If you’ve even glanced at reporting on CPAC the past two days, you know that it’s pretty whacky down there in Texas. Probably if a prize were to be given for Most Bonkers Speech By A Senator, Rick Scott could sweep the field with little or no competition.
Scott’s speech started out with the usual buzz words and talking points and then he got so far out there in the weeds that even the CPAC audience couldn’t follow him.
Watch his straight face, incongruous considering the material.
Rick Scott is delivering a bonkers speech at CPAC pic.twitter.com/cIHcB92gRO
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 5, 2022
That was to give you the flavor. Here is what former FBI agent Peter Strzok has to say about Andy Biggs’ speech, which is even more bizarre than Rick Scott’s.
I started a list of horribles about the ways a malicious Congress could derail DOJ’s work, but decided not to roadmap it.
If the House flips, expect unprecedentedly destructive behavior. I hope people in DOJ & FBI are thinking about it – because Biggs and others clearly are. https://t.co/FPX8hMdNsE
— Peter Strzok (@petestrzok) August 5, 2022
Defunding the police is now good. Makes sense to me. After all, War Is Peace. Freedom is Slavery, and if we know one thing, it is that Ignorance Is Strength. That is the well that Donald Trump tapped into, unknowingly and instinctively. Trump, being a natural born dummy, resented smart people his entire life and knew that other dummies did, too.
Anti-intellectualism has long been a trait in American culture. Isaac Asimov once said, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
That is the rule book that the Marge Greenes and Lauren Boeberts play by, “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” No, it is not. Your ignorance is appalling.
We’re all born ignorant, but you really have to work at it to stay stupid. These people have.
I think Strzok is right. We can expect a perfectly wild 2023 and 2024 if the House is retaken, which it very probably will be. The only good news is that it doesn’t look like it will be the blood bath anticipated a few short months ago of 40-some seats. Now, it may be the case that the House could pass to GOP hands but with such a small majority that they don’t have that much power. Let’s hope for that scenario.
And bear in mind, nothing is certain in politics and a lot can change in 90 days.
And make no mistake: there is a lot of pent up GOP aggression and rage. If/when the House flips, it will get nuts, at least for a time.
Scott going on about book burning when R’s are removing books they don’t approve of from libraries and schools is mindboggling. Everything the right does to make America stupid, dumbed down, beaten down and angry is flipped and blamed on the left. Asimov was correct. We are a country dominated by ignorance.
The south/bible belt of the U.S. has been doing this for decades–many decades. These are the areas of the country which really bring down our scores vs. other industrialized scores with regard to education. We are at the bottom because of southern/bible belt dumbing down activities not because of poorly funded public schools. The south in particular thought they were doing their children such a service by removing them from the public school system and putting them into whites only schools; almost always x-tian schools. X-tian schools are at the bottom of every metric used to evaluate how well our students are doing in school. Given an opportunity, and with the voucher system it’s actually reality, the ‘pubes will and in fact are pushing our children’s education to the bottom of EVERY educational metric and not just those compared with industrialized nations.
If these fools get legislative and executive power back in their greedy and ignorant little hands, our school systems will be favorably compared to those in Afghanistan.
Actually that happened across the nation after Reagan gutted the system & Devos ran the deal. I went to great public schools around Winston-Salem, & the oldest state university
& one of the finest institutions in the land. I’ve lived in Florida, Southern California, Oregon, & Massachusetts. I find the same level of ignorance, intellectual laziness, addiction to TV & the internet everywhere. It will be our undoing, if the majority that polls so differently than the gop, doesn’t register & vote against these fascists. I studied Religion with scholars & find unbelievers are as ignorant of ancient history & our religious traditions as the religious cult members. Outright rejecting something based on personal opinion is as much a problem as the perpetuation of ignorance through homeschooling. History deserves our investigation on all levels in all subjects, but our culture ignores it to our peril. Lose the power to fascists & prepare for a more complete Hell On Earth. Hitler, through circumstances & his fanaticism turned the citizens of Germany into killing machines. In 1938, he is on the cover of Time as Man Of the Year. In 1945, he’s lying dead in a hole & Germany is destroyed. Lesson learned? We will see. It won’t be the Christian fascists that destroys us…the MAJORITY of us that allows it will do just fine.
I was born to WWII generation parents. The attitude in my small southern Illinois hometown was widespread around the country in the 50s and 70s when I went to school. Adults would bitch about their taxes, but paid up and when bond issues for schools appeared on ballots they always got approved. In my dirt poor region even much smaller towns were proud of their public schools. My own school system had countless good, and quite a few exceptional teachers. My alma mater (SIU-Carbondale) was a state university and while not top tier was well-regarded and some departments were very much so. And higher education was affordable then. My first semester tuition & fees was $273 and change. In the latter part of the 70s it went up but even in my last semester it had only gone up to $475 and change – still affordable for the average person or family back then.
