The Legitimization of QAnon
These people seem to want to die hard.
Now take whichever puerile equation of those words above you like, written as an opening huff. Set them aside, set them aside. There is plenty of time for puerility to come.
No, by dying I mean an ideological transformation. From
To
Amy Facchinello, a Grand Blanc School Board Member and Michigan state elector who has repeatedly ranted about a variety of Q topics, posting twitter and facebook messages
while telling children and their parents at school board meeting that
- I don’t know why we have to listen to medical scientists. Following them is like following a cult.
The response in Grand Blanc has been mostly negative.
To which, predictably, these students and their supportive parents are labelled
- Part of the Satanic-Democratic-Socialist cancel culture cabal.
But there are a few student supporters, and their rigid parents:
people who parrot the same lines:
- They are trying to cancel Conservative views!
And
- It’s about free speech! Amy is about avoiding indoctrinating children with the lies black lives matter terrorists are trying to push into schools! Those are the people who shouldn’t be allowed to speak! Free speech is too important for those terrorists to have a say in what our children are being taught!
Even worse, one person simply referred to Amy as
- A great teacher.
Someone such as Amy Facchinello, while fringe, has managed to amass quite a bit of influence over the running of the state, discovering and befriending several members of local city councils who share her QAnon or otherwise views.
In California this guy,
Tito Ortiz, a former UFC champion
was elected and served briefly as a member of the Huntington Beach, California city council, and the until-the-hearing Mayor Pro Tempore, or temporary mayor of town. One of the first things he did was rail against the city council for voting to have online meetings for the foreseeable COVID-19 future.
- This whole coronavirus thing is a hoax! It’s bullshit! I don’t need to wear a mask! My kids certainly won’t wear masks! Bullshit you pussies! If you don’t think you can hack it face to face then you can hardly be considered an American!
Tito sells desperation on his website, posing muscularly
while his girlfriend Amber Nichole Miller
briefly became an online influencer, urging people to embrace theories such as
which she explains
- Oh, it’s HORRIBLE. You don’t want to know about it. It’s not a good place to start.
As far as I could discover, Amber never expanded on this comment, describing her pet project as “Pastel” QAnon, using her pretty, ring-girl grace to state that it is
- Something so complex you should look it up yourself.
So I looked it up. Frazzledrip seeks to expose the vampiric practices of the Satanic-Democrat-Socialist Pedophiles. The SDSPs are a secret cabal who cut off children’s faces, then ritualistically dance around wearing them in front of their screaming victims. And they’re laughing, rubbing each other with blood. It is a cannibalistic orgy.
So the kids have their faces sliced off upon a 1970s horror-movie inspired Satanic altar. Frazzledrip alleges that spells of immortality are being cast while the monsters fight over the dripping mask of skin, and they reach for it and sometimes tear it apart, each side holding flaps.
Hillary Clinton is named as one of the biggest purveyors of magic child enzyme
along with the disgraced Anthony Weiner,
a former 12-year Congressman from New York caught text masturbating and sending dick pics
to a number of women, including a 15-year old, and an undercover FBI agent. There in the picture we see him snapping this photo while his child sleeps beside him. Could you possibly imagine a more perfect candidate to smear something the Q way than Anthony Weiner?
It is claimed that Mrs. Clinton and Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin
(separated by the time of this allegation because, you know, above) sliced off a child’s face and raped them while wearing it, Anthony jacking off in the corner groaning “Oh yeah baby! Yeah!”
The intention of this clinical “frazzledrip” process is to scare the terrified sacrifices into producing an excess of Adrenochrome, which is an oxidized form of adrenaline, usually found in trace elements in over-the-counter diet pills. Although Aldous Huxley,
author of Brave New World
and Doors to Perception
says of Adrenochrome,
- it is an energy medicine,
and Anthony Burgess
defines it as the drug people are allowed to take instead of alcohol, mixed with milk, in A Clockwork Orange,
Those believers in the Frazzledrip theory claim that this chemical milked from children’s fear creates the dark potion of immortality, of continuing soullessness forever. Drink and ye be damned!
Anyway, Amber’s boyfriend, Tito Ortiz (who also lived with and had twins with former Porn superstar Jenna Jameson)
continued spewing the same old, same old Satanic, baby eating pedophile narrative, reduced to a campaign sermon, ignoring the gruesome historical parallels to Q’s way of thinking. The following chart compares QAnon beliefs with the theories espoused in the The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion:
Elders of Zion
- The Jews are out to take over the world and enslave humanity.
- The Jews kidnap, rape, sell, and eat babies.
- The Jews are in league with Satan.
- The Jewish plot has been active for more than 1,000 years.
- The Jews must be stopped.
- There is one brave leader — a messiah — who can lead us to salvation.
QAnon
- The Democrat/Socialists are out to take over the world and enslave humanity.
- The Democrat/Socialists kidnap, rape, sell, and eat babies.
- ’The Democrat/Socialists are in league with Satan.
- The Democrat/Socialist plot has been active since the founding of the United States of America.
- The Democrat/Socialists must be stopped.
- There is one brave leader — a messiah — who can lead us to salvation.
Ortiz’s tenure as mayor did not last long. He resigned claiming
- Threats that brought in my family
caused him to get out of the public eye. This is probably true, Ortiz’s blaring arrogance rubbing most people he’d ever encountered in his life the wrong way. Unlike the brave soldier he played on TV, Ortiz rapidly scurried away to his mousehole, blaming everyone for everything he had ever done wrong in his life, while his girlfriend mumbled something vague about “religious opposition to mask wearing,” and leaving the man remembered only for taking a beating.
There are plenty of others, candidates and, in particular, state legislators with the power to influence election rules and to overturn the results.
They have evangelized the prophecies of Q.
There have also been a growing number of more serious candidates with larger followings, able to bury the cultishness of their beliefs, and promote them as the ideals of freedom. Take Jo Rae Perkins,
a QAnon fanatic who recently ran for US Senate from Oregon, losing to incumbent Jeff Merkley,
although she received more than 39% of the state’s vote.
Jeff Merkley (D / Independent / Working Families Party)
56.9
1,321,047
Jo Rae Perkins (R)
39.3
912,814
Gary Dye (L)
1.8
42,747
Ibrahim Taher (Pacific Green Party / Progressive Party)
1.8
42,239
Other/Write-in votes
0.1
2,402
912, 814 votes for a hosannahing true believer, seeing the whole world as a conspiracy against her personally.
This is not about some pedestrian, zany QAnon kook like
(Michael Bluemling, R.)
who briefly ran for congress in the 21st district of Florida before giving way to the sour Laura Loomer,
who at least some people have heard of. She is a known wah-wahing crybaby right-wing whiner and stomper, sneeringly calling everyone that offends her or won’t take her seriously a
- snowflake.
Loomer was given some help in the polls by comments made by Marjorie Taylor Greene,
with another censorious line about cancel culture.
Lois Frankel (D)
59.0
237,925
Laura Loomer (R)
39.1
157,612
Charleston Malkemus (Independent)
1.9
7,544
Sylvia Caravetta (Independent) (Write-in)
0.0
8
Piotr Blass (R) (Write-in)
0.0
4
It is worthwhile to consider this frenzied ambition of a radical movement to take over the government,
and then once again wonder what happens when a ranting school board argument with fundamentalists makes its way into Congress, into the Senate, the White House? What happens in America on the world stage when the leader represents people who believe the opposition are all breeding babies free range for the open market?
