Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, has been on something of a roll lately. Last week, he announced to the world that Real America was done with COVID-19. It was a fairly premature declaration given that the areas of the country Jordan likely considers to be "Real America" have far higher COVID death rates than parts he'd likely consider "Not Real America."
On Sunday, he made an appearance on Sebastian Gorka's Newsmax TV show (this is a thing) to talk about what a horrific existential threat the Left is, suggesting that perhaps they may have to kill us all in a brutal war of some kind.
Gorka started things off by kicking it old school and whining about Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals, the very existence of which he and Jordan agreed is solid proof that today's Democratic Party is "not your parents' Democrat Party."
Rules For Radicals was published in 1971, which would actually make it proof, I suppose, that today's Democratic Party is in fact, many people's parents' Democratic Party. Gorka also named Alinsky as the most important of these modern Democratic radicals, which is odd considering he has been quite dead since 1972, the year after the book was published.
Gorka initially tried to use the book to get Jordan to talk about the ways in which the Left had done Rule 12 to him — "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." It seems pretty obvious that Gorka was talking about the myriad accusations that Jordan ignored complaints of sexual abuse when he was assistant coach of Ohio State University's wrestling team from 1987 to 1995. Alas, Jordan did not seem too keen on talking about that for some reason.
Rather, Jordan pivoted to how incredibly radical the Left is now, erroneously claiming that everyone in the Democratic Party supports defunding the police — possibly getting rid of the police entirely! — and having completely open borders, which he claims we have right now at this very moment. At some point he brought up critical race theory. It is very clear he has no idea what defunding the police or critical race theory entail, he just knows they sound scary.
This was the best he could come up with, because it would probably be less frightening to talk about what Democrats are actually trying to do in Congress right now. Try saying "They're going to let Medicare negotiate prices with drug companies so seniors don't have to pay ridiculously high prices for their medications! WoooOOOOoooOOO!" in your spookiest voice. Still not very threatening!
Even the kind of "radical" proposals centrist Democrats shy away from are hard to make sound scary. Like "MUAHAHAHA! They're going to cancel your student loan debt! And you'll never pay $1,500 for an ambulance ride again!"
But he needed to make things sound as frightening as possible, because what came next was a highly disturbing monologue about how every third generation, Americans are called upon to "do something big" — citing the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II.
JORDAN: Every third generation in this country has had to do something big. You think about the Founders and what they did when they declared why we're going to be an independent country, what they had to overcome, the greatest military in the world. They did it.
Three generations later, Lincoln and the Americans then held the country together, got rid of the evil of slavery. Three generations later, we defeated imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, the evils that those two countries represented and the greatest generation won that war.
Here we are three generations later and the assault is from the radical Left. We have to step forward and do our part like previous generations of Americans have done. I think we're up to the task."
Jim Jordan, by the way, was one of the 120 Republicans in Congress who voted against removing Confederate statues from the Capitol building.
The grotesque absurdity of these statements aside, it's worth noting that he's talking about wars here. Were conservatives to "step forward and do [their] part like previous generations," it would involve killing us. "Us" being the actual majority of Americans, whether he considers us to be Real Americans or not.
This isn't just Jim Jordan being an asshole, this is arguably stochastic terrorism. The January 6 insurrection happened because of rhetoric like this, because these people keep getting told by those with authority and power that they have not just the right but the obligation to use violence to get their own way. People like Jordan say these things because it makes their base feel excited and empowered and important and more likely to vote for them. It also makes them more likely to go to prison.
The fact is, if Jim Jordan gave half a shit about "Real America" he'd tell them to get vaccinated and remind them that it is not actually legal for them to try to overthrow the government or murder people who disagree with them. He doesn't. He doesn't care if they die from COVID or wind up in prison so long as they vote for him before they do it.
Call me a radical, but I don't think that someone who thinks it would be swell to murder half of the country ought to be in Congress. It would be nice if we had a higher bar than that. Apparently we don't.
[Newsmax]
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Robyn Pennacchia is a brilliant, fabulously talented and visually stunning angel of a human being, who shrugged off what she is pretty sure would have been a Tony Award-winning career in musical theater in order to write about stuff on the internet. Follow her on Twitter at @RobynElyse
