Rick Scott’s ’11 Point Plan to Save America’ Is So Crazy It’s Essentially a Giveaway to Democrats | Orlando Area News | Orlando

Mitch McConnell knows how to win midterm: Oppose everything Joe Biden does, blame him for everything that goes wrong, but never present an agenda that turns the election into a choice rather than in a referendum.

Last week, however, Senator Rick Scott – a Medicare billionaire scammer who scammed Floridians into narrowly electing him governor twice and senator once, and who is responsible for electing Republicans to the Senate – threw a spanner in the machine with his “11 point plan to save Americaa manifesto that mixes Newt Gingrich’s ’90s with Trumpian authoritarianism, white Christian nationalism, overt attacks on suffrage, economic and constitutional illiteracy, and a Mack truck full of gaslights.

The 11 points speak for themselves:

• Turn schools into factories of patriotism where children are forced to take the (unconstitutional) oath of allegiance and teachers can be fired for making white children feel uncomfortable (i.e. the “theory criticism of race”). Then again, none of this will matter after the Department of Education is shut down and a voucher program is implemented that ghettoizes public schools and funnels billions of tax dollars to religious institutions. unregulated.
• End diversity training “or any woke ideological indoctrination” in the military – “woke” is Scott’s new favorite word – cut funding to universities that attempt to diversify their student body and proclaim as a fact that the nation is color blind (the last 400 years never happened).
• Imposing tougher penalties for the violent and non-violent crime, and expanding qualified immunity so that cops can even more easily abuse their authority with impunity. Blue lives matter, etc.
• “We will secure our border, finish building the wall and name it after President Donald Trump.”
• Give the president a veto (not only unconstitutional, but it would make Congress useless), ban increases in the debt ceiling (calamitous), tax the poor and pensioners (everyone should have “skin in the game” ”) and all that “socialism be treated as a foreign fighter” means.
• Enact term limits for members of Congress and civil servants (unconstitutional and will empower lobbyists), move government agencies out of Washington and “into the real world” (expensive), and halve funding for the IRS (presumably so Scott’s cronies can get away with tax evasion).
• Ban same-day and automatic voter registration (due to fraud or otherwise), unstaffed collection boxes and public campaign financing (“No serious person would ever be in favor of this,” says the billionaire) , and do not count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. But voter identification will be mandatory, of course.
• Ban abortion, ban pornography, give tax breaks to “nuclear families” and allow faith groups to discriminate against whomever they want.
• God says trans people aren’t real, so doctors should be banned from treating trans kids and trans men should be banned from women’s sports – which was the case just a few years ago. Title IX ridiculed now finds sacred. (Weird, that.) Also, “no government forms will include questions about ‘gender identity’ or ‘sexual preference’.”
• Ban Facebook and Twitter from prohibiting users from spreading hate speech or spreading misinformation (unconstitutional), “reject both the roots and followers of cancel culture in America” ​​and “stop investing federal retirement dollars with ‘woke’ fund managers and corporations that put left-wing politics ahead of profits” (“woke” stands for clean energy, I presume).
• Stop participating in peacekeeping missions, end imports from China (only $435 billion per year), “take climate change seriously but not hysterically” (i.e. do nothing) and “treat our enemies as enemies”.

There is the Republican plan to “save” the country, which was working well until January 20, 2021.

Most of them are not new, per se. What is new is Scott’s attempt to marry the anti-tax, pro-austerity wing of the party with the populist, authoritarian wing of Trump. On the surface, this seems doubtful. To the extent that Trump had a more sophisticated political perspective than ‘Building the Wall’, he promised everyone everything – lower taxes and increase spending and cut the deficit – and pretend he never made those promises when they got in the way.

Scott, however, wants to reframe the oligarchic (read: deeply unpopular) aspects of the GOP agenda as an extension of the culture wars: the “woke” left sends your money to “undeserving” others; you don’t have to squint to see the racial subtext. From beginning to end, it is an authoritative document dressed in the language of freedom. Like all variants of right-wing populism, it focuses the grievances of its target demo (a loss of cultural primacy) on scapegoats (the revivals).

Consider how Scott begins his treatise: “The militant left now controls all of the federal government, the news media, universities, Hollywood, and most corporate boards, but they want more. They are redefining America and silencing their opponents.

Set aside the obvious question – how much LSD does a man have to take to consider Joe Biden the “militant left”? – and let me translate from Fox Newsese: Scott’s version of a white, Christian America that idealizes capitalists (e.g. him) has lost favor in the cultural marketplace, and people who espouse racist views, misogynists or bigots now face consequences they didn’t have before (what they call censorship). A multicultural society forces their children to learn more than the historical myths on which their supposed superiority was built (what they call indoctrination).

They are victims, forever and ever. Scott promises to avenge their victimhood by imposing their cultural norms on everyone – in the name of freedom – and maintaining the socio-economic caste system that has fostered the greatest level of inequality in a century.

This is the Republican Party’s 2022 platform. It’s also a gift for Democrats – if they know how to use it.