Steve Lynch — the Republican candidate for Northampton, Pennsylvania’s County Executive — describes himself as a fighter for “freedom” and democracy. But he has a strange notion of democracy, at least when it comes to the issue of mask mandates.
At a self-described “freedom rally,” last Sunday, alongside dozens of fellow so-called “patriots,” some of them armed, with t-shirts reading “Will Work for Ammo” and “White Lives Matter,” Lynch suggested that if democratically elected school boards do something you really, really dislike — in this case, mandating masks for school staff and children — you don’t need to wait to vote them out of office.
Nope, you can just gather together a bunch of tough guys and both figuratively and literally remove those insolent school board members from their offices. As in, literally carrying them out the door.
“i’m going in with twenty strong men,” he told rally-goers.
I’m going to speak in front of the school board and I’m going to give them an option — they can leave or they can be removed.
Lynch is evidently still recruiting his gang of twenty.
“Men where are you?” he asked the crowd.
Men wake up smell the coffee. Let’s go make men great again, right, make men men again. Let’s go men, I need you.
That’s the worst cover version of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World” I’ve ever heard.
Anyone “not standing up with us,” he proclaimed, deserves, at a minimum, to rot in jail — “and [at] a maximum should be tried for treason and we all know what treason is.”
Since the penalty for high treason is a death sentence, he’s suggesting that a good portion of his opponents deserve to be killed. For making kids wear masks to protect them and others from a fucking plague.
You can see his whole speech, and other, er, highlights from the rally here. I’ve cued it up to the start of the “man man man” portion of his speech but you may want to watch the rest of it as well, because these people are scary as fuck.
Is this what the end of democracy in America looks like?
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@Scildfreja: OK, that is just blood-fizzingly rage inducing. And it shows us exactly how these “Pro-Lifers” think. Ugh.
@Victorious Parasol: Aw… My condolences. How old was your cat?
@Victorious Parasol
I’m so very sorry. Your cat was part of your family, and now he’s suddenly gone. It’s a very sad situation. My girl cat died, more than a year ago, at the vet’s office. While we waited for the vet to show up, I was crying so much that tears came to the vet tech’s eyes. Your cat will live forever in your heart. All best wishes to you, your husband, and your other animals during this time of mourning.
Thank you, everybody.
He was 16 – we’d had him since he was about 6 months old. He was a rescue cat found in an alley around Christmas time, and my husband was getting cat food when he saw this fluffy black kitten in an adoption cubicle, suckling on a corner of the carpet square they’d given him to lie on. Mr. Parasol called me from the store: “There’s a kitten here. He looks just like [the cat we’d had to say goodbye to earlier that year].”
Me: (very resigned voice) “Is he cute?”
Mr. Parasol: “Yes.”
And that’s how he joined our family.
Adding a bit to my last comment – when I said “adoption cubicle” I meant “in the area the pet store designated for various rescue groups to bring animals for customers to adopt.”
@VP Very sorry about your pet.
@Victorious Parasol, Oh, I’m so sorry <3 the poor thing. I hope that looking back at the wonderful 16 years you gave them is consoling, or will be soon, at least. You gave them someplace safe and happy, right to the end. That’s not nothing.
@Alan, yeah, I clued into that immediately, and it’s stark reminder that the punishment is the point. They gleefully pursue cruelty to others, and will be selectively blind to the actual consequences along the way. Leading to…
@Some Chick, the do hate freedom! They claim to love it, but when they say that they love freedom, what they mean is that they love having power over others. That’s how I see it at least. They love seeing people squashed by the boot of authority, and if it’s an especially big boot they don’t even mind if they get a little bit of the steppies, so long as their hated foe is getting the worst of it.
I’m quite glad the subreddit got nuked, @Neqam, thanks for pointing it out! But the conversations exactly like this one are happening all over Texas right now and it’s awful.
Conservatives firmly believe that everyone has equal rights, by which they mean “I have the right right to do whatever I want, and you too have the right to do whatever I want.”
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes
They do want power over others. I’ve been watching a lot of videos by someone going by Schrodinger’s Cat and they like to cover sovcit and “first amendment auditors”. You can see how goading, put downs and more are the whole point. Getting to act dominant.
Lots of useful patterns to note. Trigger Warnings for police aggression. I can’t say the videos don’t have problems.
https://youtube.com/c/SchrodingersCatlive
@Victorious Parasol
My condolences
@Victorious Parasol
I’m sorry for your loss.
The youtube channel I posted is very ableist. I’m working on something for that along the lines of the feature of ignorance and incompetence in proper identification of reasoning and logic and other problems), via pejorative language used to abuse a range of people with many mental characteristics. The language is a little awkward.
It’s in addition to doing it because it hurts people who have been abused because a self interest angle helps. Incompetence and ignorance are supposed to feel bad once identified, and while those word gets abused too they has the benefit of accuracy. You can actually engage with features.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/oh-my-fucking-god-get-the-fucking-vaccine-already-you-fucking-fucks
Cathartic. (and obviously NSFW)
@VP: I’m so sorry. We lost an old kitty (adopted the same way) recently too. Big hugs.
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes,
If it makes you feel better, a hotline that the Texas Right to Life organization set up to receive anonymous tips to report violators has been getting trolled big time by activists.
https://www.chron.com/politics/article/Texas-Right-to-Life-abortion-anonymous-tip-troll-16431881.php
Victorious Parasol,
I’m so sorry about your kitty.
It seems like there’s a lot of pet loss going around lately. I hate it.
If it’ll cheer anyone up, Kitten Academy has 2 brand new litters of rescue kittens. A batch of 2 week olds and a batch of 2 day olds.
@GSS ex-noob
I’m sorry to hear that you also lost your cat recently. Animals bring so much life to a household, and you get very used to having them around. It’s a sorrowful situation. All the best to you.
@Brony, I’ll give them a listen when I have the time. Thank you! And thanks on the warning for the more problematic elements in there.
@Redsilkphoenix, yes, I’ve been seeing that and it’s great. I’ve also seen the efforts of the Satanic Church, which makes me giggle with amusement. They consider the right to abortion a sincerely held belief, so are preparing to set the state in a bind on whether that can be used. If the fundies in Texas are taken down by The Satanic Church, of all things, I’m going to die of laughter.
@ Vicky P
Oh, my heart goes out to you and your much loved fur friend.
Mr. Parasol and I are kinda stumbling through the weekend. We took our kitty to our vet yesterday morning – they arranged for his cremation. He’d been a patient of theirs since his kitten days. I called the family after we got back because Mr. Parasol’s parents had considered him one of their grandcats.
Our two remaining cats know the household has been disrupted, and they know Other Cat is not here. He’d been a big brother to them when they came to live with us, so they’ve known him since they were 3 months old.
I keep stuttering on the things I used to do for him. “Time to feed–no, he’s not here.” Or “Time to give him his meds–no, he’s not here.” Yesterday Mr. Parasol saw one of our other cats and called him by the wrong name, very cheerfully, because he happened to be lying down in a favorite spot.
At least we’ve got a 3-day weekend to get through it.
“Lynch”. Appropriate name.