The Texas Deep Freeze: Welcome to the Republican Dystopia

Ye Olde Blogge has been posting for literal years that the Repubes want to create single-party, pseudo-democratic, minority-rule authoritarian regime to transfer the nation’s wealth to the one percent as fast as possible. A kind of dystopia in which we all live in Cancer Alley, drinking Flint water, and dying as quickly and quietly as possible when we quit contributing more than we consume.

It’s here. Look at Texas.

Think about everything that electricity supplies and what having no electricity means for your daily life:

• No lights — no DUH! But no fucking lights! It’s really dark at night something that urban dwellers have lost touch with.
• No Internet — no DUH! Your wireless router won’t work, so you have to plug into the wireless jack, if you can any more, or use a smart phone driven hotspot. Ever notice how many times you want to google something when you don’t have Internet access? You think, “I’ll just google what to do without Internet access,” reach for your device and, then, remember. Only to think, “I know, I’ll google how to get Internet access…” and start all over again.
• No charging your smart phone — no DUH! But, we’re so reliant that we have a hard time imagining life without it and have lots of useful crap stored on them.
• No refrigerators — no DUH! But critical thinking is hard, and it is surprising that more people don’t think to put there food on the porch or something — of course wandering raccoons and opossums — what is the difference between a possum and an opossum, any way? I know, I’ll google it! DOH! — will be happy about that, too.
• No heat because everything is central heating nowadays. No one has a gas heater any more. I remember standing by the gas wall heater as a child on cold winter mornings to warm up, but mom installed central heating and air years ago.
• No gas pumps! Yeow! Luckily idling your car doesn’t use much gas but all of us who lived off of putting $5.00 in at a time are SOL, amirite? And, carbon monoxide poisoning, which got a mother and daughter in Houston.
• No credit cards or debit cards! Unless everything along the chain of service from the store to the bank has generators going. Who has stacks of cash lying around any more? “I know, I’ll go to the ATM and get some cash!”
• No ATMs — “I know, I’ll go to the bank and get some cash!”
• No bank transactions, unless they have a generator!
• No water — How much water do you need? Well, you need to drink water, eventually. Beer will only get you so many days. But, what about flushing your fucking toilet? You can melt snow, if you can make a fire, but good luck with that.

You begin to see the depth of the disaster. Millions are suffering and dozens have died as they try to cope.

Republican Values and Principles Caused the Texas Disaster

How could this happen in the United States, you ask. The short answer is that the Repubes have turned us into the United Fucking States of Fucking Stupid because profits are people, too, my friend. It’s not like this is the first time that this has happened in Texas, either. In fact, it happens pretty regularly, like once every decade. It happens because Texas emphasized profits and part of that prioritization included deregulation which meant avoiding federal regulations so they isolated themselves from the national grid. Not shipping electric power across state lines means no federal reason, but also, you can’t supply electric to the country when someone needs it and can’t get it when you need it, except in El Paso. Not very neighborly.

Other people have explained it much more clearly than I can and you’ve probably already read them. If not, see this Vox explainer, Why the Texas power grid is struggling to cope with the extreme cold.

The disaster is the result of the Repube governing philosophy, which is best embodied by Reagan’s line, I’m from the government and I’m here to help and an extension of Romney’s line, Profits are people, too, my friend. It is also the result of decades of deliberate cynical Repube propaganda and disinformation. It results in lots of unbelievable myths being believed by their low-information rural conservative Christian white voters including that companies will preserve the environment without regulation and oversight because it is in the companies’ economic interest to do so. For more of this same crap, see the post, The Making of the Republican Stooge Voter: A Review of “Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.”

What amazes me, and perhaps the unique contribution that Ye Olde Blogge can make is just how closely the Repube response to the Repube-made deadly disaster in Texas is how closely it hews to Hitler’s propaganda playbook. Let’s match it up play-by-play.

Abbott Uses Hitler’s Propaganda Playbook

The following are the main ideas from Hitler’s Propaganda Playbook. You can read more about them in the post, The Narcissist’s Playbook: Trump’s Adaptation of Hitler’s Propaganda Techniques.

• never allow the public to cool off This was one of Trump’s favorite things. He always kept the country roiling over some controversy or other. Here, though, no sooner had the utility grid gone down, than Gov. Abbott and other Repubes were hitting the airwaves blaming renewables, especially wind, and the Green New Deal.
• never admit a fault or wrong, never accept blame, and never leave room for alternatives As has been so amply demonstrated in the local MSM, the real issues were the relaxing of state regulations, avoidance of federal regulation, and the economizing that avoided winterizing the supply chain of the state utilities that occurred in the 1990’s. Gov. Abbott has not — PREDICTION: he will not — said that this is the issue. He’ll go on Fox, OANN, and other conservative media outlets and continue blaming renewable energy sources and the Green New Deal while telling the MSM that there must be an investigation and there may have been issues with all sources of energy production.
• never concede that there may be some good in your enemy Gov. Abbott has not and will not ever mention the role of climate change in this year’s severe weather emergency and will not accept that such things will happen with increasing frequency and severity. He will continue to use this failure as a cudgel on renewable energy so that fossil fuels companies can make money for as long as possible despite the real and tangible consequences.
• concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong Notice how often AOC, the Green New Deal, and renewable energy sources come up in the discussion of the catastrophe. They will blame the progressive left for this for as long as they can.
• people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it This one is well established and used with frightening effectiveness by the cynical and manipulative conservative politicians to maintain their positions. They will continue exploiting the gullibility of their low-information rural conservative Christian white voters by repeating big and small lies whenever convenient for them.
• take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind Instead of actually governing, they will demagogue renewable energy, the Green New Deal, AOC, and progressives in general. They will not be addressing any of the issues that led up to this event.

The deadly disaster unfolding in Texas was born of the stubborn refusal of the Repubes to actually govern. They feed their base and anyone willing to listen lies and disinformation so that they can sell us to the corporate world as a cheap resource. I don’t think there is a clearer example of what our future will be like if we as voters let them continue. This is the latest installment of the dystopia that the Repubes would have us living in if we let them.

Image Attribution

“Snow Day Texas” by Chris Zúniga is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0