I hold these truths to be self-evident: that Republicans have blatantly manipulated Christians and conservatives for years, fomenting racism, classism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia to extend and preserve their grip on power. Donald Trump is just the most obvious and disgusting symptom of a much greater moral rot. The reversal of Roe v. Wade is intended as the ceremonial nail in the coffin of secular humanism (i.e., liberalism.) If you were hedging your bets until now wondering if this is an outright culture war, you just lost your shirt—looking at you, Joe Biden!
Republicans whittle away at education, social services, healthcare, human rights, workers’ rights, gun regulations and bodily autonomy at every turn to sow discord, fear, confusion, hardship and anger among people they deem Other. Every mass shooting BENEFITS the Republican agenda. Every woman forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term increases their power. Every queer or trans person afraid for their life and safety extends the reach of Republican hegemony.
The poorer, less educated, more angry, frightened and frustrated any individual American is, the more easily they can be worn down into not voting at all, or fooled into voting for the party that erodes their prosperity and freedom while simultaneously providing a manufactured “villain” from among a vulnerable population. And yes, if that sounds to you exactly like what the Nazi Party did in Germany with Jewish people, then you don’t need a crystal ball to see what Republican mob rule will look like in the United States of Gilead.
The Republican Party is profoundly immoral, filled with intractably selfish people hell-bent on preserving their own power and interests at the expense of anyone else’s and by any means necessary.
We must seize our political moment while we have a Democratic president and Congress, and cut the strings Republicans have been pulling for years to block and eliminate the protections and rights of women, queers, people of color, the trans community, the disabled, immigrants, the economically disadvantaged—everyone, basically, who is not rich, cis, abled, white, and male.
Let's be clear: the rude political demonstration, protest and incivility now required of us to roll back their stranglehold on freedom is a far cry from the perjury, legal trickery, and treasonous, violent insurrectionism practiced by ever more extreme factions of Republican ideology. And let us also draw a distinction between demanding the personal and political agency to which the Founding Framers aspired, and the unbalanced power which accrues from the money-grubbing, power-hungry nonsense Republicans live and breathe.
Time to level the playing field! Kill the filibuster. Kill the electoral college. Expand the Supreme Court, and impeach SCOTUS “justices” who lied to Congress. Institute term limits on the Court, and in Congress. Get dark money out of politics. Institute federal rules on gerrymandering, and eliminate election loopholes and levers Republicans pulled trying to steal the election. Prosecute crimes committed by Donald Trump and his accomplices. No more cooperation for the sake of decorum. We must never come so close to losing our democracy again! VOTE!
The fundamental lie the patriarchy tells is that we are each of us, individually, alone and worthless. Ironically believing their own lies, they imagine they must accumulate as much wealth and power as possible—at all costs—to amplify their own frightened, impotent voices. It’s all a pack of lies, from a party full of cowards.
Make no mistake: if your vote didn’t count, Republicans wouldn’t be doing everything in their power to dilute, take away, nullify and steal your vote, or stress you out on so many different levels you don’t have the time, energy or will to vote.
Think of the deafening noise of a sports stadium. Why is the combined noise of all those people so much louder than the single loudest person in the group? It’s the combined energy. Like a single pebble thrown into a lake and its gentle ripples versus a vast number of pebbles, their energy resonating and reverberating off each other to produce a much greater disturbance. EVERY SINGLE VOICE HELPS.