-year-old girl who was sex-trafficked is spot on: what Britt did was a) mention Biden, b) tell horrific story [that had nothing to do with Biden or his administration], c) punctuate the story by mentioning Biden again, thus tying him in the listener’s mind to this woman’s sex trafficking nightmare.

This is not an anomaly. It is the go-to rhetorical structure for almost all of right-wing discourse, as I’ve covered before here and here. That was brought home to me yesterday when yet another Imprimis^[1] from Hillsdale College arrived in my mailbox. For those who are unaware, Hillsdale is a rightwing cesspit, dedicated to keeping the amygdala-based lifeforms fed with fear and anger.

These things come every now and then, addressed to my late mother. I don’t disabuse them of their mistake, because it’s costing them money to mail this thing to someone who skims the main essay, snorts, then throws the thing in the trash (disregarding the mail-in ‘give us your money’ envelope as part of the process), and I’m on board with that. Vive le résistance.

Because I’m in that kind of mood, I red-penciled the thing and flunked Todd Bensman. Let’s see what I found.

First of all, the thing is loaded with panic words, disgust words, and weasel words. Keep those categories in mind.

It is chock full of post hoc, propter hoc fallacies, i.e., putting factoid after another and allowing the reader to infer that the first is the cause of the second.

Finally, the rhetorical trick of elision is a constant issue.

The whole thing is a vector of ooga booga, designed to inject panic and fear directly into the veins of the reader. Check out the front page there: beyond imagining, tsunami, unfathomable, smashed every record, stair-stepping fashion. The rest of the pamphlet sustains that with phrases like public outrage, some may commit acts of terrorism, and the like. Its whole purpose is stir outrage.

To make it easier on both of us, let’s go with bullet points. I’ll quote the essay, then explain the issue with it.

• “Of the over 7.6 million illegals encountered by the Border Patrol since 2021…” First of all, illegals is a disgust word, a trigger for the amygdala-based lifeforms. Elision: What, exactly, constitutes an “encounter”? Is it an arrest? What? Also, since 2021: that was three years ago. I know, they’re trying to pin it on the Biden administration. I should note here that there are no footnotes, no references, no sources cited.
• “But with the percentage of those allowed to stay now approaching 100 percent, if current trends hold, the total allowed to remain in the U.S. under the Biden administration will reach ten million by next January.” Weasel words: “approaching” and “if the current trends hold.” This is their get-out-of-lying-free card.
• At no point does the estimable Todd Bensman dare to explain why so many people are desperate to come to the U.S., probably because the U.S. helped cause the conditions in their homeland that makes them want to get the hell out of there. And you think he’s ever going to acknowledge climate-change as a cause, either now or in the future? Pfft.
• He does ask “Who are these people?” at one point, but then just gives numbers, not details about who they actually are. Todd Bensman does not give a fupp about the humans whose lives he is so cavalier about.
• “More than 330 as of November 2023 are on the FBI’s terrorist watch list.” Did you catch that? Elision: as of — in other words, in total, ever. Mr. Bensman wants you to think that at least 330 terrorists are admitted to the U.S. every year, when in fact that number is a total number (since when, he does not say) — and clearly, the total number of people on the terrorist watch list who were caught, not admitted.
• “Many are murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and violent criminals.” Weasel words: “many.” How many, Todd? Are these the ones who are allowed into the country? How do you know?
• “More than a million have been lawfully ordered deported by judges in the U.S. but remain in our country regardless.” Elision: Possibly because of due process? Also a bit of panic: “regardless” — THEY’RE STILL HERE, KENNETH!
• “Never before have the Border Patrol’s 19,000 agents been ordered to abandon vast stretches of the border to conduct administrative intake duty. Elision: “administrative intake duty” = what the rest of us call “legal immigration process.” Also, Todd, check with your congressional team to see how they voted on the recent immigration bill, which would have increased funding for border security, exactly like you’ve been screaming for. Panic: “never before”!!!!!1!! KENNETH!
• “And never has there been anything like the current conveyor-belt policy to distribute millions of illegals through the American interior.” Panic words: OMG, KENNETH, NOT THE AMERICAN INTERIOR!!!!1! (It’s also a lie.)
• “One can only assume that the reason for this is partisan bias…” Weasel words: Any time you see the words “assume” or “probably” or “may,” the writer is going for plausible deniability of an untruth.
• “It is probably not coincidental that hospital systems across the nation have fallen deep into the red since the great mass migration crisis began.” Yeah, it’s probably those filthy illegals who did that, not the red states’ refusal to expand Medicaid in their domains. And it couldn’t possibly be the grotesque for-profit healthcare system we continue to inflict on ourselves. It has to be the immigrants, right? Also, panic words: “great mass migration crisis.”
• “…to care for the hundreds of thousands showing up with hands out.” Disgust words: “hands out,” because those filthy illegals are only coming here for the freebies, right?
• “Some percentage will commit crimes…” Weasel words: “Some percentage.” What percentage, Todd? At this point in time, data shows that the crime rate for non-citizens in this country, “illegal” or not, is far below the crime rate of actual citizens. (See Alabama, to pick one state at almost random.)
• “One prays not, but some may also commit acts of terrorism.” Panic words: Honey, please.
• “…this great influx will increase joblessness and put immense downward pressure on wages for American workers.” We now await Mr. Bensman’s call to rigorously prosecute companies that illegally hire undocumented workers at less than minimum wage, resulting in stiff criminal and financial penalties.
• In a paragraph about determining whether a political action will increase or decrease the chances of immigrants taking the risk to try to come here, we get “… in the ongoing standoff in Texas, placing razor wire at the border as the Texas Governor ordered done will clearly decrease the odds…” Since this is a family blog, I cannot transcribe what I scrawled over that, but suffice it to say that this one sentence encapsulates the rightwing’s attitude towards the lives of the less fortunate, and my reaction was righteous if obscene.
• Finally, he lists five steps that we could take to reduce all this illegal immigration. None of them do anything to fund and improve the immigration process itself, but rather are all punitive and destructive, i.e., rightwing values.
• He concludes with “Too many of our elected leaders have selfish reasons to let the border crisis continue…” Panic words: “selfish reasons” — If, as Todd is bluntly stating, we are faced with a tsunami of immigrants, most of whom are terrorists and rapists, what “reasons” could any politician have for wanting this to continue?? This is just a dog whistle to those who want to believe in conspiracy theories among the powerful.

