Rep Johnson (the white woman who eked by with one vote short) said that before the voting the House HR people came by her office and were like “You know, if you get expelled you’ll lose your healthcare. This one time, when a guy was facing expulsion, he decided to just resign so he could keep his healthcare. Just saying’…”
Also, some good ole boys shot up - I mean, exercised their second amendment rights against - TN Holler founder Justin Kanew’s house while his family was asleep inside. Luckily no one was hurt.
There’s an ActBlue.com fundraiser for the two Tennessee Representatives who were expelled: Stand with Justin Jones and Justin Pearson.
Not sure if we are allowed to post direct links like this.
It’s sad but not surprising that Republicans are quick to act against people fighting to save lives from gun violence, but slow to address (if they act at all) gun violence itself.
I stopped a long time ago. They give now shits about looking like hypocrites, they never did. They always work in bad faith. The real clue is how many of them seem to talk sense the moment they are out of office. It’s galling.
It doesn’t need saying, because she said it herself. Per CBS:
Johnson was asked why she thought she’d been spared while her two Black colleagues were not. “It might have to do with the color of our skin,” Johnson, who is White, told CNN.
Everything else you wrote is just target prioritization. The cruelty is the goal, and always has been. They are just a little more open about it nowadays.
We need to break the feedback loop, and we slowly have, but far too many of these cruel, petty people are still around, and still passing their glorification of hatred down to their children.
Worth noting that fewer and fewer of the younger kids are buying this shit. It ain’t zero, but they are a dying ideology, and they know it. Which is why they are so desperate to grab power, suppress voting and establish their bigotry as “the law of the land.” They can do a hell of a lot of damage, though. So we need to fight them on every front.
As Beau says, “over a long enough time frame, we win. Guaranteed.”
Yes, it is worth noting, but Kyle Rittenhouse did not just arrive sui generis. All too many parents out there are busy passing their biases and own resentments on to their children, who learn to channel childhood selfishness into a sense of privilege and then resentment at those who to not grant them the privileges they feel owed by birthright.
There are less buying into the bullshit, but those left are still dangerous, and will be for a few generations more.
i think it’s important to remember that progress isn’t guaranteed. ( ex. things like racial geographic and education segregation have gotten worse over recent history not better. )
and while i think grappling with these things out in the open is a good sign, policy and the effects of it on real people’s lives matters
people being forced to give birth to children they’re financially, emotionally, or physically unready for; trans kids who are bullied an denied the healthcare they need; black families exploited by banks or targeted by cops and the justice system; all of those affect people now and lay the foundation for tomorrow’s opportunities
there’s no guarantee things will be better later ( especially with the crunch of climate change and mass migrations now begining ) so somehow we have to figure out how to do things better now
Everyone remembers the famous MLK quote “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” but as Jon Stewart recently pointed out it doesn’t just bend that way through force of gravity… we have to bend it ourselves because there’s always a bunch of crazy people working hard to bend it back in the other direction.
