We have become hijacked by stupidity and now much of our national conversation is spent speaking of men and women that should be far below the level of public discourse.
Branding has toppled substance and we indulge idiots because of a temporary hold on market share and imagination that is being fueled by an army of Bitcoin-bros and troll bots.
From MAGA to Musk, the stench is the same.
Chaos agents and clowns compete for coverage.
Josh Hawley, just yesterday, performed a stunt on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
He basically accused President Biden, Commander-in-Chief, of allowing U.S. Service members to be killed in the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The venal young Senator with a mailing address in the Ozarks but living a comfortable life in Northern Virginia knows this is a lie.
As a young teacher at St. Paul’s school outside of London, Josh ate popcorn and watched the first night of first U.S. Iraq invasion on CNN in the teachers lounge.
While American service members fought, Hawley sat in an elite British boarding school enjoying the ‘action’ from the safety of privilege and his post-Stanford career track.
Actual military service and the sacrifice their families endure has always been used a prop or rhetorical decoration for the GOP.
Embarrassingly, this past December 6th, the attacks on Pearl Harbor were referred to as ‘D-Day’ by Sean Spicer (an actual Commander in U.S. Navy Reserves) and ‘Pear Harbor’ by Rep. Lauren Boebert.
Look at all the ‘stolen valor’ in their ranks from Tom Cotton’s made up Army Rangers’ credentials to the idiot, J.R. Majewski in Ohio, who lied about his deployment and got laughed out of his GOP congressional race.
A Republican anti-LGBTQ Congresswoman, Rep. Vicki Hartzler, also hailing from Missouri where the only thing stronger than their love of Jesus is their hate for anyone who isn’t a rural white Christo-Fascist moron shed actual tears over the Marriage Equality Act.
Her hate won out over her humanity - this is a trait that is always rewarded in the GOP.
The only modern political party where going backwards is the goal.
‘Make America Great Again’ was about a return to a stunted and brutal time for minorities and women’s rights and where inequality was the rule for many and white mediocrity was often rewarded.
Who would find that more appealing now than a non-college educated, firearm-owning, Fox News-watching white American male.
The same demographic currently responsible for much of the havoc and heartbreak being wrought on this nation.
An exalted criminal has been their godhead for the last 7 years and only now are they searching for a replacement.
Not for redemption, but for a replacement.
Someone just as mean but a little more self-disciplined, and we all know who that is-in fact, Trump’s heir apparent, Ron DeSantis-just went full anti-vaxxer QAnon as both men know it’s now a race to the bottom in the GOP.
Whomever out-extremes the other will win his party’s nomination.
Republicans make no mention of the lives lost at Sandy Hook Elementary school ten years ago this week.
Beautiful children and their teachers, twenty-six lives in all, were taken from this world by a damaged soul turned darker, by the same gun-obsessed culture that feeds the GOP and pays its bills and owns its politicians.
People may forget that the shooter in Newtown, CT killed his own mother as she slept in their home before turning his rampage on the school with an AR15 that she purchased for him as a gift to help them bond.
Shooting was her way to try and reach her troubled teenager, allowing him to own a weapon that no child, teenager or troubled young man should ever touch, let alone own.
She paid with her life and 26 families are forever changed with a loss that never truly heals.
The type of insanity that normalizes gun ownership and the proliferation of weaponry designed only for warfare is actively promoted and proselytized by the GOP.
It’s being promoted as ‘conservative beliefs’ by right wing media and there’s nothing conservative or patriotic about it.
Our country is under attack.
It’s extremism and unique to the United States, mass shootings to the extent we suffer them here, and the inability to stop the NRA is a uniquely American phenomena and baked-in to the self identity of far too many brainwashed citizens who have become blind to trauma.
How many Republican politicians will send out holiday cards this season standing in front of a Christmas tree with their smiling families holding guns?
And not just any guns but legit weapons of war designed for combat.
This sort of insanity would inspire a wellness check in most parts of the world but in the United States it has become a holiday routine in conservative culture and nothing about that is normal.
I was working on a series of shows with the Rolling Stones when the Sandy Hook shooting happened.
I was part of the talent logistics team that helped with the special musical guests that were to perform as part of a live TV broadcast.
Most everyone in the live-TV/music industry in NYC had just come off the 12/12/12 benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, including the Stones themselves.
We had the day off and I was at my apartment in Manhattan, sitting on my front stoop when I heard the awful and shocking news.
I went upstairs and turned on the TV and sat in stunned silence before crying for hours, feeling like now the world, at the very least, has to change.
I felt like this nation surely had to stop to address - and react with determined force and fervent solutions to - a preventable tragedy and the horrific ease with which the criminal obtained his weaponry and ammunition.
What we all witnessed seemed to be so far beyond the pale that even the most calloused heart would bend to the need for gun control and an assault weapons ban.
