AMERICA’S NEW N……

I start with the famous quote from Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist whose cancer was imprinted onto Republican machinations for decades, and unfortunately, his insidious racism continues to course through the veins of the Republican Party.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’  rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re  talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…“We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

“LGBTQ people are nine times more likely than non-LGBTQ people to be victims of violent hate crimes.” UCLA Williams         

“Institute LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers” (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020).

“The Trevor Project’s on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health found that 45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth.”

These alarming statistics aren’t created out of a vacuum; there are causal agents planting seeds of prejudice, and manufacturing hate, followed by its inevitable violence. Republican politicians spawn homophobia fearmongering, pumping venom into hate groups who in turn terrorize and bully their latest scapegoat—LGBTQ citizens.

These are human beings, Americans; they don’t deserve to be bullied, terrorized. People show up at LGBTQ events, armed to the gills, striking fear and horror into the protesters. Why is a guy in a dress so threatening to these people? In the eighties and nineties, often the most strident critics of the gay lifestyle were later revealed to be gay. Are those guys with the guns just self-loathing closeted gays?

Another terrorist group, the KKK, were also soldiers of anti-grooming. They used violence in an attempt to preserve a white Protestant world, absent Jews, Christians, and certainly blacks. It’s the old story: targeting ‘others’ through the demonization of ‘others.’ But aren’t we all God’s children?  

“Pure womanhood. Our Little Girls Must be Protected.” KKK banner, 1923: A Fever in the Heartland, Timothy Egan

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire

And boy, do we have some absurdities, especially in Florida where we have the mini-me fascist DeSantis calling the plays. He is using tax-payer money to fund a lawsuit against Disney, accusing them of infecting kids with Gay and LGBTQ propaganda. Really?

There have been over 500 books banned in Florida, including books like To Kill a Mockingbird. Amanda Gorman’s poem, The Hill We Climb, is now banned in Florida. It is a poem of hope, redemption, and ascension.

Amanda Gorman: “I’m gutted. One parent could get my poetry banned from classrooms. And yet one country can’t ban assault rifles from massacring children.”

“At least 525 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced this year in forty-one states, HRC found, including more than 220 pieces of legislation that explicitly target transgender people.” The Hill, 6/8/2023

What are they afraid of?  Drag queens aren’t marching into schools and gunning down children with AR-15s. Aren’t they avoiding the real problem?

The school children of Florida will no longer be taught black history, and Critical Race Theory is being treated like a plague.  Large swaths of history, including the Gay Rights Movement, the Woman’s Movement, Civil Rights Movement are all on the chopping block.  Black history is hanging by a thread.  Instead, students will be taught that slaves lived the good life, free room and board, and only a few slave owners were cruel, the rest were benevolent plantation owners with kindly overseers, providing a utopian work environment.  A county in Texas wants to call slavery “involuntary relocation”, a not-so-subtle attempt to bury America’s original sin.

And talking about grooming!!!! Students will be taught literal Biblical passages that proclaim Homosexuals are abominations. When Ed Jackson, a member of the KKK, became governor of Indiana in 1922, he pledged to “fire all Jewish and Catholic professors”. A Fever in the Heartland, Timothy Eagan.

Sounds like Florida’s present agenda of weeding out educators who appear to be woke, whatever the hell that means. The KKK is not dead, and continues to infect our culture through the medium of the Republican Party. Even Trump couldn’t bring himself to denounce David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK, during the 2016 political campaign.

For fascism to take root, the first target is always education, and we are witnessing this offensive in Florida. Hitler piloted massive book-burning events, and last year, a pastor in Tennessee ignited a book-burning event. Teachers are resigning in droves because they are no longer allowed to teach the truth about American history.

History is uncomfortable, but our uncomfortable truths, by confronting them, is how we achieve a more perfect union.

“This summer, the board will consider updates to social studies instruction a year after lawmakers passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms.” Brain Lopez, Texas Tribune

The absurdities rampant in Florida are the ignition for the subsequent violence against LGBTQ citizens.

