Our greatest strength as a nation is our compassion.
Empathy and equality always triumph over brutality.
Especially when the aggression of small-minded men is driven solely by greed.
The flags that flew outside of Justice Alito and (former Federalist Society head honcho) Leonard Leo’s homes are not just beacons of their own personal extremism and allegiance to Trump.
They also represent the wealth both men have acquired by helping such a man rise to power and then hold on to that power by any means necessary.
Including the violent insurrection that occurred at the US Capitol while Justice Alito was looking to stick it to his neighbors and boast of his allegiance with MAGA and Christian nationalist ideology.
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The flags are also a celebration of the financial windfall that has rained down on both men since Trump took office and the decades of regressive conservative political strategy having reached its zenith.
In my eyes it’s akin to someone naming their Hamptons vacation home ‘Hedge Fun’.
It’s a wink and a nod to the good fortune that came their way via business ventures.
The ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flags are the right wing equivalent of the Mary Kay pink Cadillacs; an appeal to others to sign up and share in the wealth.
Speaker Johnson also had one on display outside of his office.
A man who went from an obscure GOP-MAGA-minion, whose only claim to fame was suggesting the US Congress cut 750 billion from Social Security, to second-in-line to the Presidency for no other qualifications than his utter and complete fealty to Donald Trump - and the ability to allow others to suffer so he can help Trump get re-elected and disrupt the legislative process from his lair at Mar-a-Lago.
How many Ukrainian soldiers were sent to their graves while Mike Johnson held up aid at Donald’s behest?
A man who himself is under the control of Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s post this week about freeing a Wall Street Journal reporter being imprisoned in Russia was the typical transactional boast we’ve grown accustomed to and signaled a back channel deal to NOT free him before that time as it would aid Biden’s re-election efforts.
This would be exactly the sort of thing Paul Manafort would engineer on Trump’s behalf.
A possible violation of the Logan Act that nobody seems to really enforce anymore, as so many in government have become numb to the corruption and the way the outrage du jour quickly filters through the news cycle.
The fact that Trump will not stand trial for stealing classified documents before the election is perhaps the best example of the corrosive nature of the GOP’s attacks on our judiciary and the rule of law.
Judge Cannon received her trial instructions from Team Trump early on and has dutifully run out the clock on that case until there is virtually no chance it will now happen before the election.
So if and when Trump wins/steals the election, Cannon will not doubt be appointed to the Supreme Court and Clarence Thomas will retire and ride off into the sunset in his quarter of a million dollar Prevost motor coach.
Riding shotgun of course will be Ginni his J6 insurrection-planning wife.
A woman who has received tens of thousands of dollars from the Federalist Society and is as close a consigliere to Leonard Leo as almost anyone in Washington, DC.
Hence Ginni’s Thomas’ multiple texts to Mark Meadows in favor of overturning the election and her attendance at Trump rally on the morning of their attempted coup d’etat.
These are not moral, scrupulous or decent people.
They are cowards and insurrectionists hiding behind religion to brainwash culturally backward red state white Christofascist morons so they can buy a bigger house in McLean and summer in Nantucket.
Sucking up to men like Ken Griffin at GOP fundraisers for the real cash behind the Republican policy.
From Charles Koch to Harlan Crow, the billionaires that are dictating GOP policy to favor big oil, corporations and an unregulated financial industry, where CEOs and private equity managers can manipulate the markets and exploit workers and middle class Americans to increase profitability.
This has been the dream of the ‘Greed-is-Good’ set since Reagan’s day when they began their march towards theocratic kleptocracy in earnest.
These men will pay top dollar to the judges, lobbyists, and politicians that can deliver them the votes from white Americans who are so culturally malnourished, xenophobic and bigoted that the rhetoric spewing from Trump’s thin lips sounds like music to their ignorant ears.
We are on a dangerous precipice; the GOP is setting the stage for the takeover Trump is planning.
They will not admit defeat in November’s election (as they have yet to do for 2020, which is no accident, as the Big Lie now functions as a loyalty purity test for GOP candidates) and they will hope use their vast network of corrupt local politicians and law enforcement to achieve their aim early on November 5th.
We must not let them succeed but in order to do this we need to see very clearly what we are facing and not just hope things work out on their own.
If we have learned anything in the last nine years of Trump’s upending of our democratic norms, it is that our institutions are only as good as the men and women working in them.
That is why Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025’ has Donald Trump dismantling our civil servant infrastructure on Day One and replacing up to fifty-thousand people with MAGA loyalists.
That one action alone would be akin to the Taliban blowing up antiquities because it was in opposition to their extremism, or the Nazis burning paintings in Hitler’s Berlin and calling it degenerate art.
It would hamper progress and be an attack on our cultural and civic traditions in one fell swoop.
I’m speaking beyond the obvious chaos of what it would do to our daily life almost overnight.
Its effect on educational institutions and museums would be almost catastrophic and that would be the point.
An unsophisticated and uneducated population full of ‘MAGA culture’ that pleases the state will be exactly what they hope to achieve.
It would be an act of brutality perpetrated on a functioning government in favor of a dictator.
Millions of Americans would begin to suffer the moment our bureaucracy was replaced with inexperienced and unqualified Trump loyalists and that would be precisely the point.
Authoritarians thrive in worlds that are cold and grey and where people go hungry.
It breeds desperation and fear; folks become focused on survival while becoming afraid to acknowledge their own humanity and that of their neighbors if it runs the risk of crossing the dear leader and his surrogates.
We have seen examples of this before in the not so distant past.
Many people have given their lives to fight against tyranny and we honor and pay tribute to them this Memorial Day weekend.
It almost beggars belief that a man who dodged the draft five times in his lifetime and as POTUS refused to honor fallen WWI Marines in France because it was raining (“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers”), is once again the Republican candidate.
It shows you how deep the rot is in the GOP that a man who once uttered those words is their nominee for President.
The Republican party has for decades claimed the mantle of being the most aligned with our military and veterans.
They love the iconography of it all but have no stomach for real support when it comes down to a choice of troops or Trump.
As we take time to remember this Memorial Day, we would be wise to do it with an eye towards the future and the duty we have to those that have made the ultimate sacrifice for the freedoms many of us enjoy.
We cannot allow our future as a nation to once again placed in the hands of a conman, a coward and a criminal.
You can bet Biden would have been standing in the rain at Belleau Wood to honor our fallen.
Its time for all of us to stand up for freedom.
Vote Blue.
