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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Also, Texas has openly declared itself the Republic of Gilead by passing the 6-week Fetal heart anti-abortion nonsense (and the Supreme court has rubber stamped it, seemingly)
This sort of thing only has a realistic chance of having an effect in the short run because school boards don’t normally have armed security guards. If it ever becomes a real tactic, however…
@Fishy Goat: The Supreme Court hasn’t rubber-stamped it, they just refused to block it until the legal battles have been resolved. This means that it could easily be in effect for anywhere from a few months to a few years even if it’s eventually overturned.
Sounds pretty fashy to me.
Narrator: He did not, in fact, know what treason is.
‘Democracy’==’good’
‘twenty strong men doing what I want’==’good’
Therefore: ‘Democracy’==’twenty strong men doing what I want’
Gaston intensifies.
Steve, you can do what you like with 20 strong men, just not in public and not bothering the rest of us.
Seriously, how is it that these chuckleheads always sound like the gayest of gay porn, so much that Tom of Finland would have thought it a bit much?
@Snowberry:
But who will want to serve on a school board if it means constant threats of violence? You don’t have armed security 24×7, unless you’re armed yourself. Many decent people will decide that serving is not worth the risk, leaving those posts to be filled by Trumpists. This is the goal, all over the country.
Well, at least their ambitions have scaled down over the past eight months, from the United States Congress to some random school board in Bumtrumpet, Pennsylvania …
Snowberry: SCOTUS rubber-stamped it.
An abortion ban obviously affects people immediately beyond just money, so it’s ripe for an immediate injunction before the courts get through the arguments pro and con.
That’s what’s always happened up to now; even much milder abortion bans were not enforced until due process could go through, and due process would shoot the ban down or severely limit it.
SCOTUS just ignored precedent entirely. As they have been doing lately.
The real question is: ok, so the reactionaries will bring out 20 strong men, but are they a match for 30-50 feral pigs?
Since the US Constitution is explicitly anti-democratic*, the answer here is: no, because this place never was a democracy to start with.
*See the reasons for the Senate, the Electoral College, limiting even that limited franchise to wealthy white men, etc.
If this guy were actually a strong man himself, he wouldn’t bother with warning the school board and he wouldn’t ask for help with his mission. He’d just barge in on the next school board meeting and drag those board members out all by himself. Sure, I enjoy Tough Guy Theater as much as the next person. But it’s only make-believe.
The name writes itself: Steve Lynch Mob.
Unrelated, but was just grossed out by some official Alberta announcement from our Fair and Beautiful government. I just had to see it, so you have to, too! Please, enjoy the mindspace of our f’n representatives here.
I can practically hear them asking about hip diameter from here. And checking teeth. Heugh.
@ Surplus
Don’t be so sure this represents a reduction in ambition. School board elections have been weaponized by the GOP over the last 15-20 years. It’s how we’ve got religion creeping into the public school system. It’s how we’ve seen lunch programs reduced because “you don’t want to spoil kids by giving them free food.” It’s how we’ve seen abstinence-based sex “education” take hold.
These are small local elections, which means it’s a great way to slip under the radar and through the kind of protections/attention that exist for larger state and federal elections.
HHHHHHH
Who wants to be angry with me? You all?
https://twitter.com/kendallybrown/status/1433588701385400327
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-UhU2OWYAACOz3?format=jpg
I can’t even with this world anymore. Literally cannot even.
@ scildfreja
I’ll join in your anger. But it’s also eyeroll inducing. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that such a person isn’t the sharpest tool in the box. But the irony is that, the law doesn’t apply to people getting a termination, only people who assist. So in this case he couldn’t get the bounty on the woman, but someone could sue him for driving her to the clinic.
It’s going to take another civil war to fix all this, isn’t it?
These people really hate freedom. And everyone else. And possibly themselves. But definitely freedom. Gawd, i hate these idiots.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the world’s various liberal/conservative political party pairs are not really opposed to one another. The Dems bending over backwards to accommodate Republican demands in the name of “bipartisanship”, even when they have majorities in both chambers and have the WH, proves it in the case of the United States, as does the continued presence of “spoilers” like Manchin and Sinema who make sure the interests of capital still get served. Our own Justin Trudeau basically handing Parliament over to the Tories on a silver platter when he could have served out at least two more years as Prime Minister first must be part of some similar under-the-table arrangement.
It seems like such pairs basically just play “good cop/bad cop” with entire national populations. The “good cop” talks nicer and throws, or at least promises to throw, non-wealthy-white-cishet-male citizens a bone now and again, while the “bad cop” threatens and glowers and offers nothing nice to anyone who isn’t on some Forbes short list or other, but they’re really both on the same side, and that is the side of the billionaires.
(To the top 20% by income, the landowning suburbanites hoarding the few remaining white collar jobs, the roles are reversed: the further-right of the two parties is the “good cop” who will keep land prices up and taxes on the middle class down, while the more centrist party is the “bad cop” who threatens to raise taxes and damage property values.)
What can be done to alter this dynamic and get a party into the mainstream in each country that really, actually represents the bulk of the people, rather than the wealthiest 20% or less?
Got to make sure She is pristine condition,the corporations are paying top dollar for her
@Scildfreja: the subreddit that came from was swiftly nuked, even if it’s just the people who run Reddit worried about spoiling their IPO.
OT/CW: Loss of pet.
@surplus
Being thrown the occasional bone can mean the difference between survival and starvation.
White trash