DID THEY REALLY JUST DO IT ALL AGAIN

Republican greed is fueling American gun violence



We have a gun violence problem in the United States and one of the pieces to this destructive equation is Republican greed.

There were 10 mass shootings across the United States last week in which three were high profile.

Over the Easter weekend, nine teens were shot and two were killed while attending a party with over 200 people in attendance at an AirBnB in Pittsburgh. No suspects are in custody.


There was also a shooting at a mall in Columbia, South Carolina where 12 people were injured. And finally, the mass shooting in New York City orchestrated by 62 year old Frank James victimized nearly two dozen people who were riding the subway where the assault took place.

The interesting thing is, when you research rising gun violence in America, there’s ample data on how many shootings occur but not much discussion on the why.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to identify some key factors fueling the surge, such as: a growing mental health crisis with inadequate resources, inflation and rising costs of living pushing people to the brink of despair, and inflamed racial tension. It’s truly a public health crisis.


But I’m here to tell you another “why” lie in politics. 

Republicans continue to block gun reform legislation

After the shooting in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams said gun violence isn’t a red or blue state issue, it’s a national issue–which is true. This year alone we’ve seen a total of 139 mass shootings, a 66% increase since 2019.

However, with red states leading with higher murder rates and Republicans blocking meaningful gun reform, we certainly have right-wing politicians to point a finger at in why we can’t get a grip on this problem. Just follow the money and power.


These elected officials sit in their ivory towers and watch the turmoil amongst us peasants play out all while lining their pockets with dollars from gun lobbyists for the National Rifle Association.

According to The Brady Campaign, 50 Senators have received campaign donations from the NRA. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell alone has collected more than $1.2 million dollars from them over the course of his career and has a lengthy resume of blocking weapons reform. When Democrats called for legislative action after 2019 shootings in El Paso and Dayton, McConnell called for prayer.

Recently, Georgia Governor, Brian Kemp, signed off on a bill allowing people to carry guns in public without a concealed carry permit. The NRA spent over four million dollars in 2020 runoff races to make that happen.

American gun violence won’t end as long as Republicans keep getting their way

And finally, in President Biden’s recently announced effort to crack down on the manufacturing of ghost guns, the GOP is already planning a counterattack. 

Republicans blame Democrats for rising crime but they’re to blame for rising gun violence. Overprotectiveness of the “right to bear arms” isn’t rooted in freedom–it’s rooted in greed and currently supersedes other people’s right to live in peace.

So at what point do we consider changing the laws? Perhaps it will be when these politicians fall from their ivory towers and are faced with the same dangers as the average American. But for now, money and power make legislation go round and gun violence will remain at the top of our public health crises list.

In response to the letter to the editor, “It’s no joke is a joke,” Nov. 14, page C4, anyone with half a brain can google the question, “what is in the infrastructure package” and they will find a complete breakdown of exactly where money is going.  To say that “liberals” don’t understand the “reality of the infrastructure legislation” is ridiculous.

All of the country is in dire need of fixing and even some Republicans agree.

Yes, the border issue is quite serious and Donald Trump’s answer to solving the problem was building a stupid wall that cost taxpayers a fortune.  Remember, “Mexico will pay for?”  It is a serious problem that needs to be resolved by collaboration from each party.  Getting out of Afghanistan definitely could have been done better, but the bottom line is we are out of a place we never should have gone to in the first place.  So kudos to President Biden for getting us out.

There is no such thing as Critical Race teaching in any of our public schools and in fact is a college course taught at Harvard.  Biden walked into a pandemic, dealing with Republicans who continue to believe a lie and who have lost their moral compass.  The letter writer is correct and saying this is “no joke”.  It is “NO Joke” that we have a Republican party so immersed in greed and hatred that they have no policies to present and seem to only care about what is in it for themselves.


As an Independent who left the party of greed, I take umbrage at the comments made in that article.  They are not fact-based but sound more like “Fox News based” comments.


Marilyn Gentile, Agawam

The GOP is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.
By George Packer

Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.
I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison. Those abuses are nonpartisan and always with us. So is vote theft of the kind we’ve just seen in North Carolina—after all, the alleged fraudster employed by the Republican candidate for Congress hired himself out to Democrats in 2010.

And I don’t just mean that the Republican Party is led by the boss of a kleptocratic family business who presides over a scandal-ridden administration, that many of his closest advisers are facing prison time, that Donald Trump himself might have to stay in office just to avoid prosecution, that he could be exposed by the special counsel and the incoming House majority as the most corrupt president in American history. Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. It played by the rules.
The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake—the foam is scummy with self-dealing—but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.
Charles J. Sykes: Wisconsin Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot

Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.



