There have been more mass shootings than days so far in this crazy year; gunmen are threatening our current and second to last presidents; a catastrophic hurricane season is predicted; the west is baking, the east has been under water, and there's a war going on in Europe, the biggest since WWII, which amazingly is being fought more like WWI than a war of modern armies. We're talking artillery, mines, and trench warfare. All that's missing is the mustard gas used at Ypres in 1915, and there may be even more hideous weapons to come in Ukraine.
Oh, and Lahaina burned to the ground.
But if all this doesn't sound that crazy, you need look no further than the current state of the Republican party, which was once affectionately known as the Grand Old Party. No more. Take a quick look at the morons and clowns that the "GOP" has elected to our nation's congress. You know them: Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, and on and on. That's without even mentioning the two mental giants Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos, who together make Sarah Palin look like Albert Einstein. Meanwhile, Fox News anchors seem contractually obligated to refer to something called the "Biden Crime Family" at least once every eleven minutes, portraying our current president in one minute as a doddering old fool who literally doesn't know where he is, and labeling him a criminal mastermind in the next. (Pro tip: He can't be both.)
Still not convinced? Well, yes, welcome to Bizzaro World!
Republican voters are hurtling towards nominating for president a twice impeached, four times indicted convicted sexual predator to run for our nation's highest office. Far more skilled pundits than I will detail his countless sins, high crimes and misdemeaners, and malignant narcicism and sociopathy, so I won't even try. What I will try to do, and the purpose of this post, is to alert you to the publicly stated blueprint for a second Trump presidency.
It's called Agenda 47, and, as usual, Trump says the quiet part out loud.
What is included in this plan? Chauncey Devega at Salon.com has said it best in an excellent article called "Be Very Afraid: Trump's Agenda 47 Is No Joke."
"Agenda 47 would consist of an end to birthright citizenship, further criminalizing transgender people and the LGBTQI community more broadly, expanding the thought crime and other censorship laws to end the teaching of "critical race theory" and to defeat "Woke" and "Black Lives Matter", attacking academic freedom and replacing it with "patriot education", implementing a national stop and frisk law, pardoning the Jan. 6 terrorists, putting homeless people in camps or some other designated area under threat of arrest, building high tech "freedom cities", ending the professional civil service and replacing it with right-wing political appointees and other such partisan agents, gutting the Department of Justice and other parts of the government that opposed Trump's attacks on democracy and the rule of law, executing drug dealers, starting a trade war with China, and making "peace" with Vladimir Putin by withdrawing support for the Ukrainian people and their freedom struggle. In many ways, Agenda 47 is a continuation of the fascist and other authoritarian policies Trump put in place during his first regime but now made even more extreme and cruel."
And if any or all of this appeals to you as the right direction for our country, then you and I are done. No more whatabout-ism, both-sides-ism, or any other false equivalencies, period. It is often said that we should always be voting for something rather than against something, but that doesn't apply here. Even if you love Trump and hate everything the democrats say and do, you must vote against this cruel and evil plan to dismantle the diverse democratic Republic that we have worked so hard to slowly build.
Portland, OR
August 26, 2023
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