Republican Party is White Supremacist

I’m fairly certain that the Top’s Supermarket massacre in Buffalo, NY last weekend will generate more arguments about the Second Amendment but all I’m going to say about that is; what about the right 13 people shot to live their lives and shop for groceries safely? Oh, and one other thing, the “good guy with a gun” argument doesn’t hold water since retired police officer Aaron Salter shot the perpetrator but since the perpetrator was wearing body armor it was ineffective and then Salter was shot down.

The massacre was planned and prepared for over a period of months. The perpetrator carried a rifle and fired upwards of 50 rounds, wore a bullet proof vest, a tactical helmet with a video camera mounted on it so he could live stream the murder of innocents. The shooter was apparently radicalized online by white supremacist/neo-Nazis. In March 2021 the Director of National Intelligence warned that racially-motivated extremists posed the most lethal domestic terrorism threat. It said the menace was now more serious than potential attacks from overseas.

Don’t think for a moment that this is just some loons winding each other up online. White Supremacist ideology and rhetoric has a large presence in the Republican Party nation-wide. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito cited the "domestic supply of infants" as reasoning for overturning Roe v. Wade while the Buffalo shooter's manifesto focuses on "white birth rates." This isn’t a coincidence.

Representative Elise Stefanik replaced Liz Cheney as the #3 Republican in the House when Cheney demanded the truth about Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Stefanik launched a Facebook ad campaign pushing the same “white replacement theory”, aka “great replacement theory”, cited as impetus for the Buffalo mass murder.

Like Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, Stefanik uses violence-provoking conspiracy claims to further her own career but refuses to take any responsibility for the deaths caused when violent believers decide that terrorism is the only solution. The "great replacement" conspiracy is now widespread in Republican rhetoric; there is now no great difference between the conspiracies of neo-Nazism and those of Republican Party "leadership".

The theory has been cited by several other mass shooters since 2018, including Robert Bowers who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018 and Patrick Crusius who murdered 23 people in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart.

Last December, the Associated Press and NORC conducted a large national poll and found that nearly half of Republicans agree to at least some extent with the white supremacist/neo-Nazi propaganda that there’s a deliberate intent to “replace” native-born Americans with immigrants.

Republican leaders are making a direct attack on our democracy using white supremacist propaganda to motivate voters to vote for them. This is how fascists came to power in Europe in the 1930’s.

Where does the country go from here? The people of this country must decide is if we want to live in a world where fear and division are able to take root, because after you dehumanize everybody that’s when the killing start. Do you remember the 1994 Rwandan genocide? It started much like what we’re seeing now in the United States with the majority ethnicity blaming a minority group for their problems. Then the finger pointing turned into murdering their neighbors.

Inciting a riot is a federal crime with a penalty of 5 years in prison, shouldn’t there be a penalty for inciting mass murder?

In my book anyone who votes for Republicans is aiding and abetting the enemy of the people of the United States.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 18, 2022

Overturning Roe is Hypocrisy

The big news maker last week was the draft opinion regarding the abortion case heard by the Supreme Court published by Politico. The document indicates that 5 of the 6 Republican appointees have agreed to overturn the 50 year old Roe v. Wade decision and once again allow states to make abortion a criminal offense. Had Sen. Mitch McConnell not stolen a seat by refusing to hold hearings on Pres. Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, when Justice Scalia’s death created a vacancy this decision would almost certainly been to continue the right to abortion as the law of the land.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion includes the justification that “the domestic supply of infants” is insufficient to meet demand. This sentiment has previously been expressed by Justice Amy Coney Barrett saying that we don’t “need” abortion anymore because the supply of adoptable domestic infants cannot meet demand. I don’t see how that argument is morally sustainable.

According to Adopt US Kids, there are 117,000 children waiting to be adopted in the United States right now. So Alito and Barrett’s argument doesn’t hold up factually either.

Alito and several other conservative members of the court claim to be originalists, which they define as believing that the constitution is a dead document, in other words it means only what it meant at the time it was written and is to be understood as it would have been understood in the 1780’s. There’s a real problem with that notion, founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison both rejected Originalism. You’ll often hear Republicans use a similar argument about government agencies they claim shouldn’t exist because it isn’t stated in the constitution. Neither is the right to travel but no one argues that Americans don’t have the right to travel within their states, or within the country, or even to other countries.

Then there’s our Firsts Amendment right to religious freedom, which this decision actually runs roughshod over. There are numerous Christian denominations, not to mention other religions that are pro-choice on a theological basis and at least as many other religious denominations that believe that abortion is a matter of individual conscience. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, and the United Church of Christ are just a few of those.

In Judaism when a mother’s life is endangered by a pregnancy, it is Jewish law that the mother’s life, a life in being, takes precedent. Keep in mind that Jesus, being born a Jew, would likely accept this position since nowhere in scripture does he speak out against it. Justice Alito has essentially ruled that a pregnant Jewish woman who will risk death if the pregnancy is carried to term can be denied an abortion – against her own religious beliefs. That makes Alito and other four Justices joining him Christian supremacists. Alito has essentially declared orthodox Catholic theology to be the law of the land on abortion. Such a ruling is counter to the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment.

Alito’s draft says that a right to abortion services is not deeply rooted in this nation’s history. Women on the Supreme Court are not deeply rooted in this nation’s history either, nor are anyone but white men. The Constitution doesn’t say that women or black people can serve on the Supreme Court. By Alito’s argument apparently the founders thought only white men should ever serve on the Supreme Court. So why has he never advocated for rejecting Clarence Thomas or Amy Coney Barrett’s positions on the court.

It all boils down to hypocrisy in service to an agenda that is incompatible with democracy.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 11, 2022