Republicans the party of fraud, fear, and fascism

The leadership of the modern Republican Party have taken the party down the path of fraud, fear, and fascism. First they use fraud to create scenarios and conspiracy theories on topics that will instill fear in conservative voters. The next step is to blame liberals and Democratic officials and candidates in particular for participating in or enabling the feared behavior. All of this is in aid of winning electoral contests so that the Republican Party retains power in order to do the bidding of the oligarchs that provide their campaign funds and very lucrative jobs when they are out of office.

Republican leaders and media figures peddled non-sense like the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy in an effort to defeat Hillary Clinton. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election Trump made claims that refugees from Central and South America were mostly criminals and we therefore needed a wall on the southern border to protect us. Now, many of those same Republican leaders have added equally absurd, yet even more dangerous hokum such as connecting homosexuality with pedophilia or Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Patrick throwing vulnerable transgender children under the bus by making them scapegoats with their overwrought claims that they somehow threaten to overwhelm high school athletic competition.

Proponents of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory - like Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn Lt. General, U.S. Army ret. falsely claimed that illegally hacked emails between John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and others contained coded messages that connected several high-ranking Democratic Party officials and certain restaurants with an alleged human trafficking and child sex ring. Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. was purportedly the central hub of the conspiracy and holding children in the basement. A North Carolina conservative bought into the conspiracy theory so strongly that he drove to Washington, D.C. and barged into the restaurant whereupon he fired a rifle in an effort to unlock the door to a storage locker that was supposedly the entrance to the non-existent basement. Washington , D. C. police and numerous other respected organizations have thoroughly de-bunked the entire conspiracy theory.

With very few exceptions the people trying to cross the southern border to get into the U.S. are suffering from poverty and violence in their home countries very often caused by drug traffickers that are financed by their customers in the United States. Often the migrants are unaccompanied children who have been sent on their way after being threatened by drug gangs. If Republicans really wanted to do something constructive so that those migrants would stay at home they’d advocate for legalizing all drugs especially marijuana to undercut the finances of the drug gangs. But then, they couldn’t rail at Democrats about open borders or fill up private prisons with men of color who then can’t vote for their opponents or compete for jobs with white men of similar education and skills.

Frankly, there is stronger evidence of a conspiracy to protect pedophiles and groom children within the Catholic Church than there is for gay men but you don’t see Republicans attacking the Catholic Church.

Republican justifications for bill’s restricting transgender students from participating in high school sports largely rely on scare tactics, stereotypes, and unwarranted claims that transgender women have a physiological advantage over cisgender women—despite a complete lack of evidence that transgender sports participation has had any measurable impact on the success of cisgender athletes.

Republican candidates still genuflect to Trump because their voters demand it. The Trump-Putin axis scares me as Trump has continued to speak admiringly of Putin even as Putin endeavors to annex Ukraine through armed invasion.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - April 13, 2022