What fresh hell is this..?

I'm a soccer fan, but one thing I've been able to miss is the appalling "barstool sports" sort of "fan culture" shit. Apparently it's a thing, and not a good one. One of the staff over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has a post up about this freakish "sports fandom fandom" that cuts to the real heart of our national problem:

"There are so many parallels between the popularity of Barstool and MAGA, it’s frightening. In fact, as this podcast very astutely points out, things like Barstool and Gamergate were very much proving grounds for MAGA. They’re all cults centered around the most toxic idiots on the internet. They’re all troll armies. They all have an undisguised loathing for women and POC. And most importantly they’re all movements and moments that give people permission to be their absolute worst selves.

Editing to say: It really hit me how much MAGA centers on monetizing being awful and how absolutely dystopian that is"

Tl:dr? "MAGA means never having to say you're sorry you're an asshole."

Here's my question, though; what the everlovin' fuck do you do with someone who WANTS to be an unapologetic asshole?

Seriously.

How do you possible "reach" someone like that?

Because the implicit part of being an unapologetic asshole is that you want, expect, and will fight to ensure that the "public square" is asshole-friendly. You're gonna do everything you can to ensure that there's no, not the slightest hint of, pushback against your assholery. You're never going to back down, give up, or give in.

Which is what we've seen from MAGA since Day Zero.

These dickstains have been loud and proud up in the grille of everyone and everything that has tried to stand up to or against them. Now, especially, since they have all the levers of federal power they've forced their opponents to bend the knee. And to their eternal shame, many have; universities, media conglomerates, pundits, functionaries.

Which is why I keep repeating; we, the non-asshole non-MAGAts, need to realize that

We

Are

At

War

with these people and their institutions.

They know they are; their openly stated objectives are to crush us and destroy everything we value. They are not our fellow Americans, not our fellow citizens, but our mortal enemies.

Because that sort of person is effectively unredeemable our battle must not be directed at them but against those around them, the non-voter, the marginal MAGAt (who cannot be won but who can be disheartened or frightened and terrorized into passivity), the "independent".

We have to detach and discourage the auxiliaries if we are ever to hope to crush the MAGAts.

Because that has to be our ultimate goal.

The lessons of Reconstruction, and the post-WW2 occupations, need to be absorbed this time.

After WW2 we hung the enemies, and hunted and terrified their partisans into fearful silence. After our own Civil War we pardoned the enemies and, as part of reconciling our society, let them craft their shitty Lost Cause stories into our national myths.

But. 

Assholes are always gonna asshole. There's no changing them, or that. Instead they must be forced into silence, and since they feel no shame, by fear. Fear of retribution. Fear of consequences. 

After 1945 we learned what we'd failed to absorb after 1865. 

Bill Sherman said "Fear is the beginning of wisdom". 

But for those who choose never to be wise, fear is, at least, the beginning of silence.

In my personal opinion? The best silence for these people is the silence of the grave. As Stalin was wont to say, if people are the problem? No people, no problem.

But I will take living but fearful silence if that's the best we can get from them.

Endlösung

So tell me, MAGAt.

What is it called when your police and soldiers just take people from their homes, from the streets. and force them into camps where they never leave until they die?

What the fuck is it called? Say it! Say the name. Fucking say it!
 

Sounded better in the original German, didn't it, you fascist fuck?

But you had to have your Orange Fuhrer back and now the rest of us are so fucked, and faster than I ever believed possible.

That Monday's insane presser didn't immediately result in burning buildings and dead policemen dangling from power poles is a vicious indictment of how supine and cowardly We the People have become.

Tonight the White House should be enveloped in flames, the mutilated bodies of Trump and Miller and Melania dangling head-down from the East Portico in the best fascisti traditions. Terrified MAGAts should be hiding in cellars and alleys, barely pausing to tear the gold Trump-head pins off their jackets in their haste to escape the vengeful mobs roaming the Capitol. Margie Greene should be begging to barter anything, everything, to buy mercy from the cold-eyed citizens who just continue dragging her to the nearest wall.

Christ I wish all these fuckers had one throat so I could slit it in one vicious drawing stroke.

