What happens to the Republican Party now? (17 Viewers)

If you happened to watch "Deep in the Pockets of Texas" on CNN tonight you know something about this guy:

Meet Farris Wilks, Kingmaker of the Texas GOP

Wilks is an elder at an idiosyncratic church that reportedly doesn't allow women to speak during worship. He also pumps millions into Texas Republican politics.

www.texasobserver.org

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"Farris, who couldn’t be reached for an interview, served as bishop of the fringy Assembly of Yahweh church for 31 years until his retirement in February 2017. He now returns regularly as a kind of guest star, or “elder.” The congregation celebrates the Sabbath on Saturday, observes dietary restrictions found in Leviticus and reportedly bans women from speaking during worship.

In the wake of Obama’s 2012 re-election, according to recordings reviewed by Right Wing Watch, Wilks preached, “I do believe that our country died that Tuesday night,” adding that millenarian musings were giving him comfort: “Maybe it’s time to wrap up some things, maybe it’s time to move on to the next 1,000 years.”

Conveniently for a fracking billionaire, Wilks has also asserted that man can do nothing about climate change, and, of course, he’s done the requisite gay-bashing. “This lifestyle is a predatorial [sic] lifestyle in that they need your children and straight people having kids to fulfill their sexual habits,” he said in a 2013 recording."

They may not be a part of the Republican party but much of their rhetoric is echoed by the GOP or vice versa.

White supremacists wholly support the Republican Party, though. Mostly Trump, but Trumpists make up most of the Party at this point. There aren’t any white supremacists voting for Democrats, I don’t think. I would say it’s fair to acknowledge they make up a subset of the Republican Party. At least now they do.

…..It raises a more important question: Why are these people so eager to justify violent attacks against our system — either a hypothetical future attack or the one on Jan. 6, 2021 — when they have the least to complain about?……

In other words, the people who have throughout the United States’ history been most advantaged by the Constitution, especially its antidemocratic features, are the most obsessed with the idea that sometime soon they may have to start killing people.

They are the ones who enjoyed the full panoply of rights and privileges from the start. They didn’t labor in chains. They didn’t have to fight to be able to vote, or to own property, or to see themselves represented in the halls of power.


Not only that, to this day, they are granted special status within our political system. The Senate and the electoral college give overwhelmingly disproportionate power to small, rural, overwhelmingly White states. And within states they control, Republicans have gerrymandered districts so that rural White residents’ votes have even more weight.


Just look at Jan. 6, 2021. What was it that enraged those people? In 2016, they had the privilege of seeing their candidate become president despite winning fewer votes than his opponent.

In 2020 his margin of defeat in the popular vote was large enough that it didn’t happen again (though it almost did), and they were so aggrieved by the supposed injustice of losing that they attempted to reverse the election with violence.


But you know who you almost never see fantasizing in public about the violent overthrow of the American system of government?

Black people whose ancestors were enslaved, whose parents suffered under Jim Crow, and who today are the targets of enduring racism and a relentless campaign of voter suppression.


Women watching their reproductive rights taken away do not protest with AR-15s in their hands.

Nor do the gay teachers being run out of their jobs or the loving families of trans kids being slandered as child abusers.

None of those groups are saying they may need to overthrow the government with violence. The political system has not been kind to them — indeed, at times it has actively brutalized them — but they maintain their belief in it. When confronted with oppression, they redoubled their commitment to democracy.


Not so for the Jan. 6 rioter, the gun enthusiast with a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag in his yard, and even, at times, the Republican congressman.

They have the least claim to being a victim of the American system, yet they are the most eager to react to a momentary political setback — or even a hypothetical one — with the threat of violence…….

KEARNEY, Neb. — Last year, when the state board of education proposed new sex-education standards for teaching about issues such as sexual orientation, gender identity and consent, a retired pediatrician in this central Nebraska town reached out to Gov. Pete Ricketts and state lawmakers.


“This is NOT Sex Ed as anyone knows it,” Sue Greenwald wrote in a July 16, 2021, email obtained by The Washington Post. Lessons that met these standards, she wrote, would be “ ‘grooming’ children to be sexual victims.”


It was a shocking claim, and it was catching on — repeated by Greenwald, by members of the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition, a group she co-founded to oppose the standards, and embraced by Ricketts (R) himself.

The message also spread through screenings at libraries and churches of “The Mind Polluters,” billed as an “investigative documentary” that “shows how the vast majority of America’s public schools are prematurely sexualizing children.”

Grooming erupted as a national issue earlier this year, but this state in America’s heartland has been roiled by that attack on comprehensive sex education since last spring, providing a unique window into a newly inflamed debate.

