Lies, hate & Republicans
Today’s GOP would impose its will, coerce silence, pillage our libraries, strip away our liberties, police our private lives, and call that some sort of "freedom."
This week more of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s lies came unraveled. Not that lying and letting everyone know you are lying is a disqualification from leadership in today’s Republican Party. The Mage of Mar-a-Lago, after all, casts a contraveritas spell that even J.K Rowling could never have imagined.
This week the strong-man Governor of Florida and his supine legislature did something completely, totally, thoroughly, corrupt. They enacted a law to punish a private company for speaking out against the Governor’s legislative agenda.
That’s right. They passed a law to punish the Walt Disney Company because its CEO announced he did not support the Governor’s don’t say gay legislation. To be clear, Disney did not violate any laws. It did not engage in conscientious objection. All it did was publicly disagree with a position taken by the Governor.
But no opposition is tolerable in a dictatorship, and the state enacted a law to punish Disney.
Using the power of government, the way DeSantis uses it, to punish companies for speaking out against his policies is a coercive attack on American freedom. It cannot be called conservative. It is, just like so many current Republican efforts, an extreme form of government overreach.
Not even mathematics is immune. This week DeSantis banned math books claiming to find in them efforts to indoctrinate youth with ideas of Critical Race Theory.
DeSantis’ hateful state has now advised doctors treating trans youth to stop gender transition protocols that are underway. Whatever you think about trans youth- and I hope when you do think about these young people you do so with compassion and love- whatever you think, it cannot be that a governor should be allowed to direct the course of treatment a doctor prescribes for a patient.
In perfect Orwellian fashion, leaders like DeSantis enact laws to ban books, coerce private companies, suppress votes, and scapegoat citizens who happen to be gay or trans or who make the personal health decision to have an abortion or to wear a mask. They impose their will through coercion then strut about telling people they have created more freedom for their people.
Lies.
And hate.
And a phrase I never thought we would hear in politics again, the will to power.
Last night the January 6th Committee filed a court document in the case to compel former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to comply with their subpoena. The filing included text messages where Meadows described the Trump Administration’s effort to overturn the election. The plan was to delay the certification of a free and fair election, then to declare martial law and impose by force a different result.
The filing also included testimony of a Meadow aide, Cassidy Hutchinson. She told the committee that Jim Jordan, Lauren Bobert, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert, Jodi Hice, Scott Perry, Marjorie Taylor Greene – all members of Congress who swore an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution- were at a White House meeting on December 21 to strategize about January 6th and tactics to pressure Mike Pence.
I will not unpack all of this here. Just know that plot is coming into focus, and that soon the side bar in the history text books with the picture of Benedict Arnold will need an update.
In the kind of serendipity usually reserved for fiction, the Committee filing came at the end of the very same day that Marjorie Taylor Greene took the witness stand. It was a case brought by some of constituents who claim she is not eligible to run for office because she violated the third article of the 14th Amendment. That’s where it says you are not eligible to run for office if you’ve sworn an oath then participated in an insurrection.
Honestly, seeing Marjorie Taylor Greene on the witness stand under oath yesterday was revelatory for me. In her position, she is a danger to the republic- subversive not only to democracy and to the proposition that all are created equal, but to truth itself. And yet seeing her on the stand, unable to recall anything, unaware of what was written in the Declaration of Independence when asked about it, I felt sorry for her.
I am sure everyone has at one time or another seen someone promoted to a position well beyond their capabilities. Some try to hide their deficiencies. Some work extra hard to overcome them. And some, like Ms. Greene explode in kind of permanent bravado. It turns out, she is just plain stupid. And maybe afraid. She covers her limitations with lies, and maybe she takes comfort in the patron saint of all dupes and dunces, the former, and would-be-again, liar-in-chief, Mr. Trump.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, today’s GOP elevates people like her to high office because they enable evil men like Ron DeSantis to impose their will, to coerce silence, to pillage our libraries, to strip away our liberties, to police our private lives, and to call it freedom.
When you imposing your will on others and claim they are happy about it- well that it is just another echo of the cruel, dishonest, and delusional antebellum claim that slaves were happy with their work.
Like all autocratic movements, the American one lifts up those who will not think for themselves. It asks, not what you can do for your country. Instead, it demands that you pretend our country is limned by imagined racial and religious boundaries. Its vision is narrow- and so, consequently, is the future of a people ruled this way.
This week we gave us two examples of the nation they would have us become: We learned that guns are now the leading cause of death among children in the United States. And, in Texas, Exxon Mobil, one of America’s biggest companies, has banned the display of pride flags during pride month.
No, thank you.
The heavy current of American history flows in the opposite direction. Americans did not storm Omaha Beach in the name of an illiberal and coercive government coercion. The did not stand firm on Little Round Top to maintain the fiction that some men are more equal than others. They did not huddle together in the freezing winter of Valley Forge for the right to lie under oath. Nor did they cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge to let government divide us.
Today’s autocratic threat joins a long line of failures to live up to our ideals. But it cannot prevail because the alternative is so much stronger.
The advantages of a free press, free speech, and a public square where ideas compete without coercion have never been matched by repressive systems. Our country is more creative, innovative, dynamic, and prosperous because of our freedom. It was not foreordained that we would be the nation that time and again invents a future that shapes the world. Whether that is the freedom to drive across a continent or to surf a global internet or to travel to the moon or to live in a multi-racial democracy. We lead because of the collective power of millions of people freely sharing ideas.
A new day is coming.
The truth, as they say, will out. And in our case, I expect that to happen next month when the House January 6 Committee holds its public hearings.