US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wins GOP primary in Georgia

A defiant U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene easily defeated five fellow Republicans on Tuesday in a primary race that showed her conservative Georgia constituents standing steadfastly beside her after a turbulent freshman term.

Greene showed no signs of mellowing in her victory speech late Tuesday. She called, as she has in the past, for the impeachment of President Joe Biden and dismissed his election as the product of “fraudulent electoral votes.” She likened pandemic mask and vaccine mandates to “medical tyranny,” and bemoaned “the cruel and illegal treatment of many nonviolent Jan. 6 protesters.”

Greene called Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell one of Congress’ “failed leaders” and said to loud applause that she’s part of a “majority who even now wants to see Hillary Clinton in jail.”

“Sending me back to Washington will send a message to the bloodsucking establishment: It is we who will set the policy agenda for the next decade and not them,” Greene said. She added: “We’re going to start speaking the truth more forcefully and more loudly than ever before.”

Greene, 47, will be back on the ballot in November facing Democrat Marcus Flowers in northwest Georgia’s 14th District, a seat drawn to give Republicans a huge advantage. Flowers, an Army veteran who raised $8.1 million, easily beat two other candidates in the Democratic primary.

Greene became a celebrity of the Republican Party's far-right fringe with her election two years ago as she embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and engaged in conspiracy theories about the coronavirus.

Greene spoke at an event organized by a white nationalist where the crowd chanted “Putin!” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and launched other partisan attacks that critics said promoted racism and violence.

Greene remained on the primary ballot Tuesday in Georgia's 14th Congressional District after a failed effort to disqualify her by opposing voters. They argued Greene engaged in insurrection by encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that disrupted Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Georgia's secretary of state and an administrative law judge dismissed the claims.

Still, fellow Republicans refused to give Greene a free ride to reelection. Though her first term won loyal followers, it left others in the GOP embarrassed.

Leading the slate of Republicans running to oust Greene in the primary was Jennifer Strahan, founder of a suburban Atlanta health care advisory firm who pitched herself to voters as a “no-nonsense conservative.”

“This is not the time for unserious politicians who just want to hear themselves talk,” Strahan said in one campaign ad, without mentioning Greene by name. In another she stated bluntly: “Our current U.S. representative isn’t doing her job.”

Greene was stripped of her committee assignments last year by House Democrats who accused her of spreading violent and hateful conspiracies. In recent months, Greene got banned from Twitter for spreading coronavirus misinformation.

Green has been largely unrepentant. In a campaign ad posted recently to her Facebook page, she calls Biden and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “communist Democrats” who “hate America, hate God and hate our way of life.”

Greene proved popular enough that she raised more than $9 million for her reelection bid, placing her among the year’s top fundraisers in Congress, according to the Federal Election Commission. Greene spent more than $6.6 million before the primary.

Strahan's $391,000 in fundraising trailed far behind Greene but dwarfed that of other Republican contenders — retired physician Charles Lutin, engineer James Haygood, Marine Corps veteran Seth Synstelien and logistics executive Eric Cunningham.

Spanning a stretch of northwest Georgia from metro Atlanta to the state line at Chattanooga, Tennessee, Greene's district was drawn to favor Republicans even after state lawmakers slightly shifted its boundaries during redistricting last year.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/us-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-wins-gop-primary-in-georgia/ar-AAXGiqa?ocid=mailsignout&li=AAggNb9

Any thoughts on the latest mass slaughter and the normal non-response that will follow?

 

Republicans pay homage to Hungary’s neo-fascist dictator, again!

American fascists in the 1930s

The New York Times writes in an opinion piece by Jamelle Bouie:

This year, the American Conservative Union decided to hold one of its Conservative Political Action Conference gatherings in Hungary. The group met last week in Budapest, guests of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who — since winning back office in 2010 — has led the country away from liberal democracy toward a system he proudly calls “illiberal democracy.”