The two QAnon supporters who managed to win their way into The House are Greene
74.7
229,827
Kevin Van Ausdal (D)
25.3
77,798
(Van Ausdal withdrew from the race months before after receiving numerous death threats from QAnon supporters he spoke out against, eventually fleeing Georgia entirely.)
and Lauren Boebert
Lauren Boebert (R)
51.4
220,634
45.2
194,122
John Keil (L)
2.4
10,298
Critter Milton (Unity Party)
1.0
4,265
a woman whose chief campaign promise to the folks in Colorado was that she would
- Walk right into the capitol locked and loaded because that is my right as an American citizen!
The point here being, as QAnon evolves more fluidly into a new political party, featuring numerous born-again parallels to past wars of tyranny, the very idea of the United States of America becomes shattered, no longer united, an ideological civil war not just over horrible issues, but over radically different versions of the truth.
QAnon has its superstars, sure, and a hard fought, aggressively panicked shout of an agenda. QAnon has sunk even into the federal halls where people know better than to believe any of it. But, being successful politicians, they know how to take advantage of scattered movements of the like-minded, and baptize them into a quieter organized coalition. The smartest among these opportunists, taking over this frenzied radicalism, know how to clean things up a little, and they get to decide which crazy shit they can do without.
No, they know the true believers they need.
So QAnon: aren’t they those sore losers who believe in Satanic Child Molesters running the world, buried deep inside the Socialist-Democratic-Nazi Party, toxifying the earth? Aren’t they supposed to be fighting against evil monsters hellbent on injecting you with poison, then taking over your minds? Aren’t they there to expose some ancient Illuminati-styled child trafficking/molestation rig that courses exclusively through Hollywood and liberal cities? Don’t they have information from an unknown government official, a ‘Q,’
who can and already has exposed the nefarious dealings of all the enemies of the messianic Donald Trump?
They are fighting the viciousness of those who want to impose racialist identity politics onto their lives — even onto the same White Nationalist Philosophers who used to call for public segregation, and who formed movements to destroy the black, gay, Communist, Jewish, anti-gun, feminist-lesbian conspiracy — they are battling for the very soul of America, they loudly proclaim, using American flags as swords.
Warriors pose against the demonic visions they believe others are sinking subliminally into their children’s minds. Remember, Marjorie Taylor Greene was named to an education committee briefly, fully prepared to ruin the future of historical understanding for generations to come (says the historian, defending his home).
A quick note on Greene, certainly a person of interest:
How many Trumpian cliches can fit into one campaign ad?
It seems that Greene’s chief goal is based upon a simmering, bitterly personal jealousy of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
the previous year’s young new superstar congressperson (as portrayed in the media, both pro and con). Greene seems insistent upon becoming the right-wing AOC, blathering irreconcilable silliness no one takes seriously, yet mouthy enough to get heard.
Side-by-side, one and the same. Where-we-go-1-we-go-all, indeed.
But Greene has already grown stale, her desperate efforts to get noticed become cartoonishly silly, these barking demands for imposed absurdity — fire this one and prosecute that one because I-don’t-like-it-and-I-don’t-like-them-and-this-will-get-me-in-the-news-and-oh-my-God-please-please-please-notice-me!
Let us begin the slow process of dismissing Greene into the subsequent memory people will have of her, warning about Jewish space lasers and comparing enforced mask wearing in the halls of Congress during a pandemic to the Nazi holocaust (despite her recent flaccid apology for saying this, even rubbing her fellow anti-Semitic supporters wrong.) Let us laugh it all off, yet retain the warning sign that this is how tyranny starts in an angry, frustrated, exhausted, and socially divided nation.
We can go on and on about the baffling stupidity of the full doctrine of what Q worshippers believe, but that has become boring too, an endlessly concerning repetition of the very few things that actually motivate these stupid, stupid people. I have spent the last two plus years, half of the time, diving into the bowels of this cult and finding it easily removed, finally. These folks are more like the “lone wolf” Islamic fundamentalists in the early days of the modern Jihad movement, or the first National Socialists Hitler executed because they were loudmouths alienating fellow travelers. That’s who QAnon is and will end up being, a bizarre footnote for fringe-watching historians such as myself to make more of than they ever deserved.
Yet what is important now, in light of the post-COVID resurrection of society, is the fact that people together outside again have far less trust in each other, having been taught that we are all diseased. Community is shattered, suspicious glares rolling around a gathering, parents watching their children play baseball sitting much too far apart, not talking to each other beyond their friends, whom they whisper conspiratorially to. Everyone is more thoroughly the enemy, far more deeply than with our previous partisan contempt.
We spent all that time reading or listening to angry complaints, finger-pointing allegations, while sidestepping blame and declaring everything anybody else’s fault, and you are the only person innocent — and you know they know it! You know you never did whatever you’ve been accused of (or think someone has accused you of). Nobody told you anything. You just read about it and believed it and you IM’d to malicious people you do not know and who float the craziest shit, exaggerations, science-fiction stories explaining away all the unknowable, letting the world know who is smart enough to see the truth. And you believe it, or discovered it yourself, and unlike whoever you were before, now every bit as malicious, joyfully alleging nonsense, trying so hard that you wonder if maybe you’re onto something. The lonely pandemic has inspired so many cranky conspiratorial ideas that there may be no coming back.
By the way, in conversations on various social media sites, I have been told that I am part of the Satanic-Pedophile-Socialist-Conspiracy plot run by the Obamas and Clintons, and I am such a
- stupid liberal snowflake,
and how dare I ask questions and how dare I not take their opinions on faith, realizing that the world is more dangerous than any of us ever knew. (an odd confluence of hypocrisy as they say curiously verbatim things when asking questions themselves.) And if I mock this, I am one of them. They call me a snowflake again as they rant out their fear, offense, and humiliation, blaming me for the unhappiness in their lives. (I have also been called a “Trumper” or “Trump Nazi” for many of the same reasons.)
So the first movements, as with the failed radicals of the early Nazi days, burn themselves out with over-exposure, facing the same problems a horror film franchise suffers by the time they reach the second sequel: it just keeps having to get more and more extreme to maintain interest. We are already filming that third QAnon movie as we speak, the reformation with a climax when Donald Trump returns to the throne this coming this summer, or by Christmas, or maybe next Memorial Day or 4th of July or Halloween or May Day or the day before the 2024 election, shouting prophecy like evangelists repeatedly changing the date of the end of the world.
No, the real influence of these fools on the progress of American society comes as the smart politicians narrow the mistrust, fear, and anger into an ideology, a new religion. Some people always emerge to be the augurs of a New World Order.
* * *
The wannabe prophets of the next age are people already taken seriously outside of QAnon circles. They are in a grave position to impose their autocratic desires onto the world, peppered with some QAnon comedy to inspire the darkest fringe soldiers.
There are ambitious opportunists such a Retired-Soldier Tom Cotton,
a behind-the-scenes planner, deadly earnest in setting his ideas into motion.
There is the hand-wringing, incredibly angry, sniveling Ted Cruz,
disgusted with everything, and therefore disgusted by everyone.
There are ambitious geniuses like Josh Hawley,
and smug, arrogant misanthropes like Ron Johnson,
who believe in nothing other than how they, personally, can benefit from anarchy.
