#gopisthepartyoftherich — Public Fediverse posts

Without the greedy, obscenely wealthy people who just want more money and less taxes and regulations propping up the deplorable racists, nazis, supremacists and Christian nationalists on the far right, they would never stand a chance in our democracy. But with those wealthy, greedy sleazeball's help, our democracy is in danger.

"So, to the question about what’s really behind the war Republicans are waging against American democracy, the answer is simple: rightwing billionaires who want more, more, more money and are willing to make common cause with bigots, fascists, and wannabee killers to get it.:"

What’s Behind the GOP’s War Against Democracy? https://hartmannreport.com/p/whats-behind-the-gops-war-against?

#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#GreedKillsDemocracy
#GOPUnholyAlliance
#GOPUsesDeplorables4Votes

"...As German industrialist Fritz Thyssen writes in his apologetic book I Paid Hitler, he pressured German President von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor, and then lobbied the Association of German Industrialists, that country’s and era’s version of the US Chamber of Commerce, to donate 3 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi Party for the 1932 election.

While Thyssen did it primarily because he wanted tax cuts for morbidly rich people like himself and government contracts for his company, his efforts combined with Hugenberg’s media empire brought Hitler and his bigots to power.
...
If the German people were victims, Hitler told them, the villains were German minorities, promoting degeneracy like jazz and swing music, tolerance of homosexuality and transgender people, and the “international Jewish conspiracy.”

Once the Nazis took power they banned books, outlawed drag shows and homosexuality, changed school curricula to remove mention of their atrocities in WWI, and rewrote election laws so they’d never again lose an election.
...
This is all echoed in the crisis today facing both the GOP and the Democratic Party’s opposition to it.

As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently wrote:

“My friends, the Republican Party is no longer committed to democracy. It is rapidly becoming the American fascist party.”

Rightwing American billionaires, parroting Fritz Thyssen, have spent the past decade pouring money into Republican-aligned groups working to change school textbooks, ban library books, outlaw healthcare for queer people, criminalize trans participation in civil society, and make it harder for college students and Black people to vote.

Like Thyssen, most probably aren’t all that bigoted themselves: their primary motivation is lowering their own taxes and increasing their companies’ government purchases and subsidies.

But to get there they must have Republicans in power, and the GOP’s base — while they don’t much care about billionaire’s taxes or corporate deregulation — are fervent bigots.
...
There are signs that a few of the billionaires funding the modern neofascist wing of the GOP’s rise to power are having second thoughts, much as Fritz Thyssen ultimately did in Germany.
...
The billionaire-funded movement to pass anti-voting, anti-trans, anti-Black history, anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, and anti-public school legislation and policy is roaring down the track, as is the billionaire-owned media campaign to promote fascism.

And since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with Citizens United, the deck remains stacked in their favor.

There is no Democratic equivalent to Fox “News,” 1500 rightwing radio stations, hundreds of subsidized rightwing podcasts and media sites, The Wall Street Journal, ALEC, Heritage Foundation, Musk’s rightwing reinvention of Twitter, Facebook’s GOP-leaning algorithms, or the hundreds of other state and national policy operations and think tanks.

The American people, however, seem to be waking up even in the face of this onslaught of billionaire-owned and -funded media and political infrastructure.

The velocity with which Republican governors are leaving ERIC so they can quietly purge people from their voting rolls (now that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized that in 2018) and passing over 400 new make-it-harder-to-vote laws shows how concerned they are about this trend.

So, to the question about what’s really behind the war Republicans are waging against American democracy, the answer is simple: rightwing billionaires who want more, more, more money and are willing to make common cause with bigots, fascists, and wannabee killers to get it.

Given how far we are down this road to fascism — and how the GOP’s fascist faction is being supported by both American billionaires and outsiders like Orbán, Putin, and Xi — the 2024 election may well be the equivalent of the November, 1932 German elections: a make-or-break moment for American democracy."

The leaders of the right are becoming ever more aligned around autocracy and oligarchy as their preferred outcome. They have increasingly given up on democracy and no longer have any interest in sharing power or governing from the center. Part of this is attributable to their imbibing far too much of their own kool-aid and part is due to their power-hunger and greed.

They have been working toward their goal of single-party, oligarchic rule for decades--with a touch of Christian nationalism thrown in for "moral" cover. Their ongoing, and now relatively successful, capture of the judiciary as an end-run around democracy, is just one prong of their overarching plan. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, allowing unlimited money/bribery into our elections, eroding the security of the middle class, and propagandistic indoctrination of the susceptible, are all parts of this same plan.

They have been patiently moving toward dismantling our democracy and then fortunately for us, Trump came along and coopted many of the pieces of their plan, for his own, selfish, narcissistic purposes, before it was fully ready to be rolled out. They fought him initially, concerned that he would ruin their well-planned strategy, but then eventually went along with him in the hopes that their desired outcome could be achieved even more quickly than they had hoped. All the pieces were not in place, some of our democratic checks and balances and guardrails held, and that is what saved us.

Make no mistake about it, they wanted to put together an Orban-like, illiberal "democracy-in-name-only" but it wasn't fully successful. Recognizing that this was their plan all along and that they haven't abandoned it but instead doubled down, is what we need to wake up and work together to protect our democracy from this ongoing insurrection. The GOP is not a partner in our democracy any longer!!

American Autocratic Threats: Ted Cruz and John Roberts https://politicususa.substack.com/p/american-autocratic-threats-ted-cruz?

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary
#ImprisonSeditionists

"The U.S. is facing ongoing pressure from the right to become an autocracy, as proven by the secret Ted Cruz tapes and Justice John Roberts' refusal to testify regarding SCOTUS' ethics challenges.

It’s been a banger of a week so far, with sexual harassment scandals bringing down major TV news stars and a CEO and then on Tuesday more breaking news as we heard the secret Ted Cruz (R-TX) tapes in which he laid out the plot to steal America. At the same time, news broke that Republican Chief Justice John Roberts refused Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) request to testify regarding the massive ethics scandals infecting the Supreme Court.

Both sides of this coin are a symptom of an oppressive, out-of-control reactionary and right-wing patriarchy that feels so threatened by change that it is working to seize power and actively escalating democratic backsliding. This is not normal.

The Secret Authoritarian Plot Hatched at the Highest Levels of U.S. Government
The secret recordings of Cruz revealed his coup plot to overturn Biden’s 2020 win and kept Trump in the White House. Cruz is a U.S. Senator, who is supposed to be loyal to the United States and her government. Plotting a coup is the opposite of loyalty.

It was a deeply somber moment as Ari Melber, on whose MSNBC show the Ted Cruz tapes debuted, warned Americans not to dismiss the threat of rising autocracy evidenced by the Republican plan to steal an election.

Melber made the most important point from all of this news when he warned not to underestimate authoritarian plans. I’ve been warning about this since the Right started taking lessons from Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban — they are serious about turning the United States into a democracy in name only and the takeover isn’t going to be a violent Civil War, but rather what you see right now: using the courts to steal power, culture war propaganda and media dominance.

Melber said, "There are also those who would look at this tape with this plan and say, Ari, this sounds pretty farfetched. That sounds unlikely to get anywhere. They might want to dismiss it. They might say, hey, Ari, this wasn't going to really happen. And it didn't happen, we didn't see a fake commission popped up to do this. Let me tell you this tonight -- underestimating authoritarian plans hatched at the highest levels of your government would be a mistake. This was hidden for a reason they don't want to you know about it, don't want to you take it seriously."