Re: the growing authoritarianism on the right, or in general, discussed in last night's BWB.

When the Palestinians attacked Israel on October 7, the following day I got in an argument with my aunt over it because she was very pro-McCarthy and I was pro "make him do what Matt Gaetz bargained for any way possible", and she thought that we needed to get the House working as quickly as possible to go provide support to Israel. During this argument, I lost it (a lot), and told her, "you have been voting for Republicans for 25 years and they campaign on balancing the budget every year and haven't done it since Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the house." I don't care what the excuses are--the fact of the matter is that their primary brand since 1995 has been "fiscal responsibility" and they haven't actually done it since 2001. It's 2026. The Republican political strategy is to lie to their voters to get elected, and to use the mantra that "Democrats are worse", to coerce them into voting Republican. They lie to their voters every. single. year. Because if they thought that the deficit was an existential threat, they'd have fixed it by now. And they have duped their voters for long enough. The younger generations have grown up with Republicans being the party of liars their entire lives.

I do consider our debt and spending a key piece of why our economy and country are broken, it's just lower down on my priority list of things on fire right now. I'm pretty sure Democrats are going to throw as many people in jail as possible, and that they already let in many more illegals than advertised, and will open the borders again with mass amnesty. I can't go to a gas station, a grocery store, in Oklahoma without hearing foreign languages spoken, seeing foreign kids, and running into people with headscarves. All our stores put the Mexican candy by the checkout kiosks now. You don't have a country anymore if you have a foreign population this big. It's gone. It's done. They're going to be made citizens and are never going to leave. I consider that our current biggest existential threat.

We have so many existential threats right now. Our American population, the white working class, and even the professional class, can't get jobs that earn enough value to buy homes and cars. Our kids are so uneducated they can't read their own Constitution. Our judiciary is filled with insane people, and has utterly decayed, rotted like a brown and pitted tooth that needs to be drilled out. Our legislatures can't pass laws that the legal system will follow--In Oklahoma we passed a law that's supposed to allow people to defend property, like in Texas, with deadly force, and they did such a bad job in writing it that the prosecutors and judges across the state effectively ignored it. Any one of these is enough to bring total destruction, but it's every system. Every single one. You can't even buy a washing machine and expect it to work for 5 years without repairs that cost more than the machine. Before our environmental regulation scheme you could buy a washing machine that worked for 25 years with affordable repairs. You can't buy candy at the convenience store that doesn't have carcinogens, that has real sugar in it. We created the USDA to protect people from "filled milk" and sawdust in our beans, now the USDA just requires that you label your sawdust as cellulose on the ingredient list, and your milk filler as soybean oil and carrageenan gum. You can't even go to the doctor and expect to interact with a doctor, you have no idea how much treatment is going to cost, it might end up giving you life-crippling debt, so you don't go. And we can't even pass legislation that requires that they post what the price will be before treatment. The Republicans were supposed to get rid of Obamacare--10 years later? We still have it. We have majorities in every branch of government. Again.

Republicans, as my husband pointed out in a post Rich read on his stream last night, have lied to their voters and used the prisoner's dilemma of Democrats being a greater threat, to get elected for over 25 years. So someone looking at voting, looking at the results, can rationally, logically conclude, that if they vote, they will not get what they voted for. Now where my husband and I differ is that I still think that the fix is getting young people to vote in Republican primaries to get the RINOs out. I think there is a solution and it's in building out communities. And when I say this my husband's response is: the Democrats with Republican consent, and Trump is doing it too, have intentionally destroyed every community, every space for organizing, every means of organizing, whether it be by targeting "militias" with infiltrated federal agents, or simply by letting corporations monopolize entertainment so that people are priced out of the modern tavern. People are so strapped for cash that they're strapped for credit--asking them to associate in public just means adding to their credit card debt.

If you are a white, working class or middle class person, then every single system that you interact with on a daily basis is not just broken--it's been co-opted to be hostile toward you. On a daily basis, the message from our society is: "Fuck your dog, fuck your back pain, fuck your home ownership, fuck your car's check engine light and the squealing sound it's making, fuck your white sounding name so you can't get a job interview, fuck your health, you lazy obese slob. Shut up and work, quit complaining." That's what it's like, all day every day. You can't even take your dog to see a vet without it costing $400.

So when you couple these two things together, the voting having been ineffective for decades, with the hostile system, the conclusion is: We don't have a Republic anymore. Our representatives are bound by our Constitution to guarantee a Republican government, and they don't represent their voters. The people getting ahead are the foreigners that lied to come here and run multi-million dollar federal welfare scams. If they can't get ahead because the system hates them, and they can't vote for improvement, the only solution that might save them from suffering is a Franco. They need a Franco to come in, get rid of the foreigners by whatever means possible, get the insane people in line, by whatever means possible, and give the people their country back. Or else the country is done. This is not an unreasonable, crazy person position.

It hinges upon a key assumption: the people in our country are no longer capable of maintaining a Republic. Montesquieu maintained that in order to have a Democratic system, your people needed to love virtue. In our current society, if you are virtuous, you are going to end up used and abused by those getting theirs first. You cannot have a low trust society and a democracy. Aristotle discusses this in On Politics: one of the key risks with a polity is that if the people are not virtuous, and they start to vote themselves the treasure, things devolve into authoritarianism. This is why I view education and foreigners as the current largest existential threats--they destroy culture. Our culture, one that loves virtue, is what makes us American and makes America America, and it's a tradition that needs to be intentionally cultivated and handed down, generation to generation. The Democrats broke this with Republican consent.

Keep in mind, the people believe that a Bukele-type can solve this problem are the ones who thought Trump was our last chance to save our country. They looked at the Democrat lawfare, coordinated by the White House, sending Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro to prison, issuing a billion dollar defamation judgment against Alex Jones, imprisoning the alternate slates of electors, and they, correctly, saw that as an existential threat. These people are disappointed that Trump did not uphold his promises. They are people that love their country and legitimately thought that their vote for Trump could save the country. Or at least they hoped he could. And now they're staring at slates of RINOs running for Republicans who still think they can campaign for Attorney General and say, "we need to get the politics out of government." When Democrats just tyrannically imprisoned anyone they could with the fig leaf of procedural propriety. The government system was subverted for their purposes, and it sent the message Democrats intended for it to send--Democrats will use whatever means necessary to put their boot on your neck and cut off the airflow. And when someone does that to you, the correct response is self defense. Someone who does that to you needs to be eliminated as a threat because Democrats will do it again the next time they get the chance. If Republicans represented their voters, they would have responded to the attacks with a vengeance. Instead they joined the January 6th committee to repudiate their voters, and attend black tie events with Democrats for several hundred dollar luxury dinners.

Just a final note, personally, I think what happens after a political conclusion like this is destruction of all of our systems, and the technocratic overlords with all the money and power rule over us as slaves, something like the Matrix body battery pods or work camps where we live in slums. The elites don't think regular people need air conditioning, they don't need cars, you can conclude the end-point of such an attitude if it controls society. So I think the correct answer is to gather political will to push back. I don't think it's beneficial to be defeatist in attitude because it'll bring about their forgone conclusion. But it's not illogical or unreasonable to come to that conclusion because of the political strategy the RINOs don't even realize is a strategy. The RINOs adopted their prisoner's dilemma strategy for their political gain, and made it part of their moral system, so they don't even realize that it is a political strategy anymore. You can't be a Republican and then lie to your voters. You have a Constitutional responsibility to represent your voters, to guarantee them a Republican form of government. Their own political strategy created this result.