The unsubstantiated claim helped activate an army of self-described Nebraska patriots who rose up against the standards, took over the local Republican Party and propelled a wave of far-right candidates for local and statewide school boards, a Post examination found.

Earlier this month, these activists were part of a broader, anti-establishment insurgency that toppled leaders of the state Republican Party.

The term “groomer” has become a catchall epithet hurled by the right wing against the left, particularly against advocates for LGBT people, who have become the target of a recent surge in violent threats and attacks.

The Post’s examination focused on the specific claim that modern sex education — including lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity — makes children more vulnerable to pedophiles.


Greenwald and others who have endorsed that claim acknowledged to The Post that there is no scientific body of research that shows such lessons make children more likely to be victimized.

The American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics both back a comprehensive approach to sex ed that includes discussions of sexual orientation, contraception and consent. Leading child abuse experts say that arming children with information helps protect them against harm……..

Yep, the R party has a white supremacy problem.

MT15 said:

Yep, the R party has a white supremacy problem.

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Right?? Dont tell me repubs do not look to Hungary, Poland...yes poland and even Russia before they invaded Ukraine for inspiration on their vision of governance. Oban shows them how to win this culture war by rigging elections legally and through an iron grip on the media. His electoral system relies on the rural vote carrying more weight. Sound familar...texas repubs? That is the danger. He won after the 2008 crisis because hungarians were pissed rightly so about their economy. But all he did was consolidate power and had marginal economic success. Hungary is still in the bottom third in the EU.


Edit....legally by changing their constitution

MT15 said:

White supremacists wholly support the Republican Party, though. Mostly Trump, but Trumpists make up most of the Party at this point. There aren’t any white supremacists voting for Democrats, I don’t think. I would say it’s fair to acknowledge they make up a subset of the Republican Party. At least now they do.

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It's been like that long before anyone ever heard of Trump. There were some among the Dixie-crats back in the day, but not so much anymore.

DaveXA said:

It's been like that long before anyone ever heard of Trump. There were some among the Dixie-crats back in the day, but not so much anymore.

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They've been involved with both parties over the years, but I would agree they're leaning strongly to the right at the moment. Better said, they are part of the right now.

Near the end of last week’s Jan. 6 House committee hearing, former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, a perpetually cheerful former Marine, said the attack on the Capitol “emboldened our enemies by helping give them ammunition to feed a narrative that our system of government doesn’t work, that the United States is in decline. China, the Putin regime in Russia, Tehran, they’re fond of pushing those kinds of narratives — and by the way, they’re wrong.”


But are they wrong?

They certainly have been to date; the United States has been defying predictions of doom for more than two centuries. But, as the ads for mutual funds say, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

We need to take seriously the possibility that the United States could become a failed democracy, if only to avert that dire fate. There’s a good reason that 85 percent of respondents in a recent survey said the country is headed in the wrong direction.

A lot of the gloom and doom is due, of course, to the high rate of inflation, which will subside in time. But there are more intractable problems, too, such as the persistence of racism and income inequality.

That we have far more gun violence than other advanced democracies and yet can’t implement common-sense gun-safety regulations (such as a ban on military-style assault rifles and high-capacity magazines) is a damning indictment of our democracy.

So, too, is our failure to do more to address climate change even as temperatures spike. When we do act, it often makes the situation worse, not better…..

We already live in a “backsliding” democracy, where voting rights are being restricted and freedom is under siege. The most severe threat comes from an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party whose maximum leader is an unindicted and unrepentant coup plotter.


Despite the yeoman work of the Jan. 6 committee, former president Donald Trump remains the leading contender for the 2024 GOP nomination — and on the current trajectory he could defeat President Biden, whose unpopularity continues to plumb new depths.

We need to be clear about what another Trump term would mean: It could be the death knell for our democracy……

I just don’t get it….

MT15 said:

I just don’t get it….

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That's not really terribly surprising. There are more than a few politicians who vote or speak contrary to their personal preferences if that means getting votes and winning elections.

Exactly. No courage. People like that are simply interested in holding on to power for power's sake.

BullSheetBuddha said:

They've been involved with both parties over the years, but I would agree they're leaning strongly to the right at the moment. Better said, they are part of the right now.

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Point of order: the KKK has always been a far-right organization. Republicans moved to the right to join them. Democrats moved left and away from them.

brandon said:

Point of order: the KKK has always been a far-right organization. Republicans moved to the right to join them. Democrats moved left and away from them.

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Yeah. In 1924, the Democratic Party was today's Republican Party. Today's GOP is the party of Lincoln in name only.

GrandAdmiral said:

Yeah. In 1924, the Democratic Party was today's Republican Party. Today's GOP is the party of Lincoln in name only.

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GOPOLINO

Saintamaniac said:

GOPOLINO

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I’ll have the gopolino with Alfredo sauce.