I can barely express how insane with rage this fucking Nazi slime makes me. This is as close as I can come, and it's nowhere near close enough. If I had the power these sonsofbitches would be...

But I don't. So all I can do is shake with rage.

The center cannot hold

 Long read by the High Priest of Centerism William Saletan describing the Fall of the House of Reagan.

I'll make it simple and short for you, though.

tl:dr - the Republican Party is a bughouse full of fascist nuts who aren't going to change and who won't back off until they rule the rest of us.

Those inside who aren't bughouse fascist nuts?

Can't and won't change anything because they believe they are 1) safe from the nutcases coming for THEM, and 2) more terrified of taxes, soyboys, feminism, and drag queens that they are of their country becoming a dictatorship.

The nuts - and the nut-complacent - will not change; there's no reason for them to.

They will rule us, or ruin us. They have no interest - zero - in living in a truly democratic, multiracial, multisocial polity. They will have their God, their guns, their "low taxes", their xenophobia and racist Paradise.

Or they'll burn it all down.

Look, if you dare peer into the abyss, at the execrable CNN "Town Hall" the other night, where a braying Tubby blarted his firehose of lies, other lies, and bullshit out into a baying mob of his CHUDs.

THAT's what lies ahead of us. Fuck, that's where we are NOW; what lies ahead may be even worse.

There is no reasoning with that. There's no "compromising" or "negotiating" with it.

There's fighting and destroying it.

Or being destroyed by it.

The implications are, naturally horrifying. The implications are that more than seventy million of our supposed "fellow Americans" are vicious enemies who won't leave us in peace, who will pursue us until their boot is on our necks, or they are utterly defeated.

I have no idea how the hell you solve that. That's the road to Rwanda. That's The Troubles in Ulster. That's the Greek Civil War, or every other Civil War except our own, where the division was more-or-less neatly geographic.

But that's the reality.

If we want to avoid those outcomes, we need to accept that reality, and the need to do what is necessary to burn out the Republican disease before it metastasizes into the sort of civic cancer that tore Ulster and Rwanda and the England of 1642 apart.

But I don't see my country accepting that; either the reality, or the need.

And that, frankly, angers, and scares the living shit out of me.

And speaking of that...

 ...the post just  minute ago? Where I mentioned being kinda irked that We the People had looked the other way as "..a dive-bar's-full claque of criminals, fools, grifters, and clowns..." known as the Bush Administration started Gulf War 3?

Yeah, well. I linked to the posts I'd written about Iraq and after I'd posted the last one, went pawing though the old posts and found this, written about U.S. torture in 2014:

"And therein lies the horror and the tragedy that is the current Republican Party.

This country - every country - needs political representation for "conservative" ideas. The GOP as presently constituted is not "conservative"; it is a monkeyhouse of fiscal unreality and irresponsibility (when your answer to every fiscal problem is "tax cuts" you're not even kidding yourself anymore...), social toxicity (racism, sexism, every "ism" conceivable outside of "straight rich white people"), and scientific and economic weapons-grade moronity (climate change denialism, Christopathic theocracy, deregulatory fanaticism).

And torture."

 And this was years before Trump came gliding down the Golden Escalator.

So.

It's not him.

It's them.

And if that doesn't scare the shit out of you, you should go to your doctor and ask to have your head examined.

Our little domestic fascist problem, condensed.

Here’s the thing.

The U.S. right has largely been captured by ideological nutbars. 

QANuts, anti-vaxxers, gunhumpers, OathKeeperProudBoyThreepers. 

Trump-fellators. 

Lunatics whose purpose is to undo the 20th Century.

The problems with that are that 1) the "mainstream" news - that is, every information source outside the outright wingnut infostream - won’t even hint at that, and 2) even if they did…

...what can sane people do about that?

Ever tried to “debate” one of these conspiracy theorist loons or just a garden-variety nutter? 

It’s impossible. 

They’re not going to concede the argument, and if you “beat” them (through balloting or such) they’ll just lose their shit and start biting you. 

They're nuts. That's the point.

Problem?

You can’t fucking run a republic like that. 

Period.

What DO we do?

I don’t know. 

Or, rather, I do…

 
...but then it presents the issue of "...what do you do with the corpses?".