QOTD -- From Common Good To Collective Punishment

 

"... [I]nstead of protecting and expanding civil rights, Project 2025 seeks to curtail individual rights by removing legal protections based on race, sexual orientation and gender identity, effectively legalizing discriminatory practices, while reworking civil rights-era legislation to focus instead on prosecuting “anti-white racism.”

"The GOP’s aforementioned platform of mass deportation of migrants will reportedly be accompanied by sweeping raids, giant detention camps and mass expulsions, tearing apart migrant families and entire communities. Here too, the common good gives way to collective punishment.

"Ultimately, what unites all these data points — from opposition to hurricane relief and attacks on civil service, public education and health care to targeting individual political opponents and minority groups for harassment and discrimination — is the Republican Party’s slide into neopatrimonialism, in which the interests of the state become fused with the whims of the leader, and the purpose of government is no longer to serve the American people, but to punish them..." -- Mark Lawrence Schrad, professor of political science at Villanova University, writing in Slate.  His article, "How the Republicans turned disaster relief into political warfare," discusses the devolution of the Republican Party/cult into a movement whose defining principle is "that the core role of government is instead to wield the power of the state to punish one’s enemies."  The most recent example comes from the "fascist to the core" Malignant Loser's speech in California yesterday, where he threatened to withhold disaster relief money from that State to punish Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsome.  A "leader" and a cult suffused with hatred, the spirit of revenge and vindictiveness, and bigotry;  the Republicans have it all.