No doubt one of these will be condemned as a traitor by all of the others, and it will obviously be Ted Cruz,
an unlovable man, even unwilling to defend his wife and children from his own shame.
Now don’t get me wrong: We understand Ted Cruz. We understand why, in a sense of exhaustion, Ted Cruz went off to Mexico in hurricane season while his home state was getting hammered.
He’d intended to spend a few days’ vacation with his family after all that time they were forced to spend alone, together. He wanted a break from all the horrible shit, and dammit! — we’re heading to exotic Cancun, Mexico!
Before he was in Congress, I bet Ted and the family would sometimes fly off to exotic places, wealthy islands and paradises, running in high Libertarian society.
Ted learned the prophecies of Greed; studied the bitter selfishness in the dystopian fantasies of Ayn Rand,
who, like many other literary prophets, began to believe her own stories of The Enemy.
Cruz read into the Constitution the shudderingly indifferent economic theory of James McGill Buchanan,
a Nobel Prize winning Wizard of Greed.
Briefly, James was a mathematician (for a detailed and perceptive portrait of the man see Nancy McLean’s magnificent editorial history Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/democracy-in-chains-nancy-maclean/1124999284?ean=9781101980972. One might charge the title with being a left wing example of a deep conspiracy title. There is a point of view from which I can see it, although from every conspiracy genre there are always the best ones, the favorites. This is one of them. Nancy is very convincing.) — a mathematician of great genius, figuring out how to eliminate, or consume, politics through the world of high finance and business.
Winner of the Nobel Prize for something vague —
his Nobel Citation in 1986 declaring: “For the development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision making.”
In the age of rising deregulation
Ronald Reagan,
and his donors and advisors were manipulating the markets, and started buying up everything, holding all the profits, and selling a few chips to the less fortunate wealthy people, offering jobs and telling the nation that everything would be okay.
Here was the long-talked about implementation of “Trickle-Down Economics,” the modern justification for the rich getting richer, and the poor only getting more when the zillionaires makes more money. Here! Work in my store! If the store does well because you’re there, you can get a raise! We will treat you just like the lucky-to-have-a-job shopgirl from the 1930s, working for a kind old Italian woman who doesn’t understand how to run a business. In will swoop the charming young business executive, who will save the store and corporatize it, making all of us rich!
This is the single American Dream of Trickle-Down Economics, a product from the Great Depression, a story of triumph which ignores all the people getting hurt, dismissed in a social Darwinian structure. The shopgirl remains a shopgirl, while the board-of-directors attack the international marketplace.
This foundation defines Ted Cruz’s view of the nation, of the whole world. He is loyal to no one, changing sides based on whatever works to his momentary advantage. Ted Cruz is smart, remember. He is very, very smart. He’s just an asshole. He doesn’t believe in QAnon gospel. I’m sure he thinks true believers are idiots, as he has always seen everybody else as idiots, all people in the way of his obsessive boyhood ambition to make it to the white house.
Everyone used to tell him he’d be President when he was a boy, so he had to prove them right.
Ted Cruz wore a mask throughout the pandemic, probably got both his shots before they were available to the public. He took whatever he could get, always takes whatever he can get, whatever safety protocol was being suggested by people in the know. Yet, after vaccination, he aggressively refused to be a role model, cautioning his few remaining loyalists to the remaining real world dangers. He smirks at reporters asking him why, saying
- You can step away,
and
- The leftist press has gone craaazy!
But he’s still Ted Cruz. No one really cares about the content of his statements, regardless of the written eloquence he is incapable of presenting coherently in person. It doesn’t matter what our opinions are on what he says; no one wants to listen, no one cares what he’s saying. He’s just such a pushy, arrogant jerk, the same prick to everyone no matter their ideological borders. He hardly defended his wife after Donald Trump called her ugly.
Ted Cruz believes in nothing.
Tom Cotton
The Republican Senator from Arkansas, he has all the credentials to be a powerful voice in a changing nation. A Congressman when he was 36, a Harvard and Harvard Law School Grad, a bronze star-winning infantry soldier, eventually a Captain, who even won a bronze star for bravery.
Or that’s what he says. There was a rather petty controversy over this, unfortunately on both sides, Cotton responding with a whining display of his medal and a brazen stance
Cotton gained a name for himself in 2006 when he was stationed in Iraq. Outraged over the battlefield reporting of two pushy lefties from The New York Times, he announced after the story was published that the two journalists were guilty of espionage, gathering secrets and publishing them with the intention of warning the enemy about what the Army was about to do (they were a guarding station, military bureaucratic duty. Their plan was to maintain the status quo.) He was so angry, and the letter he wrote to the Times was so outraged and virulent that they laughed it off and filed it away and sneered that the soldier had no idea what he was talking about. The journalists were talking to his higher ups, certainly more aware of press restrictions than Cotton, and everything they published, other than perhaps a few greasy opinions, was approved.
When the letter was refused, Cotton, in a fit of pique, rewrote the thing with even more anger, seeing the betrayal of the Army and therefore the nation in every space and every corner; under the beds and in the closets. They were mind-controlling you on TV. They were like body snatchers, these liberals. All those 1950s sci-fi horror films were true. They were trying to wipe us out of existence, we far fringe right conservatives.
He sent his new draft to Powerlineblog.com, a presumably satirical right wing blog that seems to take itself far too seriously for parody. They are no different than hyper partisan editorial sites reporting news within their glaze, expressing the “real story behind the lies,” an inevitable outcome of people no longer believing each other because all we do is lie.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/category/deep-secrets-of-racial-profiling
This link is a recent example of their opinion news reporting. They do not even deny their editorial bent, as many other news outlets do. Clearly the listed series above is what the author believes.
That’s Scott Johnson, conservative media crank whose past jackassedness got him fired from a number of news jobs. Of course he claimed it was “cancel culture” and even accused “Black Lives Matter and Antifa terrorists” of trying to sabotage his career. He’s one of those guys who believes that
- reverse racism is worse than racism today!
as though the racism he was accustomed to when he was young should always be the norm.
Scott is a man writing a cynical 11-part series on racial profiling, and how it doesn’t exist, and how blacks essentially complain and make up a whole lotta hooey about there being any racism in America. Here is a quote from Part 7:
- Why are blacks 8.7 times more likely to face arrest for low-level offenses in Minneapolis? Is it because the police are guilty of racism and misconduct? Or because blacks commit low-level offense[s] at 8.7 times the rate of others?
So we know this study is coming from a place of great knowledge, the unbiased interviews he gathered should be good enough to convince even black people, he believes. No doubt he has converted several who already contemptuously believed such a curious equation in the first place.
But this is where Cotton published his screed, introducing himself to the political public seven years before he first ran for office. This is the letter in its entirety:
Dear Messrs. Keller, Lichtblau & Risen:
Congratulations on disclosing our government’s highly classified anti-terrorist-financing program (June 23). I apologize for not writing sooner. But I am a lieutenant in the United States Army and I spent the last four days patrolling one of the more dangerous areas in Iraq. (Alas, operational security and common sense prevent me from even revealing this unclassified location in a private medium like email.)
