Republicanism is a multi-generational cancer that will destroy America unless it is destroyed first.
No, I don't mean Trumpism, the belief that laws are for others and "others" are a great wedge to distract the masses from wholesale grifting.
I mean Republicanism, the belief that the only answers to income inequality, gun violence, poor education and public corruption are lower taxes, fewer gun regulations, less educational funding and less transparency. The belief that no crime -- break-ins, arson, ballot stuffing, porn-star payoffs, extortion, campaign embezzlement, solicitation of foreign mass media assistance -- is out of the question if accountability can be suppressed or deflected or if it enriches the participants.
These aspects of Repuplicanism didn't just emerge in the Trump era, they didn't just emerge in the last 5-10 years. They have been present and poisoning public discourse and underlying politics since the Nixon era in the 1960s. The Rumsfeld / Chaney batch of mid-career Nixon diehards came back in the Bush administration to give us the bungled war in Afghanistan and the completely immoral and strategically flawed war in Iraq that cost us $3 trillion. The younger generation of Young Repblicans in the 1970s produced the unholy triumvirate of Lee Atwater, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Lee Atwater perfected the Southern Strategy that replaced outright racism within the Republican party with dog-whistle themes like welfare queens, school choice, etc. that have led to the divisive economic and social policies that have come home to roost in the last ten years with record income inequality, voting rights rollbacks, militarized policing, etc. Manafort and Stone willingly, repeatedly solicited information and material aid from Vladmir Putin to support Trump in 2016 and likely enrich their own pocketbooks.
The only material difference between these five and John Dean, John Erlichman, H.R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, Jeb Magruder, G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord, Howard Hunt, Chuck Colson, and Donald Segretti is proximity to specific crimes. They weren't standing next to those particular criminals committing those specific crimes at the time. But nothing separates them from an ideological standpoint. And they have been at work for fifty years, sometimes in the shadows but mostly in broad daylight.
And there is literally nothing of importance distinguishing that cast of willing criminality from the current 2020 generation of Young Republicans on campus. A group called College Republicans United on the campus of Arizona State University are arranging fundraisers to contribute to the defense of the 17 year-old shooter in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/education/2020/08/28/asu-college-republicans-united-kyle-rittenhouse-fundraiser/5662895002/Consider the facts already know without a doubt:
- a 17 year old individual in possession of an automatic weapon
- traveling across state lines to participate in vigilante wanna-be police actions
- who shot three different people, killing two of them and seriously wounding the third
The shooter was not in his own home, car, office or place of business so castle doctrine concepts do not apply.
Wisconsin does NOT have a law that requires someone deploying deadly force from RETREATING from the point of danger to de-escalate. However, court cases in Wisconsin have ruled that self-defense rules do NOT apply if the person deploying deadly force PURSUES the eventual victim(s) when they are beyond "the castle." IN a 2014 case, a man was convicted of reckless endangerment for firing a rifle at two assailants AFTER they attacked him in his home then fled down the street.
https://www.grgblaw.com/wisconsin-trial-lawyers/wisconsin-self-defense-ruleIn other words, you don't have to RETREAT from danger but you cannot SEEK IT OUT and escalate the danger once you encounter it.
Yet these college students want to raise money to defend the indefensible. They want to aid the defense of someone who was already committing a crime by possessing a firearm as a minor and brandishing it in circumstances he CHOSE to seek out and encounter and wound up murdering two and attempting a third.
You cannot say current "Young Republicans" haven't learned a thing. They have learned a great deal. They've watched 50 years of economic, political and legal skirmishes and learned that as long as the right people (our people) are in the right places at the right times, you should be able to get away with anything. Including murder.
WTH