I don’t need to tell you that hasn’t happened.
The next night I was working on a show in Newark, New Jersey, where Bruce Springsteen was gonna sit in with the band on ‘Tumbling Dice’.
I watched as Bruce and Patty walked down the backstage arena hallway with one of their own sons hours before the show.
The weight of the previous days tragedy and horror seemed to be all over the Boss’s face.
Or maybe I put that weight there myself, with my own interpretation of how he felt but that is the purpose he has always served for not only me but legions of fans looking to have the world and its injustices explained, or at least humanized and reflected back to us as only music and our collective songbook can.
As Bruce himself says of the mighty ‘E-Street’ - it’s a band built for hard times.
We bring our burdens to the public square to find we’re not alone and we share a common spirit.
Also, to admit there’s a darkness on the edge of town.
Those were hard times and these are too.
We need a collective coming together of sorts to combat the chaos and sickness of spirit so rampant.
I recall Lady Gaga performing that night as well, sitting in with the Stones and delivering an incendiary ‘Gimme Shelter’ that seemed to speak to the rage we all felt over this happening, yet again.
Now we find ourselves, a decade from that awful day, in another year that had a massacre in an elementary school by a deeply troubled and murderous teenager who had easy access to the same type of weapon used at Sandy Hook.
I should not have ever heard of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX and now it will be seared into our collective memories as a type of tragic shorthand, like Columbine before it, that speaks to the failures of a society where such violent events not only duplicate but proliferate.
The gun nuts and dangerous, toxic NRA/GOP culture has grown and festered in the United States and it seems to have reached a critical mass this year.
We have the spread of far-right militia groups like Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, themselves a lure for troubled young men with a predilection for high caliber weapons of war.
We need to stop and address the issue of this rising militia culture and the MAGA/GOP axis of support that is essentially building an anti-democratic guerrilla army and terrorism network here in the United States.
We’re allowing them to build a pipeline for insurrectionists and chaos agents.
If a foreign power had attempted the same thing it would be immediately shut down in this post 9/11 American landscape .
However, we are a country sometimes doomed to repeat our mistakes.
For example, the pro-Hitler fascist groups that proliferated in the U.S. in the ’30s and ’40s employing many of the same techniques for recruitment and indoctrination that the far-right is using today.
Kudos to Rachel Maddow for bringing this much overlooked chapter to the forefront again with her excellent reporting and programming.
The best teachers always remind us of where we have already been and offer up a path in a different direction.
You gotta know the woods you’re walking through before you can truly get out and find your way home. In this case, knowledge is our flashlight.
The question now becomes how resolute are we in our will to shut down this insanity and use the legal and legislative powers of the federal government to stop pro-insurrectionist/post-Trump madness in the U.S. Congress.
A sitting member of the GOP, Ralph Norman, literally texted the Trump White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows and asked him to throw out the results of a free and fair election.
And he wasn’t the only member of his party to do so, not by a long shot.
A good way to begin stopping the madness that is about to be unleashed as a result of the narrow majority the Republican Party now holds in the U.S. House of Representatives is to push for an assault weapons ban.
An assault weapons ban is the first, next-step we need to take as a nation, as we walk through loss after loss due to gun violence in the USA.
I now live about twenty miles from Sandy Hook on the New York side of the Connecticut border.
I am part of the same region, connected by hills and valleys and rivers.
Of hopes and dreams.
A quiet place to live and a seemingly safe place to raise a family.
Sought out for it’s seasons and it’s natural beauty and excellent schools.
A safety that proved to be an illusion as it so often does in this land we all share.
As I look out on the snowy field outside my window, on a sunny and cold December morning, I think of those families, those neighbors, waking up today and feeling the cold air and hard ground as they pay their respects at far too many gravestones.
The kind of headstones that don’t make sense-and should never make sense - where the dash between the dates draws attention to that fact that many of those children have now been gone longer than they were here.
And that should touch every soul.
A grief beyond comprehension.
We need to stop the insanity and malice that has gripped our country and its relationship with guns.
And all the tragedy and toxicity it brings.
Our nation made historic progress yesterday with the signing into law of the Marriage Equality Act.
Now let’s do the same with legislation on gun safety laws and an assault weapons ban.
Progress happens, and in the end, love always wins. Be well.
From Noel to his black dildo in his ass; we can confirm he's a cuck faggot and a threat to western civilization and democracy.
Noel has allegedly raped at least 4 black transgender women in New York. Look it up
Goddamn, that was good. Such a spot-on commentary of how a lot of us are feeling. The people who don't feel for these families and want to correct future damage are sociopathic.
Why can't we get past this? Who doesn't want this? Why? Freedom? Freedom from what? You don't even realize that you're already oppressed.