That was a lot, and I haven’t begun to do any kind of deep dive on the actual problems with our immigration policy, which are many, and this post is already too long. I will just say that a major solution to the problem is to go big on actual immigration: make it clear, make it easy, make it fair. You want to keep terrorists and rapists out? Great! Show me how you would do that without just shutting the door and stringing razor wire across our back yard.

Here’s the deal: If the rightwing — Katie Britt, Todd Bensman, et al. — could construct a rigorously logical argument to support their ideas, they would. But they can’t. All they can do is scare the amygdala-based lifeforms into supporting their agenda with rhetorical fuppery. Stay alert and count the silver.

—————

^[1] Imprimis translates from the Latin as “first of all,” which is what rightwingers see their rightful place in society as.

I’ve been reading back through this blog, specifically my Liberal Rants, and 1) I write good; and b) it’s probably time for me to pick up my sword and once again do regular battle with the unfortunates who swarm our public discourse with their petrified, yappy-dog lack of understanding of the realities of life.

In checking my spam filter this morning, I was intrigued by this subject heading:

Elon Musk TERRIFIES Church Leaders!

PROOF INSIDE!

THE FINAL COLLAPSE, KENNETH!!!

What the hell are we talking about here?

The spam filter on this blog’s server out in California has an excellent option where I can go peek under the hood, so to speak, of an email without having to invite it into my inbox. What did I find under this particular hood?

Mercy. This is all so vague that I’m not at all sure what I’m supposed to be terrified about. Sure, AI is from hell and is going to drag us all back to the netherworld when it goes home, we all know that. But I have not seen any news or social media suggesting that it might target Xtians in some specific way.

Needless to say, I did not click on those links to the “short independent documentary,” even though it seems clear that The Great International Conspiracy to Be Evil is going to “take it down”… PERMANENTLY! So I guess we’ll never know just how dark and sinister this threat is until it engulfs us all, presumably starting with the Xtians.

Okay, so we can laugh at this feeble crap, but here’s the deal: the target audience for this is exactly this fearful. A lot of my other spam these days is from rightwing cesspools like BuildingOurMovement — and those emails are deliberate cluster-bombs of fear-inducing buzzwords to get the amygdala-based lifeforms riled up against, well, YOU KNOW.

Yes, you do know what they are getting riled up against: things they don’t understand and have no experience with — minorities, LGBQTIA, vaccines, SOCIALAMISM KENNETH — and they go and vote for the Big Strong Daddy who can SAVE THEM and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. The fact that they are voting for people who will let the rich and the corporations do whatever the fupp they want while the amygdala-based lifeforms find themselves without healthcare, pensions, roads, schools, or jobs — that never filters back to their brains.

