Month: March 2022

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While I’ve pretty much given up discussing politics with my far more conservatives relatives — I mean, what’s the point if the only red line they have is me when ICE kills me under the Pompeo Administration — one of them said something recently that I caught my attention.

“Why do you hate him,” one of them said in reference to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

I’ve found myself mulling this comment a lot lately. Here’s what’s really going on, I think.

I definitely don’t “hate” Ron DeSantis and I think the comment could be translated to mean more something along the lines of, “Why do you hate my politics?”

I can’t help that I fucking hate the MAGA New Right. But that’s not really the issue. If this was 30 years ago, Ron DeSantis would be just your standard ambitious Republican governor. He would probably be someone whose actual politics were more in line with George H.W. Bush than Trump.

But it’s not 30 years ago.

So, here we are. DeSantis knows that he’s extremely close to being the next president of the United States for various reasons. All he has to do is either get past Trump or become Trump’s veep and he’s going to be president sooner rather than later. As such, DeSantis wallows into the tropes and conceits of the MAGA New Right.

The thing I don’t think enough people appreciate is that by definition, to be a Republican is to hate democracy. It is Republican orthodoxy now that the United States is NOT a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic and, as such, fuck you lib. Rather than doing what political parties in the United States have done for generations, which is to review what makes their policies unpopular and then revising them so they win elections again, Republicans want to burn everything to the ground.

They see democracy as simply as a means to an end — to obtain and keep power. Otherwise, fuck you.

In other words, as I keep saying, the United States is careening towards the existential decision of autocracy or civil war in the general 2024 – 2025 time frame. Something pretty big, like, say, a limited nuclear exchange, would have to happen for this not to occur.

So, I don’t “hate” DeSantis, but I’m very cleared eye as to what will happen whenever he — or any other Republican — becomes POTUS.

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The more I learn about Florida’s now-notorious “Don’t Say Gay Bill” I realize the whole thing was a trap — that the center-Left gleefully fell into. The whole thing is designed to provide the MAGA New Right yet ANOTHER budgen in the pitched battle that is the culture wars.

As I understand it, the bill deals with prohibiting discussion of being gay and gender reassignment with the very, very young — kindergarteners to third grade. This is so obviously a setup on the part of Florida Republicans eager to give Ron DeSantis yet more material for his efforts to be POTUS.

Here’s what’s happening. In my echo chamber, all I’m saying is simply “Don’t Say Gay” without any additional information about what’s going on. So, my first impression was it was about simply not talking about being gay in, I don’t know, high school or something.

Meanwhile, in the far more conservative echo chamber of my Traditionalist relatives, all they hear about is the ages involved.

That this is even an issue is so monumentally dumb indicates to me that there was plotting involved in the bill’s conception in the first place. The MAGA New Right knows damn well what the media narrative is about anything to do with being gay and so they decided to pull out of their butts something that was easy for both sides to get upset about.

The center-Left is mad because of the name, while the center-Right is mad because they’re hysterical about the possibility of children so young even having such things discussed with them in the first place. So, in a sense, both sides are both right and wrong.

And, in the end, all that happens is both sides hate each other more than already did and Ron DeSantis is one step closer to being our first autocratic president. (He’s going to have to either get passed Trump or be Trump’s veep to get this honor, but lulz.)

The point is — the United States grows more and more unstable every day as we lurch towards the “Fourth Turning” of 2024 – 2025.

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Because America is doomed and we’re probably going to have a civil war around 2024 – 2025 or turn into a full fledged autocracy, the fact that Justice Thomas’ wife is a Qanon kook is huge lulz.

Absolutely nothing matters. We’re fucked.

I say this because even without asking, I know what my Traditionalist relatives would say if I mentioned the current clusterfuck around Ginni Thomas. Both sides — what about Hunter Biden?

This is an example of how my “hysterical doom shit” is just fucking pragmatic realism at this point. People like to dismiss my real talk as “hysterical doom shit” because they don’t want to have to process the implications of how fucked we really are.

I supposed that they believe to accept how fucked we are is to give up hope. I’m not saying give up hope! But to pin all your hope on something that isn’t going to happen — any kind of accountability for a huge swath of a group of people actively working to destroy American democracy is idiotic.

My advice is to gird your loins. Accept that Trump is not only above the law, but, barring something unexpected is going to run again in 2024 and win. He may even cheat to win, even though he would win outright otherwise. Ginni Thomas will never be held accountable and her husband isn’t going resign or recuse himself.

