Written By: Anton Sawyer
I remember my first experience in understanding the Republican party vividly. It was the early 90s and my father had become obsessed with this guy named Rush Limbaugh. I was too young to care, but I do recall that his ideals mirrored the life my father had lived almost to a “T.” My father was a Korean war veteran who had driven a truck for many years and was a salt-of-the-Earth kind of person. Everything Limbaugh spoke about sounded exactly like my dad. Fast-forward a few decades later and the party of my father has warped into an aborted-fetal stealing, Russia and North Korea heralding, constitution-ignoring mess. This all leads to the question of “how?”
Though I’m not going to look at the history of the party over the last 30 years, I am going to look at the “chain of command” when it comes to the GOP in 2022. Beginning with their ardent followers and snaking my way through conservative media, up to the highest positions in the land—i.e., the Supreme Court and the Presidency—the article presented here will examine how each is involved in some weird symbiotic relationship of warping what their interpretation of American values have become in modern times.
In an attempt to maintain complete transparency, all research and statistical fact-checking for all articles can be found in the bibliography linked here.
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Aborted Fetal Theft
Those three words were not just put together in some attempt to shock or offend; this really did happen in 2022 at our nation’s capital of Washington DC when local police raided the home of a VERY pro-life individual named Lauren Handy.
In the charges, Washington DC prosecutors say anti-abortion activist Handy called a DC abortion clinic pretending to be a woman named “Hazel Jenkins” who needed an abortion and made an appointment for the morning of October 22, 2020. That morning, Handy allegedly approached a clinic employee, said she was Hazel Jenkins and was there for her appointment. When the employee opened the door, the indictment says, Handy and the other co-defendants forced their way into the clinic. In the process they allegedly knocked a clinic employee over, causing her to injure her ankle.
Once inside, the defendants allegedly moved chairs to block the entrance to the clinic’s treatment area and used chains and rope to tie them together. While inside, one of Handy's co-defendants, Jonathan Darnel, allegedly live-streamed the blockade, saying at one point, “We have people intervening physically with their bodies to prevent women from entering the clinic to murder their children.”
But that's not all they did. Handy took it upon herself to remove five aborted fetuses, place them in coolers, and take them to her house. The good news (if there is any to be found in this ghoulish display) was that per DC Police Executive Assistant Chief of Police Ashan M. Benedict, the fetuses appeared to have been aborted in accordance with DC law. "There doesn't appear to be anything criminal about that—except for how they got into that house," Benedict said. Handy is a self-described "Catholic anarcho mutualist" specializing in reaching young anti-abortion activists. Her bio also says she creates "trans-inclusive spaces within the pro-life movement." Though her background is an open book, her reasoning for stealing the fetuses remains a mystery at the time of publication.
I know the argument against this will be along the lines of “but this is just one person.” Bombings, beatings, and killings at abortion clinics have been perpetrated by pro-life zealots for as long as I’ve been alive. This is not just one person or group that went off the rails.
To others, confusion may be setting in. How can someone who supports trans-inclusive spaces also be so vehemently pro-life? These two ideas seem to contradict one another. This leads us to the next link in the chain: the media that shapes and molds the common folk.
Tucker Carlson, Russia & Conservative Media
As of late, conservative talk radio hosts have been trying to mock those who believe that anyone they like (namely Fox News host Tucker Carlson), has the capability of being pro-Russia in any way, shape, or form. To them, they really believe it’s still 1985 and they are kicking the ass of Ivan Drago all while Ronald Reagan looks on approvingly—no matter what they say or do.
So, what has Carlson said that every member of the Fox media family is fervently supporting?
In just scratching the surface, Carlson has made statements that Mr. Putin had never wronged him—and by proxy his enormous audience of Fox News viewers—so why should he oppose the actions of the dictator? Carlson said Putin "never called me a racist." He's also tried to undermine any moral argument for defending Ukraine by claiming it was "not a democracy" and filled with oligarchs—so that makes the attacks and every other atrocity OK.
Again, this is barely the top layer. The comments and their severity run much deeper and have been such that Mother Jones reported on March 3, the Kremlin circulated a talking point to state-run media outlets telling them it was of the utmost importance to run Carlson’s commentary. “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” the 12-page document said, noting that Carlson’s position was that “Russia is only protecting its interests and security."