Of course, with its endemic corruption, repression of sexual minorities, de facto state control of media, constitutional manipulation and an electoral system designed to give supermajorities to the ruling party whether the votes are there or not, there is little that is democratic about Orban’s democracy.

For American conservatives, however, the degradation of Hungarian democracy is a feature, not a bug, of Orban’s rule.

Hungary isn’t a particularly large country (by population, it’s about the size of Michigan) or a particularly rich one (its gross domestic product puts it somewhere between Nebraska and Kansas), but it is a showcase for how a reactionary movement in an ostensibly free society might seize control of the state to reshape society in its own image. And the goal, for both Orban and his American admirers, is the suppression of wokeness, a pejorative term for a broad range of progressive ideas about race, gender and sexuality. This includes, for some, the mere existence of L.G.B.T. people on an equal basis.

That shared goal of suppressing wokeness is why Tucker Carlson, one of the most prominent conservatives in the United States, hosted his show from Hungary for a week last year. “If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our global institutions,” Carlson told his audience at the time, “you should know what is happening here right now.” It’s also why Rod Dreher, a popular conservative blogger and author, wrote that his readers “ought to be beating a path to Hungary.” And it’s why Donald Trump endorsed Orban’s re-election campaign not once but twice.

Which is to say that this CPAC session may have been held in Hungary so that conservatives can learn a little more about how they might unravel American democracy in order to impose their cultural and ideological vision on the country. They even got a little encouragement from Orban himself. “We need to take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels,” he said in opening remarks on Thursday. “We need to find friends, and we need to find allies. We need to coordinate the movement of our troops, because we have a big challenge ahead of us.” Attendees heard from Trump, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Carlson himself, whom Orban singled out for praise: “His program is the most watched. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcast day and night. Or as you say, 24/7.”  

What’s striking about this display of longing and affection for Orban’s regime — beyond the obvious spectacle of people who are ostensibly American nationalists working in concert with a foreign autocrat — is how it underscores a defining trait of conservative populists, if not conservative populism itself. For all the talk of “America First,” there is a deep disdain among members of this group for both Americans and the American political tradition.

The Republican Party neo-fascism, Christian nationalism and laissez-faire capitalism constitutes a deadly threat to democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. The threat is obvious and undeniable. People either see it, or they cannot or could but won’t.  

Going forward, additional evidence of neo-fascist intent probably will not chance many minds. After all that has gone before, it is hard to imagine that  there are more a just a few open minds left, maybe ~5%, maybe less? The battle lines are drawn. War is coming to America.

Canada sees a threat from rising American conservative authoritarianism

A lot of people all over the planet are coming to recognize just how severe a threat the Republican Party, the ex-president and their propaganda Leviathan are to both American and Canadian democracy and liberty. A CBC article comments:

Canada should rethink relationship with U.S. as democratic 'backsliding' worsens: security experts

Canada's intelligence community will have to grapple with the growing influence of anti-democratic forces in the United States — including the threat posed by conservative media outlets like Fox News — says a new report from a task force of intelligence experts.

"The United States is and will remain our closest ally, but it could also become a source of threat and instability," says a newly published report written by a task force of former national security advisers, former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) directors, ex-deputy ministers, former ambassadors and academics. Members of the group have advised both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former prime minister Stephen Harper.

Now is the time for the federal government to rethink how it approaches national security, the report concludes.

The authors — some of whom had access to Canada's most prized secrets and briefed cabinet on emerging threats — say Canada has become complacent in its national security strategies and is not prepared to tackle threats like Russian and Chinese espionage, the "democratic backsliding" in the United States, a rise in cyberattacks and climate change.

"We believe that the threats are quite serious at the moment, that they do impact Canada," said report co-author Vincent Rigby, who until a few months ago served as the national security adviser to Trudeau.

"We don't want it to take a crisis for [the] government of Canada to wake up."

Tucker the neo-fascist slandering Trudeau falsely claiming  

he set up a dictatorship in Canada