The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.
Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change—longer than in progressives’ dreams—but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.
Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.

writers.Browse Newsletters
Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders—Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others—were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth.
David Frum: The Republican Party moves beyond hypocrisy
The first insurgency was the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. He campaigned as a rebel against the postwar American consensus and the soft middle of his own party’s leadership. Goldwater didn’t use the standard, reassuring lexicon of the big tent and the mainstream. At the San Francisco convention, he embraced extremism and denounced the Republican establishment, whose “moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” His campaign lit a fire of excitement that spread to millions of readers through the pages of two self-published prophesies of the apocalypse, Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo and John A. Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason. According to these mega-sellers, the political opposition wasn’t just wrong—it was a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals.
William F. Buckley—the movement’s Max Eastman, its most brilliant pamphleteer—predicted Goldwater’s landslide defeat. His candidacy, like the revolution of 1905, had come too soon, but it foretold the victory to come. At a Young Americans for Freedom convention, Buckley exhorted an audience of true-believing cadres to think beyond November: “Presuppose that the fiery little body of dissenters, of which you are a shining meteor, suddenly spun off no less than a majority of all the American people, who suddenly overcome a generation’s entrenched lassitude, suddenly penetrated to the true meaning of freedom in society where the truth is occluded by the verbose mystification of thousands of scholars, tens of thousands of books, a million miles of newsprint.” Then Goldwater’s inevitable defeat would turn into “the well planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future, if there is a future.”
The insurgents were agents of history, and history was long. To avoid despair, they needed the clarity that only ideology (“the truth”) can give. The task in 1964 was to recruit and train conservative followers. Then established institutions that concealed the truth—schools, universities, newspapers, the Republican Party itself—would have to be swept away and replaced or entered and cleansed. Eventually Buckley imagined an electoral majority; but these were not the words and ideas of democratic politics, with its ungainly coalitions and unsatisfying compromises.
During this first insurgency, the abiding contours of the movement took shape. One feature—detailed in Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein’s account of the origins of the New Right—was liberals’ inability to see, let alone take seriously enough to understand, what was happening around the country. For their part, conservatives nursed a victim’s sense of grievance—the system was stacked against them, cabals of the powerful were determined to lock them out—and they showed more energetic interest than their opponents in the means of gaining power: mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas. Finally, the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights. Even Buckley once defended Jim Crow with the claim that black Americans were too “backward” for self-government. Eventually he changed his views, but modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.
Peter Beinart: Why Trump supporters believe he is not corrupt
It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the movement and party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their treacherous liberalism, and building alternatives, in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this “counter-establishment” (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the subject) were ready to take power.
Reagan commanded a revolution, but he himself didn’t have a revolutionary character. He didn’t think the public needed to be indoctrinated and organized, only heard.
But conservatism remained an insurgent politics during the 1980s and ’90s, and the more power it amassed—in government, business, law, media—the more it set itself against the fragile web of established norms and delighted in breaking them. The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich, who had come to Congress two years before Reagan became president, with the avowed aim of overthrowing the established Republican leadership and shaping the minority party into a fighting force that could break Democratic rule by shattering what he called the “corrupt left-wing machine.” Gingrich liked to quote Mao’s definition of politics as “war without blood.” He made audiotapes that taught Republican candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as “disgrace,” “betray,” and  “traitors.” When he became speaker of the House, at the head of yet another revolution, Gingrich announced, “There will be no compromise.” How could there be, when he was leading a crusade to save American civilization from its liberal enemies?
Even after Gingrich was driven from power, the victim of his own guillotine, he regularly churned out books that warned of imminent doom—unless America turned to a leader like him (he once called himself “teacher of the rules of civilization,” among other exalted epithets). Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.
Tom Nichols: Why I’m leaving the Republican party
The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative—from Goldwater (who, in 1996, joked that he had become a Republican liberal) to Ted Cruz, from Buckley to Dinesh D’Souza. Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.
The third insurgency came in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—it was the Tea Party. Eight years later, it culminated in Trump’s victory, an insurgency within the party itself—because revolutions tend to be self-devouring (“I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals,” Gingrich declared in 1998 when he quit the House). In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes. Once again, liberals failed to see it coming and couldn’t grasp how it happened. Neither could some conservatives who still believed in democracy.
The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”
As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party:

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Shelley Lewis. Villard Books, $10.95 (212pp) ISBN 978-0-8129-7691-5

No need to avert your eyes-there's no photos of Karl Rove's bare ass here, but there are plenty of swift kicks to it. Uninhibited and unapologetic, the co-creator of liberal talk-radio network Air America unleashes a barrage of scorn-from grave accusations of high crime to ultra-personal mudslinging-on a rogue's gallery of Republicans, selected from the crop currently in power and the Contract with America revolutionaries of the 1990s. Short profiles of more than 50 Republicans, broken down into categories such as ""The Wackos,"" ""The Weasels"" and ""The Warmongers,"" feature a conversational roundup of offenses that reads much like partisan talk radio sounds: loud, jokey and very self-assured. For that reason, Lewis is at her best when she's at her nastiest, as in her expose of the entire Bush family: ""In no time Barbara was spawning a series of barely literate offspring who, tragically, would become leaders with actual responsibilities."" Lewis isn't looking to make a sophisticated case, but rather to condense much of what her audience already knows (or suspects) into a handy reference book, and she succeeds, backed by plenty of references to government reports, the mainstream media and independent watchdog groups. Though the jokes can get thin, and interludes into the trickier and stranger aspects of the Republican elite-like a breakdown of the Jack Abramoff scandal and steamy excerpts from the novels of Lewis ""Scooter"" Libby, Newt Gingrich and Lynne Cheney-are much too brief, this makes a fine primer for the angry Left-winger.