I should also not that the attitude of parents when I was growing up was widespread in this country whether they were poor, working class or (true) middle class – their kids were encouraged to work their butts off in school and get the best education possible. An Ivy League education was a pipe dream for most and my dad gave me that “look” when I had completed paperwork (I’d been invited to apply) to Harvard, but he’d have moved heaven and earth if I’d wanted to go to college at the University of Chicago which to him was THE preeminent institution of higher learning in this country, and perhaps the world. He wanted me to go there when I decided against West Point and he couldn’t talk me into the Air Force Acadamy (he sure as hell wouldn’t have tried had it been know how hard they’ve always worked to “Super ‘Christianize'” cadets but that’s another story. The point though is that in our lifetime parents believed in good public education and most pushed their kids to get the best education they could. It was the proverbial silver bullet to a better life, that American Dream of each person’s children being able to enjoy a better/more prosperous life than they’d had growing up and be able to pass it down to their own kids. Then came Reagan and his ilk and the taunts and trashing of “elites” – from people with fucking Ivy League (and the equivalent from non Ivy universities) of their own! Where we are now, these fucked up attitudes about education traces back to that point in time. We ARE a dumbed down nation because certain people who dream of a time of lords & serfs wanted it to be so.
The business of book burnings becoming an increasingly popular thing with conservatives really gets at me. If I don’t like certain authors or subject matter I don’t read them – or only excepts that others who make it a point to inform everyone what’s in them because it’s important the gist of them is out there for people to know.
I makes me think of an episode of The Waltons, a show even conservatives loved. In this episode John-Boy writes a series for their local paper as things have gotten bad in Europe and war is breaking out. He believes an apathetic America (and there was strong opposition to getting involved prior to Pearl Harbor) needed to understand what was happening overseas in the hopes of making people understand sooner or later we’d have to deal with fascism. He included excerpts from Mein Kampf which REALLY upset folks down there in Virginia. It led to not just threats but property damage to his dad’s business.
The local preacher is offended by the articles like everyone else and calls a big public meeting to express his thoughts, and holds up a copy of a book he says needs to be burned – Mein Kampf. Everyone but John-Boy is delighted and some guy brings a big, heavy bag up to the bonfire and tells the preacher that should just be the start, that he’d collected a whole bunch of “German” books including from the library to burn and dumps them on the ground. Everyone is revved up when John-Boy jumps in and shouts them down. He points out this kind of thing has been happening all over Nazi Germany and that in his mind there wasn’t a whole lot of distance at the moment between Walton’s Mountain and Germany. It almost gets REALLY ugly as some start to try and manhandle him away but he breaks free and manages to bend down to get a good look at the pile of books.
He picks one up, and says “Oh my God”, and then says he wishes there was someone present who spoke German. An old lady everyone knew and liked had taken him into her confidence earlier when she pleaded with him to stop his articles – because while no one knew her parents had brought her here from Germany when she was little. She was old and they were long gone, but life had led her to that part of Virginia and given the sentiment around the area she was terrified people would learn about her ancestry even though she and her parents had always been loyal to this, their adopted country.
She hesitantantly steps forward and takes the book, and John-Boy asks her to read a bit from in (in German) and she starts. He quickly interrupts and asks her to translate what she just said into English – to devasting effect. Because she then offers the translation, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…”
In their (willful) ignorance they were about to burn the fucking BIBLE!
That of course shamed them and the episode ended on a sort of hopeful note, with the preacher handing both the bible and Mein Kampf to John-Boy and telling the crowd those books, both of them belonged in good hands.
There is a LOT of shit in print I wish wasn’t. But burning books and things like that? It’s an awful, ugly thing to do. Because even if we fucking hate what some people write, free speech must be upheld unless it incites violence. Burning books, magazines etc. that are awful and even incite violence isn’t the answer. Educating people, and getting them to understand how toxic some shit is and even prosecuting those that call for violence and other criminal actions is what needs to be done. I for one would rather that shit be written down so we can track it and deal with it when we need to. And I’m thankful there are people who do a LOT more monitoring of it than I do because we all need to know what these despicable people are advocating.
I remember that episode but didn’t consider how absurd the story was until much later. Just as English-language Bibles tend to be titled “Holy Bible,” so too would German-language Bibles (as “Die Bibel”). (There are some German Bibles labelled as “Heilige Schrift”–“Holy Writing” or “Holy Script”; but I also found it a bit odd that John-Boy would have had enough education on Walton Mountain to recognize “Heilige Schrift” as a German Bible, especially as there wasn’t all that much call for any foreign language education in the local schools at that period of history. And for a minister not being able to discern “Bibel” as “Bible” before tossing it on a bonfire is also just a bit odd, especially as the preacher character–played by John Ritter–was a fairly young guy who seemed to have had a relatively decent level of education.)
In fairness, a German book of that period (especially if was a Bible) would probably have been printed in ‘Fraktur’ which is difficult for anyone who was never taught German to read
Republicans are the party of petty, mean-spirited vengeance, bigotry, and ignorance. They are slowly taking action to dismantle the public education system in this country through attacks on teachers and curriculum. Their ultimate goal is home schooling for all, where parents can teach their children only what they want them to learn, which won’t be much. Republicans love the uneducated becasue they are gullible and easily misled. Easy to control with blatant appeals to base instincts.
Any people that believe they can be both ignorant & free, believe in something that never was, & will never be. Thomas Jefferson
Wonder if any of these ‘patriots’ know anything about him? Doubt it.