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It is not what Pride celebrates that scares me, since the late 1970s I have found the legal and social discrimination against the gays and their brethren utterly evil and idiotic. I am old enough to remember the Anita Bryant kerfuffle and recognized even then just how wrong and hateful her campaign was no matter how many times they repeated the delusional incantation, ‘love the sinner hate the sin.’ No, Pride represents the beginning of the real fight for freedom and equality and for aspect of our nation is it as important as the 4th of July.

What terrifies me is the poisonous atmosphere of 2023 with its escalating number of mass shootings along with the rising tide of Family Values Fascism.

Mass shootings are a social contagion, with each instance acting like a chemical catalyst lowering the activation energy of the process, accelerating the reaction brings more shootings and more death. As reported by the BBC there have been more than 200 hundred mass shootings in 2023. The contagion is running unchecked.

The political environment is particularly dire. An entire political party in our two-party system is succumbing to an anti-democratic dogma that can best be described as neo-fascist. Abandoning the rule of law and democratic norms they have embraced hatred and scapegoating as tools to seize power. Still bitter over marriage equality, but recognizing that the tide had turned against them, they targeted another sexual minority for their hatred, lies, and venom, the transsexual community. Empowered by their reactionary fury they stoke fear, anger, and hatred in a base already inclined to violence.

These twin lethal cultural currents are what terrifies me about Pride 2023. It is my most sincere hope we can get to the 4th of July without any deadly violence at Pride events but there will be no shock or surprise if we do not.

Should Pride events be canceled during this terrifying time?

No.

The danger must be recognized and dealt with, but it must not be appeased. That only empowers it more. Pride must go on.

I am terrified but I am also hopeful. These are the dying spasms of an older ideology and generation, survive these and better days are ahead.

The GOP is a parade of corruption, anti-American ideology, and moral collapse.

There is no credible reason for voting for this political party save, grift, power, and bigotry. Everything else is rationalization, justification, and lies.

There are arguments to be made about the size, scope, and reach of government but that is not the question of the day.

The question of the day is do you stand with democracy or against it?

There is no third way.

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A common statement I hear repeated endlessly on political discussions is how the majority of GOP electeds, not the base mind you, are hoping for a Big Mac, or a Heart Attack, or a stroke to remove Trump from the political field by removing him from life. They suffer twin delusions with this fantasy.

The first is that somehow Trump vanishing from the scene would magically return the Republican Party to its state before that grotesque vainglorious buffoon descended that elevator. This ignores the fact that decades of stoking fear and hate created the condition that allowed Trump to seize the party from its establishment. It also ignores the basic truth of the universe, that time flows in one direction and the past is forever lost to us. The GOP today without Trump will carry forward Trump’s stamp. He has remade the party and while it can be remade again it will never be something from the past.

The second delusion is the idea that Trump’s sudden demise would be accepted as factual by his most fanatical supporters.

In July of 1973 actor, athlete, and producer Bruce Lee died. For many this was simply unbearable and rather than accept the simple fact that everyone dies and sometimes death is visited upon the healthy and fir conspiracy theories sprang up and continue to this day.

In July of 1999 JFK jr., son of the slain president, died when the airplane he was piloting suffered ‘controlled flight into terrain.’ The terrain being the Atlantic Ocean. One of the Q-Anon conspiracies is that he did not die, it was a hoax, and that he would return. The fact that so many very right people are holding out hope for a Democratic persona to returned gives evidence to the unhinged nature of conspiracy theories.

Trump’s death would instantly become a new and probably vast conspiracy theory. It may seem far-fetched and beyond reason to many of us but remember this is the population of people who accept that there is a secret cabal of Democrats feasting on infants in the basement of pizza parlors.

Between the lasting effect of Trump’s years at the head of the GOP and the fanatical followers who would not accept his death the party would find itself tethered to Trump ghost far tighter than they ever had been to Reagan’s.

Terrible Days Lay Ahead

I have been voting since the 1980 elections and throughout that time there have been those that conflate ‘conservative’ with ‘fascist.’ To be fair it was with equal abandonment that ‘liberal’ was conflated with ‘communist.’ Both conflations were the product of the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality that required political opponents be treated as enemies rather than people with different views, opinion, and premises. A natural consequence is that the weight of those terms evaporated. If everything conservatives, right or wrong, is fascist by sheer frequency of occurrence fascism becomes more commonplace and therefore less terrible.

Now, the fascists that always hid inside conservatism have taken the movement and its devices. This was not a bolt from the blue because of a single presidential candidate or election. This is the result of decades of tolerating hatred, bigotry, and cruelty because it yielded electoral benefits. Eradicating fascism from American political life will be long, arduous, path requiring an unending commitment to its defeat at every level.

Because this is a long war, dark days are coming.  The fascist war on people, currently the focus is on the Transgendered community, but should they win, they will move against their next target, is not a war about any sort of sane policy or principled stand. The fascists, as fascists have always done, are fixated on myth, lies, and a history that never existed. They have created a prior existence and view of the world that is no more real that Camelot’s Court or Wakandan Science.

From 1980 through 2003 I was a registered Republican, though I scarcely agreed with everything the party argued for. (IF you do agree 100% with a political party I seriously doubt that you are critically considering all aspects and are more of an ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality.) To me it was clear that the growing authoritarian movement within the GOP was ascendant when they embraced torture of prisoners. A political philosophy capable of torture is capable of any terrible atrocity. The intervening two decades has only strengthened my conviction on this matter.

The fascists are going to win some of the battle ahead. There will be setbacks for liberty and freedom. At times all will seem lost, but we must never stop fighting. Only by thoroughly crushing this poisonous ideology and idolatry can we move forward to a future where everyone can live their true authentic lives.