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Newt Gingrich Is Right
This past weekend, Newt Gingrich made some not-so-subtle threats that if the GOP retakes power in November, members of the January 6 committee would be arrested.
Well, Newt is right.
He’s just saying the quiet part out loud.
We’ve been warning you all along that this election isn’t about BBB or prescription drugs or guns or climate or anything else in the policy domain.
It’s about the emergent authoritarian state shambling its way toward the end of small-d democratic politics.
Speaker Jim Jordan (and no, Kevin, he didn’t take your deal and he is going to shank you) and the MAGAe will comprise a clear majority of the GOP caucus in 2022 and they are Trump’s political vergeltungswaffe. (Sorry for the German, we’re history nerds around here.)
Republicans don’t care about policy. They care about power.
On the first day of the new GOP’s reign, the impeachment of Joe Biden begins. The endless Benghazi 2.0 investigations will begin.
Expect weeks of hearings on TV regarding everything from Hunter Biden’s laptop on down. Expect endless hearings on the BLM and the imaginary Antifa threat.
You know why they’re doing it.
First, the purpose of terror is to terrorize. They want the Democrats on defense and the Democrats being Democrats will fall into the trap, day one. We’re trying to stop that.
Democrats will try to shame the GOP out of it and we know how well that’ll work…which is to say, not at all.
The persecution (and if they have their way, prosecution of the January 6th committee and the rest of Trump’s enemies list) will be to please their god-king. He’ll demand they “investigate” the Big Lie and create a wave of scandals where none exists because the purpose of the Big Lie is to corrode and undermine faith in elections.
Undermining faith in elections is central to their strategy. Will you help us stop them?
If the election of 2020 is illegitimate to the GOP base fanatics, anything goes. I warned in 2019 that they’d mainstream political violence because the acquisition and retention of political power is the only ideological underpinning. Sadly, I was right.
They’ve kept the old GOP brand – low taxes, individual liberty, blah blah blah – but the new GOP is nationalist, populist, and increasingly fascist. Yeah, I went there. The f-word.
McCarthy and McConnell are still playing the old game of Washington and their corporate donors are flooding them with cash.
Little do those corporations understand that in the New Trump Order, they’ll either toe the line politically or they’ll be punished for it. Bannon came right out and said, “We’re going to nationalize the social media companies.”
Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, and the rest of the mutant parade are pushing that Overton window hard. They’ll turn the power of the state into regulating business and enterprise to serve their ideological vision…and it’ll work.
Why is Facebook a fetid hellhole? Because Zuck didn’t want Trump to regulate him. Expect more, and worse, to come.
And yes, they’ll try to put their opponents in jail. Yes, they’ll use the full power of the state to do what they can’t do at the ballot box.
Stop thinking this is about anything else but unalloyed fascism.
And they’ll be abetted by “conservative” media desperately trying to fit grand and petit authoritarianism into a traditional, Reagan-era frame…and a mainstream media caught up in access to power and Washington’s dumb old political games.
Thanks for being here,
Rick Wilson[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]