I have long said people who highlight liberty over equality in American political rhetoric are often either fascists or racists, and often essentially both. Yes, these people who showed up at the rally in Georgia are dangerously deranged, but as The Son says (and I paraphrase), "Don't worry, Dad. These people are not French. If they were, they would have already stormed DC. They're just lazy, stupid, wussie-fied Americans." So, there's that, I suppose. :)
For me, I cracked up reading in the article about the right wing loon-grifter, Lin Wood, and his day job is a personal-injury attorney. Wood gives further proof to my long-held point that a lot of plaintiff side civil attorneys are either, at best, Clinton-Obama cultural libs or worse, outright right-wingers. You know, like that lovely couple from St. Louis. These people are in the business of suing people--and, from my own personal experience, I have found the heads of successful plaintiff-side firms I've known over the years have similar characteristics as the CEOs of the companies they sue. One thinks of Bill Lerach, the now disgraced plaintiff securities lawyer from San Diego, who was a major Democratic donor to corporate Democrats, and a "friend-donor" to Bill Clinton. Lerach made hundreds of millions of dollars suing companies in class action stock suits, and he was really hard-ass type of boss from what I read and knew about him (he has been in San Diego for at least three or more decades, and I think still lives there, very comfortably I should add). One may say people such as Lerach are doing a service for consumers (in Lerach's case, stockholders, who are, at the end of the day, just fellow rich people) However, we would not really need this type of sociopath if we didn't already have a sociopathic system. As Michael Harrington and Robert Kuttner pointed out decades ago, if our nation had the type of social democracy Western Europeans have, and with national health care and mass transit galore, we would have far less need for people to sue anyone, which is why lawsuits in Canada and Europe are so much more rare.
So, yeah, a lot of hollerin' in Georgia about "liberty" and paeans to 1776, but this time they have turned their outrage against a right-wing Trumpist governor (Brian Kemp) and secretary of state--with the irony that it was Kemp who did so much to suppress black people's and college people's votes. Suddenly, these right wing white people are worried about voting rights? Suddenly, Brian Kemp--Brian Kemp?!?--is part of the "Deep State" conspiracy with the CIA and China? Well, if right wing tv loon, Lou Dobbs, can think Bill Barr is part of "the" conspiracy, then I suppose this should not be too surprising anymore.
We know what really bothers these people: Too many n-word people still got to vote in Georgia despite the right wing governor and secretary of state's very plain and often disgusting purging and harassing efforts.* These poor besotted, unmasked people at the rally where Wood spoke have been taught to only think in Manachean terms of "good" and "evil." It is not that people somehow got to the voting polls despite the strong efforts of Kemp and the secretary of state to rig the vote through voter suppression and voter roll purges before an election. No, it can't be that, these people are told. There must instead be a nefarious, wide-ranging, multi-national conspiracy arrayed against these "good" people who love Trump. Meanwhile, these Trumpists intone, those n-word and college kids voted for the enemy--Joe Biden! Yes, Biden, the old white man who was one of the architects of putting lots of black people in jail for a very long time. That, my friends, is the American political spectrum right there: from far-right delusional and racist people to...Joe Biden, Senator Payne incarnate.
I just wish I could get up on that stage with Wood, and ask Wood in front of all those people: "Mr. Wood, please define what you mean by socialist-communist. Please." We'll end up in about 45 seconds with abortion, guns, and "critical race theory" as the definition. And my MSNBC/CNN watching friends and family wanna know why I get so angry at MSNBC and CNN, and corporate media in general? Because, for seven decades, those networks, and their corporate media predecessors, turned the words "socialism" and "communism" into scare words, so that whatever some prole doesn't like, it's gotta be--"I mean, it's gotta be, right?"--"socialism" and "communism."
We have had a soft forming fascism during the entirety of the years in which I have been alive (yeah, Captain America learned this truth in movie-style Manachean terms). However, the fascism has hardened over the past decade. So, yeah, these same misbegotten folks and their grifting leaders are hollering about "liberty"--the same type of "liberty" Jefferson Davis was hollerin' about in 1861, and the same "liberty" the South Carolina and Georgia delegates to the 1776 convention were hollerin' about when they demanded Thomas Jefferson remove anti-slavery language from the Declaration of Independence he largely wrote. Yup, as the link shows, Jefferson confirmed that in his memoirs years later, as the anti-slavery draft language was removed sometime between July 2 and 3, 1776, meaning it had survived initial reviews from the committee charged with writing the document.
Georgia on my mind, indeed.
*See this lawsuit filed against the state, alleging an improper purging of over 200,000 voters in the year leading up to the election last month. Well, at least we now know why the secretary of state suddenly announced an investigation into the three voting rights groups, as they are the ones funding this newly filed lawsuit. Go on the offensive before you go on the defensive, is how these people deal with pesky liberals.