The January 6th Committee is going to lay out some pretty shocking things between now and election day 2022 — and Republicans will still sweep to victory in both the House and Senate.

We. Are. Fucking. Doomed. This is it, the end of the United States as we’ve known it since the beginning. Or a civil war breaks out and we have the high risk, high reward possibility of some sort of Third Republic being established. But not without the death of millions of Americans when WMD are used by both sides.

You’re an idiot if you think the system is ever going to work at this point. We just don’t have the political will to do anything about the systemic criminal behavior of the MAGA New Right.

Rather than have any expectation of being “saved” by the system, I would recommend you figure out what you’re willing suffer — even die — for. And then be prepared to not know if you’re side is going to win in the end. It probably is going to get that bad starting around 2024 – 2025. The United States is very unstable and growing more so every day.

Like I said WE ARE FUCKED.

No amount of voting or organizing is going to save us. Knowing what you believe in on a personal basis is all you got at this point. Once you know that, you can grab your bug out bag and head to a part of the country that is in better tune with your own political views.

Then get ready for the air raid siren — not just a Second American Civil War is coming, but WW3, too.

Or, if we’re “lucky,” we slip peacefully into autocracy and your biggest concern won’t be the soft power of “woke cancel culture” but the very real hard power of something like ICE knocking the heads of people who are willing to say what everyone knows is true — Mike Pompeo is a fat fuck.

Anyway. Good luck.

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I went to the grocery story today and saw my first MAGA New Right whack job protest drawn on a truck that drove past me. It said, in part, “Cancel Cancel Culture.”

This really gets to me because given where I live in Virginia, I wonder if the gentleman who was protesting woke cancel culture even knows what the fuck it is. My guess is he doesn’t. Or, if pressed, he would probably say something that translated into “having your life ruined for being conservative.”

It’s this idea of a woke mob chomping at the bit to ruin the lives of God fearing Christian people that causes manly men on Joe Rogan’s podcast to bitch and complain about the “media narrative” that makes it difficult for them to be the manly men that they want to me.

But let’s take an honest look at what, exactly “cancel culture” really is.

My first encounter with the concept of someone being canceled was on afternoon on Twitter a few years ago when it was trending. This or that person had done something to upset the Twitter mob and they were summarily pronounced “canceled.”

It was only a few years later that this idiotic canard came roaring back to the forefront of everyone’s mind. I simply do not believe that being “canceled” exists as conceived by the orthodoxy of the MAGA New Right. Yes, people can get in trouble for being conservative, but often times these people are odd balls in Deep Blue professions like showbiz.

There is the occasional Google programer who freaks out and rants about how “woke” Big Tech is, but they’re also just regular assholes.

I really struggle with how to make concrete the concept of being “canceled” as the MAGA New Right Orthodoxy perceives it. From what I can tell, the term is really more of a catchphrase for the general unhappiness conservatives have about the soft power of the center-Left. Because the fascist idiots of primetime Fox News know simply invoking the terror of being “canceled” rubs the emotional political clit of their average viewer, they throw the concept around as needed to make people stay awake at night worried about it.

From what I can discern, a lot of the fear of being canceled is an expression of how the center-Left sets the national agenda on some issues as the country is torn apart by macro centrifugal forces of titanic proportions. As such, you have Traditionalists who work at, say, a Fortune 500 company who grow enraged that they have to take regular sensitivity training.

They don’t think of themselves as racist or sexist and they take personal offense at the idea that their company would mandate they be more sensitive to the modern expectations of women and minorities. This, in turn, gets them interested in people like Joe Rogan, who, in turn, serves as a gateway drug to the MAGA New Right.

I guess what really bothers me is while elements of “woke cancel culture” do, in fact, exist, I don’t see any reason to burn down our 250 year old democracy because you’re afraid of it. But we have to take seriously the cold, hard fact that autocracy is extremely popular with about 46% of the population. They crave the order of a strong man who will “crush” the woke cancel culture mob and make it safe for them to say tone deaf racist or misogynistic things without having to worry about having their lives ruined.

So, as I keep saying over and over — we’re fucked. The end of America is near and, really, the only issue is if we slip peacefully into autocracy or if we bomb ourselves into oblivion and sort out the difference between Red and Blue that way.