The GOP just suffered an absolutely painful, humiliating, and entirely self-inflicted national loss at every level. You’d think that would be grounds for introspection and thoughtful change, right?
Nope! They’re doubling right the fuck down. That’s why the Grand Old Party has now elected failed coach and current US Rep. Jim Jordan (Q-Anon) as its House minority leader!
Jim beat out Steve Scalise (R-Nazi) as the next party leader, so I guess the GOP does have a bottom after all, although it’s probably less the whole “David Duke without the baggage” part and more due to some flavor of stupid bullshit infighting, because, well, you know!
But Jim Jordan still sucks on ice. He sucks so bad! Let me count the ways he sucks!
As a wrestling coach at Ohio State, Jordan infamously turned a blind eye to former team doctor Richard Strauss sexually abusing young student-athletes for many years. “There was no truth to the fact that I knew of any abuse,” Jordan said in July 2018 during a press appearance in central Ohio. “I’ve talked to other coaches, they didn’t know about any abuse. It’s just not accurate to say those things, that we know of it and didn’t report it. It’s just not true.” (Ohio State University settled with 296 survivors who sued the university for more than $60 million; Strauss died by suicide in 2005.)
Counterpoint: All these athletes and referees say YUH HUH, and Jim Jordan is A LIAR.He’s an anti-science conspiracy theorist who hates Americans so much that he shitposted about how vaccine mandates are “un-American,” whatever the fuck that means, in 2021, as those of us working in the fact-checking sector were trying frantically to debunk the harmful and weaponized narratives that were killing people by the thousands, including many of my childhood friends, so thanks a fucking lot for contributing to that, you old bitch!
He’s an anti-democracy conspiracy theorist who hates Americans so much that he supported the attack against the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, when a big crowd made up mostly of smelly, unhygienic, woman-hating child molesters tried to overturn democracy because they were having a fit about Joe Biden getting sworn in as US President. Remember that? When they straight up murdered five people, and then smeared shit on the walls? Anyway, Jim was a biiiiiig supporter of that mess. Still is! Jordan was also subpoenaed in 2021 by the House committee investigating the attack, which identified him as a “significant player” in the protracted (one might say ongoing) attempt to overturn the election.
He was the first chair of the Fascist Caucus, I mean the House Freedom Caucus, a far-right conspiracist group that is basically a more racist Tea Party.
But it’s not just that. As JustSecurity says in a timeline of Jordan’s disinformation efforts, his efforts to advance narratives using broadcast and social media have been extraordinary.
He is a frequent guest on Fox News, as well as Newsmax and OAN, and advanced false claims about the election on all three networks. Of the 147 Republican members of Congress who opposed the certification of the election, Jordan was “the most prolific Fox guest,” according to an analysis by Media Matters, a non-profit organization that monitors conservative misinformation. He fielded close to 10% of all appearances by those GOP members since January 6. And while Jordan lost nearly 150,000 Twitter followers in a post-January 6 purge of accounts associated with the QAnon conspiracy, the most of any Republican lawmaker, he retains more than 2 million followers. Many of his tweets have been shared more than 10,000 times and liked over 50,000 times.
Anyway, that’s who the Republican Party chose to lead them in their time of sudden crisis, which suggests that not only do they hate democracy and despise the American people, making them anti-American, they also are going into a panic at the prospect of being held accountable by the democratic systems they tried to destroy.
So who’s “un-American” now?
Rather than the blatant racism, I think Scalise's most obvious bar to being selected into leadership by his party is that he's not sex-pesty-and-molesty enough to hang with the big playahs of the current maladministration.
Somewhere in hell Jesse Helms manages to smile in spite of the heat.