The Texas Republican Party will have a new party platform soon, thanks to a convention that saw over 5,000 delegates show up to boo the archconservative Republican Sen. John Cornyn while otherwise ironing out just how devoted to seditious conspiracy the party wants to be. Cornyn was booed for working on a "bipartisan" proposal to modestly tighten some gun rules so that Americans who have a history of violence or making threats of violence can't get one, aka "red flag" laws—a negotiation Cornyn almost certainly intended as a do-nothing feint to begin with, something to be scuttled again after the Uvalde mass murders have been forgotten.
Cornyn wasn't the only one to receive a hostile reception. The far-right Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw and his staff were physically assaulted by a crowd calling him "Eyepatch McCain"—a Tucker Carlson-produced insult, in case you needed further evidence of Tucker's role in far-right violence. A crowd member demanded that he "be hung for treason!" The exact impetus for the assault remains unclear, but seems to include anger at the same "red flag" laws that riled the crowd against Cornyn.
A pseudo-militia organization premised on violent street assaults is very worked up about proposed changes to bar known-violent freaks from owning guns, you say? Well, it does match the conservative reflex of only giving a damn about topics that specifically affect them.
But the new Texas Republican Party platform? Oh, it's quite a work. The state party will go into the midterms with an official declaration that President Joe Biden is not the legitimate President of the United States.
"We reject the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States," says the Texas Republican Party.
Congratulations, Texas Republicans. You're officially a seditious conspiracy cult.
But the new Texas Republican platform, as reported by The Texas Tribune, is more than the bleatings of an especially active cult. The party produced a document fully in tune with its fascist base; declaring non-allegiance to the elected leader of the United States is only the capper in a Texas Republican platform riddled with conspiracy and brazenly fascist rhetoric.
The party again asserts that Texas has a right to secede from the United States, because of course it does. It also demands a new Constitutional convention to rewrite the founding documents of the nation it demands the right to leave.
Other far-right elements of the Texas platform are familiar callbacks to decades of John Birch-era conspiracy crankitudes. Abolishing the Federal Reserve and repealing the federal income tax are oldies but goodies. A section frothing about policies that would prioritize pedestrians traffic and mass transit over cars is a warmed-over version of past conspiracy theories claiming that the United Nations was going to come take our roads and replace them with bike lanes.
But the new platform is also meaner than the old one, and is especially heavy on the indoctrination (sorry, grooming of Texas students. There are planks specifically asserting homosexuality to be "abnormal" and a "lifestyle choice," another that looks to punish gender-affirming medical care in the state through civil mechanisms similar to what the state has already used to effectively ban abortions, and another one prohibiting the teaching of "Critical Race Theory" in Texas.
A party explicitly banning the teaching of an academic theory is Not Normal, in non-fascist, non-authoritarian countries, and the move is not rendered any less dangerous by the fact that the theory simply isn't taught in Texas schools, being a narrow legal topic that requires far more advance education than any Texas Republican could tolerate, or the complete inability of anyone in the Texas Republican Party to so much as correctly define what it is they're banning.
The platform also demands that the teaching of "sex education" or "sexual health" in public schools be made a state crime. You're simply not allowed to teach a child what to expect in puberty, or why they might be bleeding profusely into their underwear. You're not allowed to teach them what molestation is, because Republicans (and, we imagine, the Proud Boys) do not want Texas children learning about consent.
Not to worry, though. The Texas Republican platform will ensure Texas students are indoctrinated properly according to the beliefs of the fascist cult that produced it. It requires schools to teach that life begins at conception and, according to the Tribune, requires students to "listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses."
When it comes to gun and the state's notable indifference to constant mass murders, the official Texas Republican Party platform goes full free-for-all. The party demands that the state constitution itself be amended to strip from the legislature the power to enact any gun restrictions, "with a view to prevent crime." There will be Zero rules on buying or carrying guns in Texas.
Yes, the Texas Republican Party has gone QAnon With Guns, and the party document imagines a pseudo-religious fascist government that teaches the state's children which citizens are worthy of respect and which are "abnormal" or suffering from "mental health" problems. It explicitly rejects the legitimacy of the current government based on a conspiracy premise bleated out by a Dear Leader figure who is provably lying, and demands a new state referendum to determine whether the state should simply leave the United States entirely.
To you, this might sound like a document produced by child molestation advocates in conjunction with seditionists to encourage mass murders before turning full traitor, but this is just what Texas Republicans are now. Yes, even the ones that claim to be against these things while voting for the Republicans that support them. It's a party of conspiracy freaks and treason, a party in which even the most far-right members aren't safe from attack in their own convention if they dare, even for a moment, go against the militant seditionist base.
If there's anything that's an "abnormal lifestyle choice" or a "mental health condition," it's willingly remaining a Texas Republican as the party slid into QAnon-styled conspiracy cult. The state's Republican leaders are riddled with actual seditionists from top to bottom, people whose only devotion to the country and to their fellow citizens is a desire to dominate. Bike lanes are tyranny; claiming the sitting president is illegitimate because some drunken idiot told a delusional narcissist that foreign satellites were out to get him, though, now that's a movement that can get the Republican base riled up.
A bunch of creepy-ass child groomers, that's what they are.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
