The Toxic Avengers Assemble

Doors open at 5, lyin’ begins at 5:01.

The Toxicity is the Point.

Let me explain.

The GOP is a toxic party that encourages and celebrates toxic people. It simply is. It’s like the GOP looks around for the loudest, most obnoxious person in the room, the person everyone just trying to have a civil conversation veers away from, and they point and scream “That’s the one!”. They then give that person a high-level job in the party infrastructure, make them a TV pundit for ‘balance’ on cable shows, or run them as a candidate for office. And since Republican legislatures have gerrymandered districts within an inch of their lives, they are gifted with safe havens, stone pulpits from where they can spew anything they want with impunity. All they have to worry about is getting ‘primaried’, but they can take care of that by running as far to the right as they possibly can. It’s the ‘No Daylight’ strategy, ‘let there be no daylight on the right’; and you’ll be safe.  

Doesn’t really matter if you help your constituents, if you write, sponsor, or actually pass bills (you know, do your job) as long as you say the right things and ‘own’ enough ‘libs’. In fact, you can be in trouble if you do pass a bill, because it could be easily used against you. Pass the ‘wrong’ bill, and you become part of the system, the ‘Deep State’ (TM and © GOP) or the oppressive ‘Big Government’ (TM and © GOP) and someone will pop up suddenly in your district (probably having recently moved there) and oppose your reelection. Yep, you’ve been primaried. Suddenly you will have to go to extraordinary lengths to prove your ‘rightness’. Maybe hang out at the border (even if it’s not your state) in front of the TV cameras and wrestle a few migrants to the ground to prove how right-crazy you are, or bow over farther to an out-of-work- grifter at Mar-a-Largo. The ushe’.

The GOP built a system that rewards extremism, and pushes, begs, for more while punishing any sort of moderation. It’s the system that ever since the founding of the John Birch Society (oh, you can go down that rabbit hole further to the Dixiecrats in ‘47, the OG ‘America First-ers’ in the 30’s and beyond, but this is an essay, not ‘Game of Thornes’), to their backing of failed presidential candidate Barry Goldwater leading to a far right thought takeover in the late 60’s to an Avengers Assemble moment in the 70s with the Christian Evangelist movement, finally to the presidency in the 1980s. Whew. Been a long, hard and ugly road to the disaster that was four years of Trump, but it was always on the horizon. Extremist movements always burn and consume themselves eventually, but they leave much ash and destruction in the path of their flames.

So here we are.

In congress, we have some of the most aggressive, extreme, performatively ignorant (most of them aren’t that stupid, they’re stupid for pay and power) since the Civil War, when Democrat Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat abolitionist Republican Senator Charles Sumner with a cane, nearly killing him. Of course, from there to today, the parties are reversed. The difference being today the GOP mostly outsources its violence to their supporters, like the mob on January 6th.

These people are all stunt, not actual policy. Unless ‘owning libs’ can be a policy. Well, if not a policy it’s certainly a goal.

The new Preston Brooks’ of the GOP are people like Jim Jordan from Ohio’s 4th district, a district both famous for being far right and safe, and for being so gerrymandered and twisted (redundant?) as to resemble a duck. Jordan has a ‘colorful’ past in which he has been accused (pretty credibly) of ignoring sexual abuse as a wrestling coach at Ohio State. Several team members have come forward, saying they informed Joran directly about the abuse, and at least one referee claims to have confronted Jordan about it. Jordan claims he had no idea.

And he’s still in congress where he’s never written and passed a bill in his ten years there, he just holds them up, insults people and yells. And yells some more, all while refusing to wear his suit jacket, man-of-the-people that he is.

There’s Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, son of former presidential candidate Ron Paul, who has inherited his father’s aggressive style of ignorance. Paul’s biggest claim to fame is acting like a jerk during senate hearings, and trying to score stupidity points off Dr. Anthony Fauci. He’s yet another Republican who has nothing to fear from the electorate, as Kentucky hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since Wendell Ford, in 1992.

There’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right conspiracy nut serving from Georgia's 14th congressional district, yet another safe district. She ran unopposed, as the Democrat running against her received so many threats that he feared for his life, ultimately leaving the state. The vile threats she made against her congressional colleagues were so bad, they stripped her of her committee assignments and her power within congress, but not the GOP where she is a money raiser and ‘rising star’. Recently she compared the torture and deaths of millions of Jews in the Holocaust with her having to wear one of her ‘Trump Won’ masks on the floor of congress. And then doubled down on it. GOP leadership has been very, very silent on this. Her grotesqueness is only rewarded. I’m sure the fund raising off the ‘Cancel Culture’ (TM and © GOP) of people telling her she’s waaaaaaaaaay out of line here has already begun.

Right now, Taylor-Greene is on a ‘Summer of Hate 2021’ Tour (not official name) with another equally horrible person, Florida (of course) congressman Matt Gaetz. Gaetz is part of the ‘frat boy’ style of politics, like if one of the guys from Animal House, only with Red Kryptonite levels of evil, were elected to congress. He, almost more than his fellow Toxic Avengers, thinks stupid congressional pet tricks done in front of TV cameras equals ‘policy work’. He is the ‘policy wonk’ of dumb stunts, like leading a charge into a secure room where a meeting was being held, thus violating security and forcing the Capitol security team to perform a sweep and examination to re-secure the room, wasting hours and money, of wearing a gasmask on the House floor during a vote on covid relief while his constituents were literally dying in Florida. He’s just a petty, vile, smug jerk. There, I said it.

That’s not the worst. Gaetz has been accused of massive illegal drug use, paying girls for sex, statutory rape, human trafficking an underage girl, showing nude photos to his fellow frat boy congressman on the floor of the house, and for being a disgusting clown.

I can say he’s guilty of at least one of those.

I could go on, and that’s the problem, I could go on. I didn’t even get to Ron Johnson, Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar, John Kennedy, Lauren Boebert (who brags about illegally packing a Glock, because she’s an idiot), and the King Of Cynical Performative Toxicity (may not be real title), Senator Ted Cruz, who at least should know better. Probably a part two coming on this…

But that’s the point, you can’t tell the true believers from those just going along with the scam. How many actually believe Trump won the 2020 election? Even in their warped reality, probably very few. In the end, it doesn’t matter who among the GOP leadership actually believes the nonsense they vomit; because they’re all united in the message and in shouting it from whatever mountaintop they can find. They’ve convinced the majority of their voters it’s true, and that’s where the danger comes in. That’s where January 6th came from and it’s where the next January 6th will come from as well.

They restrict voting to gain power, they gerrymander to keep power, they lie to their supporters to maintain power.

They take that hate cannon they’ve constructed and aim it right at democracy. Because it’s in the way. The have toxic leaders because the system they’ve built rewards that very toxicity. Toxicity = Strength, and the more they show, the more money flows to them and that system is reinforced and grows stronger while their base becomes a reduction of intense hate.

Toxicity is the point, and will be until it finally breaks the party.

That can’t be soon enough.