Unfortunately, as I supervised my soldiers late one night, I heard a booming explosion several miles away. I learned a few hours later that a powerful roadside bomb killed one soldier and severely injured another from my 130-man company. I deeply hope that we can find and kill or capture the terrorists responsible for that bomb. But, of course, these terrorists do not spring from the soil like Plato’s guardians. No, they require financing to obtain mortars and artillery shells, priming explosives, wiring and circuitry, not to mention for training and payments to locals willing to emplace bombs in exchange for a few months’ salary. As your story states, the program was legal, briefed to Congress, supported in the government and financial industry, and very successful.
Not anymore. You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here. Next time I hear that familiar explosion — or next time I feel it — I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance.
And, by the way, having graduated from Harvard Law and practiced with a federal appellate judge and two Washington law firms before becoming an infantry officer, I am well-versed in the espionage laws relevant to this story and others — laws you have plainly violated. I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars.
Very truly yours,
Tom Cotton
Baghdad, Iraq
I wonder which is more prominent here: the smug arrogance, grandiose boasting, partisan outrage, or the possibly serious fear that whatever the Times did, they did it illegally and might get him hurt? He makes a suggestion (not accusation, which immediately undermines his bragging about knowing the espionage laws because he went to Harvard. And Washington Law firms? A lot of these, most of them, have nothing to do with justice department cases, where he claims to know people he plans on telling) that maybe the information given to the enemy will get people killed. One person got killed anyway. Whose fault is that? It can’t be the terrorists because they couldn’t operate without the liberals funding them with cocaine and hookers and homosexuals — probably kidnapped, trafficked children too, they’re so corrupt!
He wants them behind bars — tortured in some Gulag, then reprogrammed to live in the America he sees, a stark place of blue skies and snow blindness caused by forever staring at clouds.
I suspect Cotton believes parts of QAnon gospel. In fact, he will likely believe anything anyone tells him, at least for a short time. For all the papers that seem to imply Tom Cotton is a smart man
in every picture he seems dead inside.
He tries a different look, first exhaustion,
and then finally an appeal to the young.
even when he smiles
Dead. Look in his eyes. Real Manchurian Candidate shit. The only time he seems to express any emotion at all is to highlight his indifference
And standing with the messiah?
Absolute void. There is a strategic study of gestures; staring into the camera and absorbing nothing whatsoever of whatever Trump is snarling about; glancing at the speech, possibly to catch up, maybe because he’s bored. Finally, his own speech, drone drone drone while Trump anxiously stares off, definitely bored, wanting to leave now that he is no longer the center of attention.
Even his racism, his
- We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.
comes across not as a specific prejudice so much as a blank statement of presumed fact. And, truth be told, in his cold-blooded way, Cotton is not wrong. Slavery, indeed, was necessary to the building and foundation of the nation, as awful a statement and reality as this is. However, Cotton seems to disregard the essential heroism of those lashed in chains, those genuine soldiers for freedom — fighting for freedom every day of their terrible, terrible lives. Cotton simply says this as an afterthought, genuinely with no hatred, not even cruel indifference, a vote against any sort of reparations not from the panicked anger of true racists — ”I didn’t have no slaves! Ain’t my problem!” — but out of an inability to understand the meaning of slavery itself. No pay. No true shelter. No safety. Owned. Sold. Raped and murdered. Not considered human. Chattel. A valuable commodity on the open market. All he sees and justifies is people, no matter their status, required to do their duty.
Despite Cotton’s approval of the salvation of Confederate statues, this also is not out of a sense of personal race hatred. No, despite the treason of southern generals, all he can see is the war games he played as a child, no doubt favoring Lee over Grant sometimes. It is all a past that makes no sense to him, history a questionable illusion. Like many conspiratorially minded people, they doubt history itself — ”says who?” — and grant whichever political bias of a hundred years later suits him best. “Liberal lies,” and “liberal revisionism,” while taking the right-wing revisions of the past as unquestioned fact.
As I said, Tom Cotton is not a racist. He is an emotional and intellectual void, with no imagination whatsoever.
So Tom Cotton, a man once quite legitimately a heroic soldier, regardless of an exaggeration of titular credentials (apparently he was not officially an “Army Ranger,” which is a rare designation requiring special tactics and service in order to get admittance to the club.) And the bronze star, a wonderful acknowledgment of service, was awarded for his miles away instructions under fire while overseeing computers organizing and targeting drones. He was very brave, avoiding American soldiers within range, and did his best to limit civilian casualties (although who can tell any of those terrorists apart?, he likely said with hollow laughter.) There is no official record of any tragedy.
We are left with this nothingness, this weed growing in your yard that you can’t poison and can’t pull out, this oddly hypnotic, unemotional man who dreams of a bottom line where he can do whatever he wants and the rest of the world has to deal with it. This man might one day be President.
Ron Johnson
There he is, casting a witchy spell, giddy.
Well, at least we can’t say that Senator Johnson lacks a sense of humor.
Ron Johnson, as anyone who has ever met the man in any capacity, and at whichever age he was, could tell you he is a horrible person. Immoral in a way that defies easy categorization, corrupt so profoundly that the consistency of his selfish dishonesty is mistaken for an ideology. Ron Johnson believes in nothing — nothing! I know this seems a popular refrain among this crowd, when going over the transformative post-Corona, QAnon-ascendant political crisis, but in Ron’s case it is transparent. He seems far more interested in the chaotic destruction of the United States as a farce than he is with any of the bland excuses his assistants suggest he apologize with in public.
Johnson is 66 years old, and therefore more of a parent to the slavishly gibbering younger cynics who are the future of his party.
But Johnson is savvy, indifferent to anyone else’s success or happiness. He has a marked contempt for not just government workers:
- I think it’s unrealistic for public-sector employees to believe that they are immune from modifications to their pay and benefit packages,
but for the government he represents itself — any government, any constitution or declaration of law.
- All the time, you take a look at what government rules are, so you can minimize the impact of government regulations. That’s just smart business.
Speaking of Trump,
this is one of the few pictures where The Donald appears to be even slightly interested in what another person has to say.
Johnson is charming, no doubt. He’s also very smart, the dangerous sort of sociopath who with different opportunities would succeed as a serial killer. One can see him — handsome, virile, strong. I bet that old man could beat the shit out of me today (younger, but on the precipice of old age), and he looks like the sort of bully who would start it.
He’s handsome — admit it! Let us look at his surface, and not the swollen cancer roiling within his soul. Nice suit, a dignified coloring and shape to his very white hair. Ron has impeccable taste.
He is every bit the younger, hipper version of Donald Trump. Johnson appears to have developed independently, his own mind always foremost in his head. They are the same cloth, the same bragging shuns. The same mind. Here is an answer to what might happen if Ronald Harold Johnson becomes President of the United States.
Remember the previous Johnsons the nation has had running it?
Andrew Johnson, after the Civil War, a harsh cynic not interested in settling the public down, indifferent to the potential resumption of slavery, and facing a struggle over public consensus,
and the blood-drenched Lyndon Johnson, drowned in hatred despite his very best intentions. Johnson inspired and helped to advance the divisive civil rights movement, and mired the nation’s hearts in a superfluous war in Vietnam. He followed the trauma of a public assassination, and stepped into the role like he deserved it. LBJ was a terrifying charmer, a man so bold and full of himself, and a bigoted man for whom a lifetime in government had taught very few differences between right and wrong.
Thus is the prophecy of American history.
Johnson and Trump’s gestures and facial expressions seem very telling.
