The Null Set

Two recent quotes confirm everything in last week’s column; namely, the dangers of Fox “news” spreading lies for profit, while viewers respond by electing people based on those lies. It’s a positive feedback loop, making lies central to what MAGA voters want and what their electeds happily provide.

Here’s Tucker Carlson: “It is galling to be lectured about democracy by a man who took power in an election so sketchy that many Americans don't believe it was real. Biden is far less popular in the US than Putin is in Russia... And it says everything about Joe Biden's tenuous legitimacy.” And that says everything about who Carlson is: an unrepentant pusher of lies and a fawning admirer of despotic war criminal Vladimir Putin.

His lies are central to everything repeated constantly by the gang of Trumpic legislators featured regularly on his show. He shovels it out, viewers shovel it in, their electeds shovel it again, digging democracy ever deeper into an inescapable hole.

Next are the words of House Republican Deputy Whip Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) who wrote, straight-fingered, “House Republicans are delivering in two months what Washington Democrats failed to provide for two years: an economy that’s strong, a nation that’s safe, a future that’s built on freedom, and a government that’s accountable.”

In case it’s escaped notice, House Republicans have, in those two months of vaporous power, passed zero legislation relevant to our economy, security, freedom, or accountability. None. They’ve passed some base-pleasing but meaningless resolutions, plus two theatrical bills, aimed at those imaginary 87,000 IRS agents, which died in the Senate. And their “accountability” committees have, so far, produced only embarrassment. 

It’d be laughable if it weren’t so hilarious. Surely even the most hermetically Foxified can see through such obvious bovine excreta.

Republican Senators aren’t above the patties, either. Here’s Marsha Blackburn (R-Opposite Day): “Under Biden's lawless border policy, fentanyl seizures increased by 241% between the months of October and December.” Makes perfect sense, to the MAGA-minded. But they were elected, probably not in spite of but because of such brazen gaslighting.

So was Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose altiloquent plan for “national divorce” would bankrupt red states, reliant as they are on blue-state tax dollars. So, rather than secession, she now proposes that red states simply ignore federal law. Plus, any Democrat who moved to one of those no-rules, permitless-gun-totin’, pollution-breathing, biblical-educated, book-banning, science-denying, melanophobic states couldn’t vote for five years. Presumably, that’s how long she thinks it takes DeSantisoid education and Foxian propaganda to turn functioning brains into rubricated mush.

“If Democrat voters choose to flee these blue states where they cannot tolerate the living conditions, they don't want their children taught these horrible things, and they really change their mind on the types of policies that they support, well once they move to a red state, guess what, maybe you don't get to vote for five years," is how she pronoun-confusedly put it. Watch for a stampede.

Her proposal has a historical name: nullification. And don’t think it can’t happen. Just last week, the Supreme Court narrowly decided against allowing exactly that, in a case about a man wrongly sentenced to death based on an Arizona (of course) judge’s law-ignoring instructions to the jury. The appeal was rejected by the state’s courts who, yet again, chose to ignore federal law. Four of the nine justices hearing the current case were fine with a state rejecting the law of the land if it so chose.

The road to nullification remained closed only because Justices Roberts (unsurprising) and Kavanaugh (surprising) sided with the Court’s liberals; or, as Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson should be known, the constitution-respecting, democracy-preserving ones. That’s how close we came to defacto shredding of the founding document. It’ll take only one of the three replaced by a MAGA-chosen “president.” 

But there’s good nullification, too: After that toxic train disaster in Ohio, some Rs are nullifying their lust for deregulation. Suddenly, it seems, there’s a case to be made for not letting dangerous polluters write regulations for their industries. Will Rs stay woke when the cameras are off? Will they rethink the other polluters Trump deregulated? 

We can’t end without mentioning Barry Moore (R-AL), another MAGAfoxed Congressperson, who just introduced a bill, co-sponsored by Santos (R-Fiction) and Boebert (N-RA), among others, making the AR-15 “America’s National Gun.” Arising from the cesspool of cruelty within the Foxian mindset, where “sticking it to the libs,” no matter how hurtful, in this case, to families of those killed by mass murderers, this putrescence holds primacy over basic decency and human kindness.

It’s where MTG would have us all live and where most people who think like that already do. No, thanks. I’ll stay here and vote.