Again, when thinking a step ahead it’s important to remember that the media, whether conservative or liberal, has always been an extension of the head of the party and their agendas. Media manipulation has always been done in an attempt to make the party’s ideologies more easily understood on a grand scale. When it comes to Carlson and the conservative media machine, you see that the next links in the chain are indeed found within the ranks of leadership in two of the three branches of government.
SCOTUS: The President is NOT Commander-In-Chief
OK, that section-heading is a little hyperbolic as only three of the Supreme Court justices ruled in 2022 that the President is NOT the Commander-In-Chief. Yes, you read that right; we have SCOTUS justices that do not think the military has to follow the orders of the president for whatever reason.
In March 2022 the Supreme Court of The United States surprised everyone in its ruling on the case Austin v. US Navy SEALs 1-26. The essence of the case came down to Navy SEALs fighting the Covid vaccine mandates and feeling that being forced to take them was unconstitutional. The court ruled that yes, in fact, troops do have to follow orders, including an order to take a vaccine. Though it seems to the average American that given the president’s standing as commander in chief over the military—a tradition that has been around since the birth of our nation—this would be a no-brainer. Yet, it seems some of the GOP activist judges didn't get the memo. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the majority. They bucked over 200 years of tradition and said that "no, the president is NOT the commander of America's military and troops don't have to take orders from him."
To me, this section of the article is the most chilling. We now have one of the most powerful entities in the nation upending one of the cornerstones of what makes us American. Sure, I was scared to death at the thought of Trump being in charge of the largest military in the world, along with having the codes for our nuclear weapons cache. But I never entertained the thought that if we went to war, as an American, I could support some militaristic coup if the battle being fought itself was legal and with proper authority. Image going back to 2007—when less than one-third of Americans supported the Iraq invasion—and the military telling Bush that they were done and just came home. It would have thrown our way of life into upheaval. Now we have conservatives in the Supreme Court who are advocating just such a thing.
But the SCOTUS, like everyone else in this chain, has its enabler. For that, we now look at the top rung of the ladder; the true leader of the Republican Party, ex-President Donald Trump.
Trump’s True Love
If I were to put every un-American thing that Trump did in one article, it would be tens of thousands of words. Nobody has time for that. With that being said, there was an event at the beginning of 2022 that unearthed just how little the ex-president cared for his fellow countrymen—especially those who fought in Korea much like my father.
National Archives officials retrieved 15 boxes of White House documents in January 2022 that former President Donald Trump had removed to his private residence in Mar-a-Lago, including what Trump has described as “love letters” from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, The Washington Post reported. These love letters contained lavish praise along with the insistence on another face-to-face meeting halfway around the world. The Presidential Records Act requires that the White House preserve and transfer all written communication related to a president’s official duties—including everything from memos to emails—to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The records whisked away by Trump “should have been transferred to NARA from the White House at the end of the Trump Administration in January 2021,” NARA said. The boxes of documents removed by Trump also included a letter from former President Barack Obama left for Trump when he took over the Oval Office, and letters from Kim.
We know that Trump wanted a special relationship with all of the dictators from around the globe, that’s not what’s surprising. Trying to hide these documents is par for the course as far as he’s concerned as well. What’s so concerning is the level of affection he had for the Rmass-murderer, and the levels of misdirection he held while in office when it came to fighting “our enemies” … whatever that means. In fact, one of his first agendas when taking over the presidency was what he coined “Make America Safe Again.” Though it dealt mostly with Islamic terrorists, the audacity to fool his constituents with such a blatantly untrue title (all while trying to court terrorists from other nations behind the scenes) is beyond galling.
Yet, as we’ve seen, completely on-brand.
I understand that saying one thing while doing another is a standard in politics. It’s also important to remember that I’m not so obtuse or brainwashed into thinking the Democrats aren’t guilty of such things; they are. But what the Republican party is doing with their core values is complete eradication. These examples presented lead me to believe that the GOP has completely crossed the line and has no sense of either who they are or what they can even plausibly pass off as “moral” at this point of their history. They’ve lost their strength in fighting against tyrannical oppressors. They’ve lost their knowledge of what is even in the constitution. And in the case of Ms. Handy, they’ve lost their minds.
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