Johnson is an insincere whiner too, exaggerating circumstances to make himself relevant. He is a spectacular self-promoter.
Johnson was suspended for posting the usual disingenuous promotions of various other-than-vaccine treatments, in particular Hydroxychloroquine,
which is a modestly effective anti-malaria medication, developed and owned by Sanofi,
a French pharmaceutical company valued at more than $20,000,000,000 (the very definition of “Big Pharma.”) This behemoth, the fifth largest manufacturer of drugs in the world, is run by British multi-millionaire Paul Hudson,
who once ran Novartis,
another gigantic pharmaceutical company out of Switzerland with an even greater value in stocks. Novartis used to pay a firm known as Essential Consultants $100,000 a month for investment advice. Essential Consultants was a shell company run by Michael Cohen,
the former attorney of Donald Trump.
Trump was making a huge cut from investments made with the benefit of inside information, gathered by the handful of crooks on the payroll of Essential Consultants, acquiring such information through threats, bribery, and other crimes (it is reported from numerous international sources.)
Hudson proved a genuine and enthusiastic helping hand, and upon taking over Sanofi, Trump got in with a small investment. Within a year the President was promoting Hydroxychloroquine as the great cure-all of COVID-19, which sent sales and prices skyrocketing.
Johnson, an investor himself (say reports), started and continues to say that vaccines are ineffective and the wonder drug will save your life. This led to his one week ban by YouTube, not even for the medically proven misinformation he was offering out of personal greed, but because he was so violently anti-vaccine, repeating the same horror stories about mutations, infertility, and permanent disability (alongside the suggestion that it’s a mind control serum).
Johnson responded with a smugly shrieking pity-me rant of victimhood
- YouTube’s ongoing Covid censorship proves they have accumulated too much unaccountable power. Big Tech and mainstream media believe they are smarter than medical doctors who have devoted their lives to science and use their skills to save lives. They have decided there is only one medical viewpoint allowed and it is the viewpoint dictated by government agencies.
Overseen by the Trump administration at the time, as well as Senators such as himself on the Commerce, Science and Transportation committee. He continued
- How many lives will be lost as a result? How many lives could have been saved with a free exchange of medical ideas? Government-sanctioned censorship of ideas and speech should concern us all.
Yes, there is validity to his point on free speech, but his cynical reference, something he cares about only when it muffles one of his self-serving remarks, and his brazen hypocrisy over trying to silence those mentioning that he said
- had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.
Ever the selfish asshole, Johnson smugly tried an “if they can do it so can I” approach, laughingly saying
- They should be cancelled.
Like Cruz, an adherent to Ayn Rand’s libertarian cult of greed and selfishness,
Johnson’s profound contempt for the very idea of helping his fellow man takes on a voice of outraged hysteria; cruel laughter over thinking that someone should ever help another person out. Such are the applied theories and beliefs of Ron Johnson on government, for and by the people that this public representative wishes to amend.
Johnson’s success as a businessman was spectacular. This was seen as his chief attribute towards a successful political career, beginning well before the fifth or sixth resurrection of Donald Trump. Johnson sees himself as taking advantage of Trump instead of the other way around.
Johnson, before the Senate, was the CEO and Chief Accountant of his brother-in-law Jeff Curler’s
mysterious billion dollar company Bemis.
Johnson married rich, having come from much humbler roots. Someone on his staff released a statement in 2014 describing the Senator’s early life, with a curious All-Americanism that makes one wonder what 1950s family fantasy TV show has been colorized.
- Growing up, Johnson delivered newspapers, worked as a caddy at a golf course, baled hay on his uncle’s dairy farm, and worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant.
A few quotes from this man of the people:
- I’m an accountant. I’m a manufacturer from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who stepped up to the plate, and now I’m a U.S. senator.
- We all have the problem of what do you do with the not-guilty-yet in free and democratic societies where you have the presumption of innocence. It’s a very difficult problem.
- We need different perspectives here in Washington — someone who has private-sector experience, somebody who’s actually created jobs, manufactures products, understands the incentives and disincentives, the intended and unintended consequences of legislation.
- The only area that I would agree with minimum wage is in immigration reform, the guest worker program.
- The outrages surrounding the Benghazi attack involve administration action — or lack of action — before, during, and after the attack.
More urgent than, apparently, this dystopia:
yet
Another successful American businessman in government, spreads his indifference to the nation disguised as the offer of a raise. It is all acquisitional with Johnson. Money? Power?
So Ron operates in an entirely me-me-me manner, everything for him, America his corporation to funnel further profits.
For now, he is only significantly wealthy, mid-eight figures or something — certainly rich enough to out buy most of us on anything. But he is not yet into those elite upper echelons of international finance and industry where a well-connected man such as himself could thrive on a golden egg, could have it all in a time of drastic economic decline. He can sell his stocks on words from inside, and get rid of them before profits are impacted. He can control a sizable piece of the world.
Nevertheless, no matter what, this man’s nimble mind seems contemptuous of the politics he exploits. He is indifferent to such humble joys as love or closeness or togetherness or hope.
Josh Hawley
Josh Hawley has the best shot among this churlish crowd of royal ambition to successfully run for President. An adherent to some QAnon theories when it suits him, Hawley dangles himself to safety by saying of the movement
- I still don’t know what they are, I don’t care to know. It seems like a bunch of wackos, extremists to me.
And yet
- More than 150 years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, slavery is illegal almost everywhere. But it is still not abolished — not even here, in the land of the free. On the contrary, there is a cancer of violence, a modern-day slavery growing in America by the day, in the very places where we live and work. It’s called human trafficking.
- Government serves Christ’s kingdom rule; this is its purpose. And Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God — to make it more real, more tangible, more present.
- The people in Washington are getting rich with our money. Under President Barack Obama, the federal government swelled to record size, and it took more and more of our money to pay for it. Who benefitted? Not Missouri farmers or workers.
- If you abuse the public trust, we’re going to find you, and we’re going to prosecute you.
- No entity in the history of the world has collected more information about you than Google. My office wants to know what exactly Google does with all of the information it’s gathering.
It isn’t just Hawley’s good looks, brains, and ambition that makes him an attractive leader for the future of QAnon. No, Hawley’s hypocrisy is so complete that you realize he honestly believes whichever contrary thing he says in the moment. Josh Hawley wants to rule the world.
An arrogant man, it is important to remember that Josh Hawley is brilliant. He is a brilliant man. I suspect he has a genius about him.
Several of Josh’s middle school teachers stated that they thought he would be president someday. His very name is accomplishment in his chosen field. Josh Hawley is a superstar. This is from high school, writing editorials for the Lexington, Missouri newspaper the Lexington News:
College led Hawley to a more active role in decision-making, and overturning his personal disgust.
Burning through his Stanford History Degree, Hawley was Phi Beta Kappa, an obscenely organized and hard worker. One of Hawley’s professors, the exceptional and esteemed historian David M. Kennedy,
who’s book, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War
is genuinely one of my favorite history books — a beautiful, fascinating narrative history, telling a bold, hopeful, and tragic story of days not yet so long ago, where life transformed and civilization required a “New World Order.” This is a wonderful book, so please read it if interested in the time period, or otherwise for those who just love a great story.
https://www.betterworldbooks.com/search/results?q=freedom%20from%20fear%20david%20kennedy
Kennedy is the author of books on the history of progressive thinking, the origins of modern birth control, the home front during both World War I and II, perspective-based anthologies on the nature of politics and its history — he even wrote studies on how perspectives and beliefs of history change with every generation, transforming the past into something to argue about once the next generation takes control.
