Let me get this straight:
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to a limited cell of rumors and scares will support all sorts of wild stuff out of ignorance and fear, and fail to take this sort of thing apart and think it all through.
Nutballs in American political life were there from the beginning - look at the nastiness during the Adams and Jefferson administration, under Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and so on. There’s been two big red scares (right after the first and second World Wars), and a lot of people fighting anything that smells like change.
They fought immigration from ‘those people’ - first non-English speaking Europeans, then non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and so on. They fought changes in the laws to give anyone voting and citizenship rights…removing rules that kept Catholics, non-property owners and the like off the voting rolls. Not to mention non-Christians. And letting people who aren’t our kind into office? Oh!
They fought taxation of any kind. They fought any kind of consumer protection, including drug safety and food safety. They fought public schools. They fought paper money, banking, lending, interstate commerce, the internet and highways, and practically everything that they considered despicable progress. They fought separation of church and state, because they desired their religion’s rules to trump everyone else’s.
They fought medicine and science and public health. They fought innoculations, public water systems and sanitation laws. They fought educational reform; if the Bible and a switch were good enough for them, it was good enough for you.
They fought slavery in favor of indentured servitude (think serfs, and they were white and British) because they hated foreigners, and then fought against freedom for the black slaves that came over to America against their will, and they fought homesteaders. And yes, there were fanatics like John Brown who fought against slavery but didn’t give much of a damn who died in the process, and bushwhackers like Quantrill and Jesse James who killed and laid waste in the opposite direction.
They fought freedom of expression and gun ownership by other people who didn’t fit their mind of real people.
They closed their eyes to intolerance, poverty, hate, misery, ignorance and want, out-scrooging every Scrooge. They become stooges, in many cases, for much more moneyed and wanna-be-powerful interests. And very often, those interests proceeded to screw the ignorant over just as much and thoroughly as anyone else, because the powerful who used them didn’t care who got worked over. They fought reforms of banks and recoveries from panics and recessions and depressions because they felt that the government shouldn’t help anyone.
They become shills, endlessly repeating total nonsense. They get sucked into buying tons of extra ammo and gold and survival equipment by scare merchants who advise them that the Boogie Man is right around the corner - or become dittohead drones to people who advise them to trust Nobody But Them aginst All Those Commies Out There.
Here’s a sampling of some; cut to avoid disturbing your stomach. I remembered plenty of this from my own experience, and had to do a little research to give specifically connected links.
I have no problem with political debate. I have every problem with organizing people to shut down political debate with threats and screaming. And it deeply bothers me to see how many people don’t think before they act, vote or rant about whatever.
I know Marxists, and nobody in the Administration’s top is a Marxist, unless your definition has no connection to real life. I see people rant at town halls about the evils of socialized medicine, and go home and thank God for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and never realize the problem with this. I see people gripe about potholed roads and collapsing bridges and about how there should be no local taxes and never get the connection that no taxes = no public anything.
And I am tired of politicians who lie through their teeth for political power, regardless of the cost to all but their buds - whether it’s Richie Daley trying to tapdance about how the Olympics won’t cost Chicago anything, or the GOP leadership / politicians refusing to care about anything but trying to destroy Obama as a lesson to the rest of us and pandering to the most whacked out elements of their base. That was the reason why I left the Republican party years ago; I believed in government’s role for the general good, and in things like honest government for the general good, and the GOP leadership stopped doing that.
When environmental protection comes down to ‘don’t worry, the rapture is coming’, I can’t support that.
- John Kennedy was controlled by the Vatican and there was a secret tunnel back and forth to the White House, preparatory to a Catholic takeover of the USA. (This one goes back a long ways…)
- Everything not directly approved by the Republican Party is probably a Socialist Communist Fascist organization. (Though how you can get to be socialist and fascist is beyond me).
- Dwight Eisenhower was a communist.
- Water Fluoridation is a communist plot.
- The United Nations is a communist setup. So are most foreigners.
- Polio vaccines are communist plots.
- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are communist socialist efforts to control us all.
- Mental health services are communist efforts who want to establish concentration camps for people the communists hate. Especially in Alaska.
Is it the purpose of H.R. 6376 to establish a concentration camp for political prisoners under the guise of treatment of mental cases? The answer, based on a study of the bill, indicates that it is entirely within the realm of possibility that we may be establishing in Alaska our own version of the Siberia slave camps run by the Russian government. …
This legislation, say its opponents, will place every resident of the United States at the mercy of the whims and fancies of any person with whom they might have a disagreement, causing a charge of ‘mental illness’ to be placed against them, with immediate deportation to SIBERIA, U.S.A!
- Anyone supporting school integration is a communist. Other Races Than the Europeans and women Should Know Their Place, at the end of the line and preferably Not Here or in charge of anything.
- Likewise, all civil rights laws (including the repeal of the poll tax and allowing blacks, native Americans or women to be citizens and vote) and immigration reform are plots to overthrow the proper order of things.
- Integration of major league baseball is a communist plot.
- Democrats are all communists. Howard Stern says so, especially those rats at the FCC who blocked the Sirius satellite radio merger.
- European-Americans adopting Chinese kids are race traitors AND commie preverts…“Ever wondered why white parents just “love” Asian girls so much?” (This one makes me really mad, for obvious reasons.)
- Obama is suppressing the government’s secret UFO files because he’s really a space alien Muslim Commie sent here for World Domination. Check his genitalia to see if he’s a foreigner or a REAL enemy alien.
- Obama will take away all your guns, so you better stock up on AK-47s (even if they are commie guns) and full-auto weapons and ammo at our big sale because The Democrats have targeted all gun owners and will be at your door shortly to take your guns by force. Buy now!
- Buy gold now because the New World Order armageddon is right around the corner! For just ten easy payments….
- Communist subversion of the US Senate is not funny even if it is a game. So there. (Actually, the game sounds really dumb…)
- And really, none of this is really funny at all. It’s sad, at best, and definitely scary, and reminds me that history does indeed repeat itself in the most awful ways.
