Republicans are definitely hard of hearing. They are also blind to the facts. What they aren’t is dumb, in the sense they are mute. They have a very strong voice when it comes to “alternative facts”. They are just ignorant in presenting the truth.
Like a small child clapping their hands over their ears while singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, Republicans refuse to acknowledge reality when faced with the facts about the attempted coup on January 6th. Instead they stick to the Republican playbook of deflection by talking about inflation instead of insurrection.
When Jim Jordan claimed we learned nothing new from the first round of hearings, he was speaking the truth. Except the “we” he is referring to isn’t the American public. It was he and the other Republican insiders who were well aware of the events that were happening related to the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
When Kellyanne Conway appeared on HBO’s “Real Time” with Bill Maher, she refused to stop defending Trump as she tried promoting her new book. Despite repeated attempts to get her to admit to her former boss’s role in the insurrection, as well as his comments that his VP deserved to be hanged, she attempted to deflect to the Republican playbook. When Maher continued to press her, she exasperatedly commented, “You’re always talking about Donald Trump. He hasn’t been president for a year and a half." The airhead apparently forgot she was there to promote a book about the very thing she was objecting to.
The one person not sticking to the playbook is, of course, Donald Trump. Instead of deflecting to the economy, or ignoring the hearings altogether, Trump took to the one social media outlet that will accept him: his own. Users of the poorly named “Truth” social were banned from the platform for mentioning the January 6th hearings, yet Trump used the failing venture to rant against former members of his cabinet and even his own daughter, Ivanka, as recordings of their comments during depositions were played at the initial hearing.
So, apparently someone is listening…and he’s not happy with what he’s hearing.
Guns
As parents bury their children, Republicans are turning a deaf ear to their cries for sensible gun control. Per usual, they will make the false promise to “do something” this time, only to fall back on their tired excuses of blaming mental health, pledging to “harden schools” and vowing to protect the rights of “law abiding citizens” and their precious distortion of the Second Amendment.
The utter lack of empathy to the pain of the relatives of the victims is all too familiar. Their offer of useless “thoughts and prayers” along with their empty promises demonstrates just how tone deaf Republicans are to these victims and their families.
Until they actually start to listen, the same tragic events will keep happening, again and again and again….
Yet there are those who insist the multiple school shootings are a hoax. They call the survivors “crisis actors” and insist the reports of these attacks are false flag operations meant to take away their guns.
Republicans are listening, but it’s not to the victims. They are listening to the all powerful gun lobby which continues to donate heavily to their campaigns. As a result, an attempt at instituting sensible gun reform, such as banning assault weapons or raising the minimum age for purchasing certain firearms, is dead on arrival in an evenly split Senate.
So, while an agreement was reached it will have little to no influence on the epidemic of guns. Republicans refused to budge on any efforts to restrict the sale of firearms and Democrats caved in to their demands only to acknowledge they tried while using the Republican’s stubbornness as a possible campaign issue in the midterms.
Abortion Rights
When it comes to decisions about a woman’s healthcare, Republicans refuse to listen to the very people that are most impacted by the increasingly limited choices they are faced with. They ignore the voices of the women who are forced into difficult situations. They don’t hear the many reasons why a woman may choose to terminate a pregnancy and instead focus on the narrow-minded “rights of the unborn”.
Paradoxically, they will deny assistance to these women and children after they are born. Their concerns that life begins at the moment of conception apparently end at birth. This has permitted them to pass increasingly restrictive abortion laws as the Supreme Court weighs the prospect of outlawing the procedure entirely.
As with guns, Republicans refuse to listen to those most burdened by the issue of abortion. Instead, they concentrate on the Religious Right who refuse to acknowledge the enormity of a woman’s decision to terminate their pregnancy. Many states have already passed laws that do not make exceptions in cases of rape or incest, or even when the life of the mother is in danger, as would be the case with ectopic pregnancies.
The selective hearing of Republicans is putting women’s lives at risk.
LBGTQ Rights
The leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision potentially overturning Roe v Wade could have profound implications on other rights. In the draft, Justice Samuel Alito states that the reasoning that allowed Roe to become law in the first place was flawed. The draft indicates that the right to privacy, as stated in Roe is not a Constitutionally guaranteed right since it is not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. As a result, rights such as same sex marriage may also lack similar protections.
This has the religious right jumping for joy as they view homosexuality as an abomination. They are joined by like-minded (and close-minded) Republicans who see any mention of sexuality as being part of the “woke agenda” to turn their kids gay.