This man, he wrote the introduction to Hawley’s fanatical book Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness,
an underwhelming, disposable nothing, whose chief premise is that everything old TR did back in the days of righteous politics, meaning trying-to-do-what’s-right, every misunderstood policy Hawley claims needs to be rearranged and transformed into how he can fix the future.
Kennedy said of Hawley that he is
- arguably the most gifted student I taught in 50 years.
But the theories stated by Hawley are spectacularly un-Rooseveltian. Teddy seemed to actually care about people. Hawley’s book shouts a screed of imposed will on a broken society. Just like Roosevelt said
Roosevelt, however, was aware that beliefs of right and wrong are divided, more of a call-to-arms over ideological furor. Perhaps, with a drastically different and opposing view of morality, Josh Hawley is a follower of Roosevelt’s approach after all?
Stanford was followed by Yale Law School, where Josh edited the Yale Law Journal, and served as President of the campus Federalist society, another Randian political action committee.
Their covetous ambition is obsessed with opening the nation for the very limited opportunity to control everything. Take all those regulations away. It is dog-eat-dog. Be ahead-of-the-pack. Social Darwinism and such. Theories of a non-racial, non-binary master race.
Hawley also received a sort of doctorate without going towards this in his classes. He won the Juris Doctor Degree,
which makes the recipient an actual Doctor of Law, a Doctor of Jurisprudence. Such a title could not help but inspire Josh Hawley to try and heal a sick nation.
Upon leaving law school Hawley was immediately offered a series of impressive jobs. This young man, whom many of his Yale classmates, subdued with both awe and contempt, described him as a dedicated and serious man, a
- politically ambitious and deeply religious conservative.
The affixation of “deeply religious” appealed to a number of influential judges seeking law clerks, although Hawley’s first posting was with Judge Michael McConnell,
a Constitutional scholar from the 10th Circuit US Court of Appeals, whose views were, if not liberal, then fundamentally favoring individual freedom. Once considered a serious candidate for the Supreme Court, after criticizing the high court’s ruling in Bush v Gore, he was bypassed on nomination for the eventual Chief Justice John Roberts.
Hawley left his post with McConnell to follow Roberts to the highest appointed legal seat in the land, giving additional insight into the young man’s ambitions.
What Hawley learned from his time spent with the Supreme Court
was how to manipulate public sensitivity on various ideological issues, and to divide people into absolutist sides, violently pro- or con-. He learned that this was a way to hold up government legislation, and to distract the voters, hanging on to see the outcome of the latest swirling drama of social unrest.
From there Hawley moved onto a brief career has a corporate litigator at the massive, multi-billion dollar international law firm Hogan Lovells,
He spent three years making a name for himself in elite legal circles, working on a number of cases involving the federal government. It was then that Hawley moved into a job intended to set up his future career in politics. He was hired as an executive legal consultant at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty,
an activist law firm best known for arguing for the rights of individuals to refuse homosexuals service based upon their religious convictions.
Hawley was the ideal person to write briefs for cases brought before the Supreme Court, and his role in the controversial Burwell v Hobby Lobby
case, where the very religious owners refused to cover birth control for their employees in their insurance package, brought him to national prominence. This was 2014, and was intended as a direct challenge to the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.
Simultaneously Hawley founded and lead the Missouri Liberty Project
which, despite its professional and anti-partisan introduction, in fact ran parallel to his work at Becket, and appears to have only been about gathering funds from small or large anonymous donors, suspiciously leading to Hawley’s subsequent political campaigns.
In fact, as reported in Missouri:
“Hawley — a Citizen’s United-endorsed candidate — still strongly supports the use of dark money, allowing corporations and special interests to make unlimited political contributions without disclosing them.
- Nearly 75% of Hawley’s individual contributions during his race for Attorney General came from David Humphreys
and his family. When Humphreys faced pay-to-play allegations, Hawley turned a blind eye — despite bipartisan calls for him to investigate.
(Humphries later declared Hawley “An anti-Democracy populist who provoked the DC riots.”)
- Hawley continues to refuse to return the $50,000 in contributions he received from former Governor Eric Greitens. Hawley declined to investigate the Governor on multiple occasions, changing course only when it was no longer politically tenable to do so.
- And during his campaign for Senate, Hawley has already proudly touted the endorsement of several SuperPACs.
It seems that none of Hawley’s professional political actions have anything to do with his ideas of personal religious morality, and he used these PACs to advance his longtime ambitions, exploiting such obvious political wellsprings of attack as Obamacare, his arguments in favor of Hobby Lobby finally about the unacceptable increase in costs to business “illegally” being required to take care of their employees. After all, “profits would decline.”
The Hobby-Lobby case was about rejecting the idea that employers need to help care for their employees. The birth control issue, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, was ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby 5–4. This was finally made irrelevant by changes to the ACA, which required the government insurance plan to cover all such personal decisions.
Josh Hawley, the behind-the-scenes architect of the Supreme Court victory, could only smile to himself. It is unlikely the issue itself hit home, as it is doubtful that his declared religious convictions are much more than a public face to appeal to the deeply conservative voters in Missouri.
From there, tasting the stink of power, Hawley briefly taught law classes at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship,
an arch-conservative Christian fundamentalist legal training center appealing to the highest Christian legal minds. Others involved with this elite fellowship include former Attorney General Ed Meese
and recently appointed associate judge of the Supreme Court Amy Coney Barrett.
Named for Sir William Blackstone,
the British legal scholar who inspired the United States’ founding fathers on law theory while writing the Constitution, Blackstone, founded in 2000, has little connection to the ideas of the beginnings of the nation, regardless of arguments otherwise. (although:
While taking up the cudgel of religious freedom, the Blackstone Legal Fellowship’s operating intention seems to be the barring of individual liberty in those who do not fit into their narrow view on human rights, using smear campaigns to trump up their legal arguments to an outraged partisan crowd.
The responses to such outrageous suggestions seem to sink into the same bog, the dehumanization of any contrary belief into an easily recognizable symbol of evil.
Hawley, having been a background crusader on these lawsuits, managed to keep himself out of the public well-enough that when versions of these stories arose as he was running for Missouri state Attorney General, they made very little impact..
Campaign ads in favor of Hawley
are printed in the same dull style of Hillary Clinton’s,
and Barack Obama’s.
Of course Hawley did not get smarmy parodies that plenty of people believed.
No, the attack ads against Josh Hawley were much more traditional and grounded, more targeted specifics than imaginative, speculative conspiracies. As a result, people lost interest pretty quickly:
Some of these ads were designed by Republicans against Hawley’s form of populist outrage, but, even more than Hawley’s own slickly quiet self-promotion, all this did was fire up interest.
Missouri Attorney General, 2016
Josh Hawley
61.10%
1,389,196
Democratic
38.90%
884,354
Total Votes
2,273,550
Josh Hawley’s aching hypocrisy came into its own during this election. He smugly attacked
- career politicians
whom he denounced for
- climbing the ladder
to make money and gain power over civil law. Two years after assuming office Hawley was elected to the US Senate, making his presidential ambitions publicly known.
