Republicans seek National Divorce

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

The members of the House of Representatives who won their seats in the November midterms were sworn in on January 3, 2023. The Republicans won the midterms with a wafer-thin majority, and historically, the leader of the majority party is automatically elected Speaker on the first ballot. Not so this year.

Kevin McCarthy, majority leader of the Republican Party, struggled through 15 ballots, at each of which he had to sell an exponentially larger a part of his soul to the MAGA radical right until he secured the position. He is the weakest Speaker of the House in its history, one who will be ousted if he goes against just one of the demands of the radical right.

Last week, McCarthy gave in to the first of such demands of the radical right, led by QAnon Trumpster Marjorie Taylor Greene, by granting exclusive access of 41,000 hours of surveillance footage of the January 6 insurrection to hard right Fox News anchor, Tucker Carlson.

Constitutional experts have condemned this as a grave breach of House protocol, raising as it does both political and security concerns.

Fox News is known as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and Carlson its most vocal and mendacious spokesman, a 2020 election denier who has been consistently peddling conspiracy theories that the election was stolen from Trump. At present, Carlson has the sole and dangerous power to make available to anyone of his choice the security network of the Capitol, the strategic placements of cameras, the secret escape routes and location of secure areas available to lawmakers in the event of a future attack.

He will also be able to doctor the released footage to make the violent January 6 insurrection look like a peaceful protest and air such edited footage on the Fox network. Several other networks, including CNN and MSNBC have demanded equal access to this footage, if only to ensure that the doctored version of the footage, downplaying the violent riot that will undoubtedly be released to the public by Fox News, would be exposed as being a bald-faced misrepresentation.

Fox is currently facing litigation for defamation by Dominion Voting Machines, on grounds that Fox had consistently lied that the company committed election fraud in favor of President Biden in the 2020 presidential election. The main peddlers of these lies, senior Fox commentators like Hannity, Carlson and Ingraham, knew such claims to be false, and still ran them as if they were proven fact. Amazingly, this subterfuge was exposed by none other than billionaire media mogul and owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, who testified, under oath, during the $1.6 billion defamation case filed by Dominion, that Fox News did indeed run falsehoods about the election being stolen from Trump, The Big Lie.

Greene has also proposed a “national divorce” that would separate the country by Red states and Blue states. She tweeted, “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by Red states and Blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrats’ Traitorous America Last policies, we are done”.

I have already written about the Woke culture, an ideology of social justice, compassion and kindness practiced in every other developed nation in the world. The fact that Greene describes it as “the sick and disgusting woke culture” only proves what a sick and disgusting woman she is. As if such proof was needed in the first place. After call, this is the same nutjob who wanted Speaker Pelosi executed for treason because of her opposition to Trump’s border wall, who said that California’s forest fires were caused by Jews firing lasers from outer space. And who, God help us, is thought to be eyeing the Vice Presidency to Trump in 2024.

According to Greene, Red and Blue states have reached the point of irreconcilable differences, the most common reason cited for personal divorces in the USA. However, she does not seem to understand that states are not individual persons. Red states and Blue states would be impossible to be defined as all states have a mix of Republicans, Democrats and Independents whose numbers keep changing by the day, the essence of a democracy.

For example, Georgia, the state from which Greene hails, which she defines as a Red state, is represented by a Republican Governor, two Democratic Senators and was won by Biden in the 2020 presidential election. There are many states similarly and diversely represented which vary in their choice of representatives at different election cycles. There is no way that any state could be “divorced” as ridiculously envisaged by Greene.

The fact is that Greene’s irresponsible and unachievable call has been bandied around not with any hope of success, but to cause dissension among gullible Republicans, and pave the way for yet another round of fundraising for “election campaigns”.

As Murdoch cynically testified last week at the Dominion defamation case, these preposterous theories continued to be aired by Fox News is a ruse only to maintain the interest of its viewership. They had nothing to do with Blue or Red states, or any element of fact. For Fox, nothing is ever about Red or Blue, everything is about Green – as in money.

There is a precedent for a call for such a “divorce” in the nation’s history. A call which took a civil war to settle. But the states involved in that civil war did have one irreconcilable difference, over the power of the Federal Government to prohibit slavery in territories that had not as yet become states. These seven states, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, were later joined by Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, formed the Confederacy, and seceded from the Federal Government. The main reason for these differences was based upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition”.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Confederate States and laid the groundwork for eventual freedom of all slaves across the country. After four years of bloody conflict, the United States defeated the Confederate States in 1865, and the states in rebellion were readmitted to the Federation. In his Gettysburg address, Lincoln concluded, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”.

Unfortunately, the groundwork for “the new birth of freedom” of slaves have taken over 100 years in the making, wading through decades of snail-like progress of Reconstruction and the segregation of Jim Crow laws. Legal freedom of all races was finally established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a full century after the Emancipation Proclamation. However, the endemic existence of racism in the country today is evidence that true freedom is yet not available to all citizens, especially to those descendants of slaves.

Freedom, as defined by Merriam Webster, is “the quality or state of being free, such as: the absence of necessity, coercion, constraint in choice of action; liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another; independence”.

Years of examples of violence, including murders against blacks, both by Law Enforcement and white supremacists, right up to the present day, provide ample evidence that minorities of color, especially African Americans, have been targeted for “special treatment” by white people. This does not represent liberation from slavery. This is not restraint from the power of another. This is not freedom. This is the very antithesis of freedom.

The grounds for divorce (secession) demanded by white supremacists of the Republican Party and Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2023 are exactly the same as those demanded for secession by Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy in the 1860s: that “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition” holds true and unshaken in the minds of these neo-Nazis.

So we are back to Square One. There are grounds, if not for divorce, but for some sort of polarization which will separate white supremacists and their fellow travelers from the vast majority of decent Americans of diverse colors and creeds. Those who understand and have come to terms with our history, who recognize and accept where we are today, and have the courage and the determination to move towards a just and equitable society for our children.