I do not have a solution for any of this. Once an amygdala-based lifeform is duped, they cannot be unduped. All we can do is gently point out to them that crime is actually at its lowest in decades, immigration reform is possible, taxing the rich is necessary and good, gay people are just people, and this great nation of ours is the only industrialized nation without universal healthcare.

Light a candle for me as the election continues to ramp up and I will be forced — forced, I tell you — to write more Liberal Rants as the fascists continue slouching towards Bethlehem.

I just finished reading James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, and I highly recommend it, especially if you are like me a huge fan of Lear.

A passage near the end jumped out at me:

[discussing the declining fortunes of the boy companies of London at the time] Another and now nearly fatal blow to [the Children of the Revels’] fortune came in November 1606, when they were ordered to stop recruiting boy players from among the ranks of child choristers, since “it was not fit or decent that such as should sing the praises of God Almighty should be trained up or employed in such lascivious or profane exercises.”

Well.

Here are some modern day choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the same group that fed into the theatre company Paul’s Boys back in the day.

Who could possibly want to train up or employ these precious innocents in lascivious or profane exercises? Everyone’s moral alarms should be blaring CODE RED at such an idea.

Why, it’s outrageous — it’s disgusting — it’s… GROOMING, KENNETH!

Dale, I hear you ask, are you claiming that today’s handwringers and Moms for “Liberty” and rightwing screechers are pulling the same stunt as the god-bothering Puritans from 400 years ago?

Yes, yes I am.

That is a link to coverage of the high school in Fort Wayne, IN, that had its production of Maid Marian canceled because the god-bothering Puritans of that fair city objected to its LGBQT characters. LASCIVIOUS AND PROFANE, KENNETH! (The kids are all right: They rallied support and $84,000 to put on the play independently. The house was packed.)

I get it. The god-botherers have sincere religiousy beliefs about what is LASCIVIOUS AND PROFANE, KENNETH,^[1] and they are determined that the rest of us are not going to celebrate Christmas be anything but righteous, upstanding Puritans ourselves. Because otherwise… well, I’m not sure what they think is going to happen, other than that great fear of Puritans everywhere, that someone, somewhere, might be happy.

At any rate, they’re still wrong.

Happy Pride Month!

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^[1] I do not include the scum and villainy now known as the Republican Party as having sincere religiousy beliefs. Those people do not believe in anything except using divisive topics to scare the amygdala-based lifeforms into voting them into power.

A local church has on its street bulletin board the message:

“IT’S SIMPLE. GET AMERICA BACK TO GOD!!”

That’s good. Simple is good.

But as H. L. Mencken reminds us, “For every complex problem, there’s a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

And so I’d like to ask some questions.

What does that mean, exactly, to “get America back to God”? I know where the concept comes from, all those Psalms and Old Testament moanings about Israel “turning away” from Yahweh, wherein Yahweh got testy if the Israelites weren’t paying attention to him 24/7. I suspect this church means the same thing, i.e., make everyone worship exactly as they do — since we haven’t been doing that, God has allowed (or worse, caused) our problems.

What mechanism is the church thinking of, exactly, to “get” us back to God? Public whippings? The stocks? Re-education camps? Blue laws?^[1] The Mildred Layton Committee to Stamp Out Strife and Tribulation?

What problems, exactly, have been caused by America’s not paying attention to God? Are these real problems, like global warming or income disparity? Or are they the imaginary boogeymen that are the usual sources of fear for this church’s amygdalas, like Teh Gays and illegal immigrants and some soaring crime rate that doesn’t exist?

Does this return to God involve increasing freedoms and liberty and prosperity to every American and non-American in our country? Or does it involve repression and hiding and cutting off? Do they want everyone to support each other with love or are they demanding that we all straighten up and fly right?

Do they mean that we should throw our weight behind politicians who are going to vote to provide for the least of these, with policies like socialized medical care and childcare and a livable minimum wage? Or do they want to restrict our tax dollars to those who “deserve” it?

It would be uncivil of me to put words in this church’s mouth, so to speak, but I think the odds are pretty great that what this church means is that this nation has changed in ways that make them uncomfortable. Where before there were tidy boxes for every category — and there were categories — now we have boxes and crates and beanbag chairs and waterbeds, and people keep going from one to the other with shocking ease. Those People act as if they have a seat at the table, and this church wants us to remove those chairs immediately. With prejudice.

In the end, their sanctimonious sign is empty posturing, a static version of the gospel of Luke’s Pharisee in the Temple, smug that they are not as other men are. They might be better off reading Matthew’s reporting.

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^[1] Blue laws, for those too young to remember, required local businesses to be closed on Sundays — and yes, this church would be in favor of their return.