As Missouri AG Hawley made his agenda-oriented politics front and center. He seemed to have fun going after people above him, such as the Governor, Eric Greitens,
taking the rumor of crimes, and promoting them as absolutes with the lone agenda of getting Greitens to resign, which he did. It was a baffling campaign, based on bitter allegations, some of which turned out to be true. Hawley even covered himself by cynically quoting a Missouri state Supreme Court decision on how a state AG cannot prosecute the Governor (something he never planned on paying attention to after the requisite hired outrage of partisans “forced” Hawley to file criminal charges).
The allegations were pretty grim, and Greitens deserved much of the derision spewed upon him. What he did was have several members of his staff’s cell phones erased, clearly covering something up. What was deleted remains unknown, but the suggestion that it had something to do with the misappropriation of state funds lingered. This was ranted about on talk radio, and in state house chambers by politicians who wanted Greitens’ job.
Hawley, ever the brilliant politician, seemed to slowly savor the case, continuing to quote the state law, making like the constitutionalist he’s always claimed to be, even leading to an agreement, for which several friendly lawyers called him out for his
- half-hearted
efforts in the prosecution. Hawley hid behind a partisan shield for a time (Grietens was also a Republican), before declaring the Governor guilty of invasion of privacy, and stated that he was filing the charges in the name of
- the citizens of the state.
No evidence could be found of any crime. Hawley pretended happiness that his boss was proven innocent before his office sent out a press release a few days later about how they had
- no jurisdiction
to file charges in the allegations that the Governor had blackmailed a former mistress to keep her mouth shut. Perhaps this was true, but the woman had never made such allegations until after it became necessary, and the public certainly knew nothing until then. The immediate disclosure of such suggestions was perfectly timed.
The Attorney General, after repeating statements on his inability to act, and after several threatening behind-closed-door meetings (according to sources), Greitens agreed to resign.
In addition to this mess, Hawley seemed to go back and forth between taking on very public cases, and taking credit for things he had nothing to do with. For example, after learning through the local press that more than 5,000 rape kits had never been reviewed over the past number of years, those sitting around in basement evidence rooms of police stations throughout the state, Hawley, under pressure, demanded an audit of the kits. Over the next year only 16 were tested, discovering the identity of 11 rapists. Hawley declared a great victory and insisted that justice had been served.
He went after “Big Tech,” something he has had a hard-on for for a very long time, since one of his no doubt mistakenly mis-worded, overtly racist essays from a few years before was removed from several search engines for the spreading of lies.
Some of Hawley’s allegations seem pretty solid too, dealing with the eerie use of tracking software that people sign up for when devising their identities on Facebook and Google, among other places. He stated that the algorithm used to study a person’s interests violated antitrust laws. And while he made strong arguments, and put this issue laser focused in the public eye, his investigations went nowhere. They have since been transferred to the Senate, now his own self-promotions blocked since a publisher refused to release his book, The Tyranny of Big Tech
for promoting partisan lies in the guise of a serious exposé. This book has sold very well. In fact, Hawley uses social media from a variety of “big tech” corporations to promote his book. I have received this nearly verbatim (sometimes completely verbatim) advertisement now twenty-three times over the past few weeks:
Please read below to find out how you can get a SIGNED copy of my new book The Tyranny of Big Tech.
Big Tech companies have amassed colossal power that they use to censor Conservatives and to shut out competitors.
That’s why I wrote my new book, The Tyranny of Big Tech. It is time for things to change, and I wanted to make sure you had a chance to claim a SIGNED copy so you can find out how I think it should be done.
I want you to have a SIGNED copy of my new book, but copies are extremely limited, so please hurry.
Big Tech companies spend enormous sums of money trying to influence our elected officials and the regulations that they write. It’s time that we, as freedom loving Americans, get to work.
Act NOW to claim a SIGNED copy of my new book to learn how we put an end to the tyranny of Big Tech.
Contribute $75 or more RIGHT NOW to claim a SIGNED copy of The Tyranny of Big Tech.
Thank you,
Senator Josh Hawley
The cover price for the book is $25.99. (here are used and new copies selling for starting at $14.99 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30933934579&searchurl=ds%3D20%26kn%3Dthe%2Btyranny%2Bof%2Bbig%2Btech%26sortby%3D17&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title2). Amazon discounts this former #1 bestseller to $17.99.
I wonder where the additional money Hawley is asking for goes? Is it for his campaign chest, his personal bank account? Is he contributing it to charities or Political Action Committees? One is left to wonder if this millionaire is simply bitter that he missed out on the promotion a big publishing house may have offered, despite the fact that his high profile partisan rage is better promotion than anything else could be. But Josh is over-charging, the “CONTRIBUTE ANY AMOUNT” meant for high end donors and the occasional lucky person getting the book for five dollars, if that is allowed in his promotion. I do recommend the book because it slinks inside the callous soul of Hawley, perhaps unintentionally, snakishly unobserved.
The publisher now is the old right-wing horse Regnery Publishing
(regnery.com), which declares itself “Conservative Books for Independent Thinkers (and also offers a 75% discount code, TRUMP75, on five books on the former President, one his own, and four worshipful pieces of attempted satire https://www.regnery.com/custom/happy-birthday-president-trump/). It seems like Big Tech is good for something after all.
Now in Josh Hawley’s defense he did go after numerous opioid manufacturers, including ones who are heavy Republican donors (such as Purdue Pharma)
Hawley seemed to take this case seriously, expanding and expanding the probe until he was targeting ten gigantic pharmaceutical corporations, including Allergan
Mylan
Cardinal Health
and Pfizer,
which has, of course, mitigated some of the damage Hawley caused with their COVID 19 vaccine.
But this issue apparently had meaning for Hawley out of, let us assume, a genuine concern for the well-being of his voters. He knew full-well that the majority of opioid addicts in Missouri — nay, throughout the nation — are Republican voters.
In addition, Hawley went after Catholic priests (resulting in charges against twelve retired holy pedophiles), and, while gearing up for his Senate race against the influential incumbent Claire McCaskill
took another viciously cynical approach attacking the Affordable Care Act, siding exclusively with business interests, and even insisting that pre-existing conditions shouldn’t be covered by employers unless the people are willing to pay extra. He even went after schools and union protected contracts offering health insurance, insisting that the money spent was superfluous, and that people were fine on their own.
When this didn’t go over well, Hawley shifted tactics to an even more corporate insistence, now stating (through his spokesperson) that the District Attorney and future Senator
- supported protecting those with preexisting conditions
and that the best solution to the much more important financial problems was to
- creat[e] a taxpayer subsidy to reimburse insurance companies for covering these high-cost patients.
Hawley’s slick attacks on the ACA, like many other up-and-coming and ambitious Republicans, had nothing to do with benefits or protections, and was turned into yet another demonic conspiracy from President Obama.
White Republican voters — especially those without any idea what the ACA was, other than “Obamacare,” rallied around the rejection. It led to many of these people — the opioid addicts and diabetics and individuals with heart disease and cystic fibrosis being denied health care, denied treatment unless they could pay the outrageous costs of free market medical procedures.
Seven months into his position as Missouri State Attorney General, Hawley announced he had formed an exploratory committee to see the viability of his run for Senate, after being urged on by prominent conservatives such as former Missouri Governor, Senator, and US Attorney General John Ashcroft,
and McCaskill’s predecessor, a less polished clone of Hawley, Jim Talent.
