Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

All of our local MAGA GOP leaders are using their Project 2025 plan to end our freedom to live in a democracy. I’ll be borrowing extensively from Thom Hartmann’s column: “America’s Darkest Hour: Battling the Second Great Insurrection.”

The local MAGA GOP model being used to end our freedom to live in a democracy begins with a historical review of the south from 1820 to 1865. The expensive cotton gin began being used by the wealthiest plantation owners, which replaced the work of 50 enslaved people. These southern oligarchs colluded on price-fixing to bankrupt and then buy out small farms and plantations for pennies on the dollar as most could not afford to buy a hand made cotton gin.

By the 1840s, a handful of fabulously wealthy families had seized complete control of the economic and political systems of each state in the Old South. These oligarchs brooked no opposition: White men who dared run or vote against them in elections were often assassinated or lynched; newspapers were seized and handed over to oligarchs friendly to the plantation owners; elections became a mere charade. They even monitored the mail: If you wrote a letter to a friend complaining about the end of democracy you’d find yourself in prison or hanged from a tree.

Democracy in the South, by the 1850s, was completely dead. The Confederacy had become a police state. And then they reached out to try to end that pesky remnant of democracy in the North, as well.

This is the model that today’s local MAGA GOP, the reinvented Confederacy, is using to replace modern American democracy.

Reagan’s massive tax cuts (and Bush’s and Trump’s) had the same oligarch-producing impact as the cotton gin; before Reagan, billionaires were virtually unknown and few wealthy people were politically active. Today, the oligarchs own Congress (Citizen’s United case making bribery of Congress legal), our social-and news-media, and the Supreme Court.

All of the democracy loving people in America must finally realize that the MAGA GOP is no longer interested in policy or politics but solely wants to seize absolute political and economic power to end our democracy and reinvent the confederacy.

Until then, as we try to debate “issues,” we’re engaging in meaningless political theater. Instead, we must identify, ostracize, and politically and legally crush this growing and violent insurrection against America and her traditional ideals.

Please have a look at a guide to MAGA GOP Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda for the next MAGA GOP administration. This guide will show in great detail how the MAGA GOP will roll back civil rights and destroy the federal government. (mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/guide-project 2025)

Ted Hinnenkamp
Albert Lea