Republican Presidential candidates are running on platforms that spew hate toward gay, lesbian, and LGBTQ citizens. These are the new niggers. With people of color, the assault has become more subtle, abstract, like the voter suppression subterfuge, and the election integrity con. Three million dollars of tax-payer money was used in Florida to finance DeSantis’s special police force under the guise of election integrity. Oh, and they found four violators, a couple of them felt they were eligible to vote, and two more who tried to vote twice for Trump. Talk about no bang for your buck—three million!!!!!!!! Where have I seen this movie before? Oh yeah, Hitler’s brown shirts, but how about an American precedent? In 1922, DC Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Clan: “He was backed by his own private police force, some 30,000 men legally deputized to harass violators of Klan-certified virtue.”  Egan. They were the precursors to the brown shirts. Hitler actually admired the way we suppressed and terrorized Afro-Americans, which inspired him when he began laying groundwork for the Holocaust.  He admired America’s homegrown terrorist group, the KKK.

If Hitler is an admirer of your group’s ideology, as an American, shouldn’t that give you pause????

There’s nothing that a fascist likes better than their own personal police force.

For Afro-Americans, the road to equality continues to be blocked. A friend of mine recently said to me, we have made strides in regard to Afro-American’s progress in our society. We had a black president, all kinds of black executives, and prominent positions in sports, but here’s the thing: the wealth gap between black and white keeps widening, which indicates that the systemic racial infrastructures continue to endure. The systemic racist educational structures are perhaps the most entrenched, damaging, breeding inequity in every graduating class, strengthening the girds of the power structure.

For Afro-Americans, Republicans don’t overtly say they don’t want people of color to vote, they just set up legal labyrinths such as voter ID laws and gerrymandering that sabotage their inalienable right to vote. Republicans whitewash the suppression by selling it as maintaining election integrity.

The Republican Party has no vision and no policy initiatives that would benefit their constituents. Instead, they seek to take away healthcare, voting rights, a stratagem that disproportionally targets communities of color. They never realize that their policies knee-cap poor white communities also.  Poor whites vote for politicians who undermine their standard of living by taking away their healthcare, by ignoring global warming which impacts poorer communities more. You ever see a billionaire live within a mile of a coal processing factory?

But why do poor whites fall for the grift?

“And importantly, thus it has been possible to make poor and working-class white people believe that their interests lie in making common cause with their political leaders and economic betters. Common cause in whiteness: the idea that they might eventually share in the spoils, and the understanding that the discomforts and anxieties of their own precarious lives were due to—are due to—those below them rather than those above them.” Page 7 Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America

Back in the day, it was slaveowners who fought to keep separated poor whites and poor blacks. They knew the two groups had common ground, both being exploited by slaveowners. And we see this today, the races pitted against each other, the Republican lawmaker being the puppet masters, and who are puppets to organizations like the NRA.

“By predicting that poor whites would be massacred by the “black plague,” masters tried to scare white laborers into supporting the institution of slavery—regardless of what it did to their jobs or wages.” Page 83 Masterless Men, Kari Leigh Merritt. 

While this sleight of hand is performed by Republican politicians in manufacturing LGBTQ demons, Republican politicians bury the lead, like eighteen-year-olds marching into schools with their legally purchased AR-15s, gunning down innocent children. Having sold their souls to the NRA, Republican lawmakers seek to change the dialogue to manufactured issues. 

LGBTQ people are the collateral damage of this subterfuge.

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” ― George Orwell

So why do I bring this up? Gay/Lesbian, LGBTQ people are the new niggers. Republican leadership needed a new demon because demonizing Afro-Americans no longer wins elections. You can’t put out any more Willie Horton ads, a political ad during Ronald Reagan’s Presidential campaign whose message was a big black man was coming to rape your wife or daughter so vote for me and I will protect you from this black incursion.

Here’s the thing, scapegoats are used to camouflage the real issues. Correct me if I’m wrong: no drag queen has shown up at an elementary school and gunned down twenty-three innocent children. Our kids are being gunned down by psychotics, armed to the gills, and Republican politicians engage in LGBTQ fearmongering. In the 150 days so far this year, there have been 263 mass shootings, and Republicans are hyper-focused on guys wearing dresses. And it’s not just the hundreds of dead children; it’s also the survivors who will forever be traumatized, forever strapped with horrific images of their friends being gunned down.

“If arming more people meant that we would be safer, we would be the safest country on earth.” Shannon Watts

Republican policies seek to enrich and empower a tiny section of the population and harm everyone else. So how do you pull this off—scapegoats!

Curt

https://curtsview.com/