The Senate race was a bitter one. After receiving more than 58% of the vote in the 11 person Republican primary (the candidates consisted of right-wing activists, further right-wing activists, fascist dictator wannabes, sodden moderates, and insane QAnon-styled conspiracy theorists.)
In the general election, after receiving the support of Donald Trump,
who was cruelly campaigning against McCaskill apparently for his own amusement, otherwise thinking about how he might use Hawley, Hawley won by more than 140,000 votes. As we can see by the look on the new Senator’s face, we know who was using whom.
Throughout his couple of years in the Senate Josh Hawley has made a big name for himself, soaring past the other activist politicians on the right by attacking activist politicians of the other side with far more sincerity.
Republican messaging has always been much better than Democrats’. Defund the Police? How bad does that sound, regardless that the implication of the title does not mean removing police? Why not “reallocation of funds?” or something even vaguer, implying that the money might be spent on the training that the other words are meant to promote?
Republicans go for blunt and to the heart: “Drain the swamp.” “Fake news.” “Make America great again.” They’re catchy. You remember them. They make instant sense.
These are a few important things Hawley has suggested or done in the Senate:
- Went after China not because of their authoritarian politics, but because they were beating the US in business.
- Declared “left wing” social networks “addictive.”
- Sought to ban Tiktok, equating it as a Chinese influencer after teenagers tricked Donald Trump and made him look like a fool at one of his under attended rallies (although the crowds Trump received in general were very large, like a rock superstar on a farewell tour. The common equation with crowd size giving Trump the edge in the election disregards just how seriously more than half the nation was taking COVID-19. In the election, the maybe 250,000 people who attended these rallies — many groupies touring the nation with their idol — those numbers are meaningless in the final electoral tally.)
- Cynically sided with Chuck Schumer
and Bernie Sanders
to implement President Trump’s
increase to the COVID funds given to the people of the nation. Hawley could not have cared less whether the money went through and no doubt was happy when the Senate rejected it. He did not care that Trump was trying to implement this not to help people, but desperately, figuring a bribe to the Americans might get him a few more votes.
5. Voted against all but one of President Biden’s
cabinet nominees, the exception being Cecillia Rouse
as the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors because, what the hell, right? Her job was to care about money. She cares about money. The fact that she’s black might soothe his credentials with the moderates and help his white racist followers to justify their own racism by accepted “one of the good ones.”
and, of course,
6. Vowed to object to the certification of Biden as President.
7. Insisted that every close state in the vote had violated election laws, in particular Pennsylvania, where he kept repeating, even after courts ruled otherwise, that they “failed to follow their own election laws.”
8. During the January 6, 2021 siege on the capital attempting to overthrow the US government, Hawley was speaking on the overturn of the election when he was interrupted by rioters busting into the capital. He was annoyed when he was told to adjourn, not taking any of it seriously. He asked why he was “being silenced.” Once the session resumed several hours later, after the harsh words of numerous momentarily former supporters of Trump in the anti-certify wing, most of whom denounced Trump’s provocative words that led to the attack, Hawley immediately stepped back to the lectern to continue his insistence that the election was a cheat, and that the people who broke in were righteous patriots and deserved to be heard.
Josh Hawley is not going anywhere. He denounces QAnon while greedily collecting followers’ support. He says what they want to hear and acts, in his own interest, in ways which make them rapturous. His great intelligence, his understanding of how to carve inside the heart of people, both pro and con, thus always getting noticed (Donald Trump is, of course, a master at this), all of this makes Hawley a force to reckon with. Whatever he may actually believe, all of this is subsumed in his radical grab for power. He is the sort of man who would outlaw QAnon should he assume the Presidency, and also any other opposition party, painting the Democrats as a wing of Antifa, which he would easily equate with QAnon because that marketing campaign is well underway on the right. And all of this he would do under the guise that they are trying to cancel “the people,” instead of what his brazen hypocrisy is actually doing.
These are merely four of the many Q-related politicians, although they are currently the most prominent. And none of them, other than on a small scale perhaps Cotton, believes in any of it. But they are savvy enough, a bold trouble-maker like Johnson, a selfish, bitter failure like Cruz, and the magnificent hypocrite Josh Hawley, to use militia based paranoid revolutionaries to their advantage.
There is a common, not correctly stated finger-pointing on the left that these, (and other up-and-coming people such as Madison Cawthorn,
who is one of the most dishonest, opportunistic people you could ever hope to never meet, someone who, well before being in the public eye, was known as a sexual predator on his far right-wing, Randian college campus of James Madison University. He would also later blame his friend, who saved his life from the terrible car accident that left him in a wheelchair, claiming that he was abandoned instead of pulled out. Even Cawthorn’s parents say that this is untrue and that his former friend is a hero. He additionally lied about being accepted with his less than mediocre grades into the Naval Academy, stating that he had been accepted prior to his injury — the Naval Academy corrected his claims throughout his campaign. He ran a dummy company, declaring itself huge and influential. He was its only employee and it did nothing. It never produced anything. Cawthorn sat and played computer games until deciding to run for Congress.) — and this common thread is that all these people are fascists, which the left mistakenly and to their detriment equate with Nazism. These people are not Nazis.
With the exception of Johnson, I do not believe any of the Senators discussed is racist. Sure, Cotton has his inclinations and his whining about the decline of the white race, but it isn’t personal for him against any other race. I mean, sure, as related above, Marjorie Taylor Greene is clearly an anti-Semite,
- You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany.
But for the most part, these younger right-wing politicians look beyond race into pure nationality, seeking to convert all colors of the rainbow, every faith and sexuality into their religion of economic absolutism. That line from Donald Trump, “America First,” is not intended as the noble and supportive slogan it sounds like. In this current guise it is a demand for isolationism, a statement that we do not need the rest of the world at all. This is absurd in the modern age. The cries against “globalism” have no value any longer, because the way of the world has come to pass no matter how hard some try to reject it. We are part of a world community, and putting America on a different side leaves the only people left listening amused authoritarian dictators.
This makes us weak, weaker in the eyes of the world, weaker in our own minds. It is the cause of revolutions, of coups and overthrows. It is how a nation crumbles, born again into a newly forced ideology.
No, we are not descending into Nazism, regardless of the growing legitimization of crazy, bigoted ideas like QAnon. But we are approaching fascism, this only-in-it-for-me abandonment of national values in a so-called nationalistic age. This greed, this corporatization of our own lives, as told by the selfish response of most of us (certainly myself included) over the numb horrors of the pandemic, all of this leads to fascism. People might choose to make claims that the left is the fascist group, and there are certainly factions within where this applies (you thin-skinned “woke” pussies), but trying to equate Hitler with the left is ridiculous. They like to cling onto the word “Socialist” in National Socialist, as though this explains all you need to know. But it disregards the transformative period of time in the post World War One era where such ideologies arose. Even Communism, that terminal bugbear, was not a left-wing phenomenon. Lenin was not left wing. Stalin was certainly not left wing. Those monsters resemble modern day right-wing dictators in the brutality of how they ran their nations.
Modern fascism is corporate business, the absolutist rise in recent years of one-company-controlling-all social engineering. This has been accepted and even embraced by many on the left and even more on the right. They call it free market or deregulation, or any of the other Randian philosophies that have served to put the vast majority into desperate states, struggling to survive.
After all, according to authority,