When Florida passed its “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibited the mention of sexuality in the lower grades, many other Red states viewed this as a blueprint for similar restrictions being enacted in their states. Educators who voiced opposition to the law were called “groomers” who were training their students to be victims of sexual abuse.
Again, Republicans are listening to a vocal minority rather than the desires of a majority of Americans. In yet another paradox, they claim these laws are aimed at protecting children, but will do nothing to prevent them from being victims of gun violence.
Once the Roe decision is released, supposedly sometime in June, it threatens to open the floodgates to many other challenges to the right to privacy, specifically those concerning LBGTQ rights.
Antifa and Black Lives Matter
Antifa and Black Lives Matter are the twin boogeymen of the right. Any time they are caught with their hand in the cookie jar (or far worse), they will quickly deflect to “What about Antifa?”or “Black Lives Matter protested, too”. This tired defense of the indefensible would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so deadly serious.
For starters, there is no formal organization called Antifa. Instead, it’s a label applied to anyone who protested the policies of those on the right. But, according to Republicans, Antifa wants to defund the police, have open borders and support a vaguely defined “woke agenda”.
Oh, and they were also responsible for instigating the violence on January 6th by infiltrating otherwise peaceful Trump supporters. They insist those who attacked the Capitol were peaceful protestors who only resorted to violence when egged on by members of Antifa who had blended in with those seeking to somehow convince members of Congress to “do the right thing” and declare Trump the rightful winner.
Antifa stands for anti-facist. So, it stands to reason that those on the right are pro-facist? But wasn’t facism the very thing Americans fought and died to prevent in the Second World War? Apparently it’s something those on the right want to ignore as they worship their own facist madman, Donald Trump.
The reason they view the left as “the radical left” is they have skewed so far to the right in embracing an authoritarian figure that what seems to be radical is merely centrist. It’s just the chasm between the left and the far right are so large, it only seems the Democrat’s ideas are “radical”.
Republicans even attempted to sabotage the January 6th Committee by insisting on including two fervent Trump supporters, who have promoted the false claims of voter fraud. They insisted that any investigation into the insurrection also include looking at the Black Lives Matter protests. No doubt, if these Republicans were given a seat on the Select Committee, they would have prevented a true study of the events surrounding the insurrection, and instead it would have become a partisan bickering match.
Education
Any authoritarian government first starts by controlling the avenues of information. Donald Trump regularly belittled the press to direct his followers to accept only the “news” he wanted to promote.
Likewise, authoritarians want to dictate what is being taught to children to make indoctrination easier. So, when the pandemic forced children to be home-schooled, parents became very appreciative of the difficult job educators had. As the pandemic dragged on, parents began demanding schools reopen to allow them to return to work.
When schools finally started holding in-person classes again, parents on the right protested the safety measures enacted that were meant to prevent the spread of the virus. They attacked the very teachers they were praising just a few months ago.
When mask restrictions were lifted, Republicans needed to come up with a new plan of attack to demonize educators and thus control what is being taught in the classroom. They latched on to the dual demons of Critical Race Theory and the false allegations that teachers are “grooming” their students to become molested by child-abusing homosexual teachers.
Many Republicans are running on the midterm platform of being “pro-education” by claiming they will ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the classroom. It’s truly an empty promise because no public school is teaching it, so win or lose, they can claim victory.
They further claim they will listen to parents over professional educators in deciding curriculum choices. This has led to books being banned and a cry to return “God” to the classroom. They want to not only control what is being taught in the classroom, they want to dictate how it is taught by forcing school districts to adopt increasingly restrictive curricula.
For decades, the emphasis on education has been to promote critical thinking. The goal has been to create problem solvers who could independently arrive at solutions instead of being spoon-fed propaganda, as is done in authoritarian regimes. Whether it’s George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” or Barack Obama’s “Common Core Curriculum”, the aim was to allow students academic freedom in determining the correct responses.
By eliminating any teaching that would “make students uncomfortable”, Republicans are endorsing ignoring slavery, the mistreatment of Native Americans, the Holocaust, Japanese Internment Camps and so many ugly parts of our history which must be studied to prevent them from happening again.
Instead, Republicans want a sanitized version of history that promotes American “greatness”. It sounds more suitable for the propaganda of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, or Stalin’s purges in the Soviet Union.
Again Republicans want you to listen, so long as they can direct the message. They only want you to hear what they have to say. They pride themselves on being Constitutionalists, but their version of the Constitution would have you accept that its original intent was to allow our nation to be dominated by those who are White, heterosexual male Christians.
Don’t listen. Let your vote be your voice.