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Deja Vu: MAGA Republicans are intent on sabotaging the U.S. economy (again) in a desperate attempt at achieving power. It’s the Capitol siege (Jan. 6) by another angle. They know they can’t win in the ’24 election, especially now after Roe and the epidemic gun violence, and could very well lose every branch of federal government, which would open the door to a Democratic agenda of continued progress and possibly ensure the GOP’s practical extinction. They have to gamble and make their move; it’s now or never. They know the programs and improvements initiated by the Democrats and the Biden administration will come to be recognized by Americans and they’ll be intent on continuing this progress.

Right now about a third of the electorate are MAGA-leaning Republicans, a third liberal/progressives and a third aren’t paying much attention to politics at all or are cynical opportunists that can go either way. The MAGA Republicans are depending on this latter group to react simply and superficially in blaming government in general for failing to come to a budget agreement, which they will deliberately orchestrate. Just as the Republicans were not really serious about spending cuts being tied to the debt limit — this was just their cover — their real objective was, and is again now, to disrupt, to sabotage the economy, buy time, stall the progress now being made and use the chaos to devise a targeted distractive strategy of disinformation, using conspiracy theories, blame and scapegoating to promote fear and bigotry directed toward immigrants, Chinese, trans, “deep state,” “socialists” and “culture corrupters”; all this to further undermine confidence in the “system” — government and democracy — and hope this will help create an environment where enough people will look to some authority — a strong man to take control and “fix” things — reenter Trump.

What has changed since the debt crisis — where (ironically) a default was averted because of the timidity and cowardice of enough opportunistic career Republican Congressmen (from swing districts) whose personal ambitions outweighed interest in the radical extremist MAGA “cause” — is that, with the republican house being whipped into line to unanimously support a full-MAGA speaker in Johnson, it’s now ready once again to try to sabotage the government, but this time with more unity.

Just as with the MAGA debt strategy, this budget fight and looming shutdown is an assault on democracy in general — a seditious proto-fascist agenda — and a clear and present danger.

Mike Kelly
Albert Lea