The American Taliban: Why we must neuter this dangerous representation of Trump’s movement.

The leadership of the GOP has decided to follow Trump, who has become the leader of the American Taliban. What does this mean for America?

The American Taliban told and foretold.

I read The Hartmann Report every weekday morning. He always has something insightful to get out. I repost most of them on my website in his own corner. We must expose the Progressive message as widely as possible. For all practical purposes, we must become our own media to describe who we really are.

Today’s report had a catchy title, “Trump Brutally Represents an American Version of the Taliban,” that is most prescient. Thom writes,

We are being warned

Today’s GOP, on the other hand, has become something that would be entirely unrecognizable to Nixon or Eisenhower.  It’s become an American version of the Taliban.

Lest you think that’s hyperbolic, consider these parallels:

The Taliban, as my SiriusXM colleague Dean Obeidallah pointed out last week in his MSNBC commentary, don’t believe women should have any social or political rights. 

Today’s Republicans occupy much the same space, refusing to vote for the Equal Rights Amendment, refusing to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, and proposing to put women who try to get an abortion (even when raped) in prison along with anybody who may try to help them.  

Two-hundred-twenty-eight Republican members of Congress even signed a brief to the Supreme Court asking it to overturn Roe v Wade saying they are interested in “protecting women from dangerous … abortion” while “upholding the integrity of the medical profession.”

Republicans, like the Taliban, don’t believe women should be in the workplace and so work to actively discourage them by refusing to vote for legislation ensuring they get the same pay as similarly-qualified men. 

But that’s just the beginning. 

While the Democratic Party (and the pre-2000 GOP) still believes in free and fair elections, the Taliban ridicules the idea of democracy, and, when elections are held, does everything they can to intimidate voters, rig the outcome, and even threaten politicians with assault or death. 

The way that Trump supporters in Michigan plotted to kidnap, try and execute Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer would have brought a smile to the face of any Taliban official, as would their storming the US Capitol in an attempt to assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House while disrupting the election of 2020. 

Neither the Taliban nor the Republican Party believe in democracy. 

We were warned

The entire article enumerates the striking similarities that, with an American touch, the Trump movement shares with the Taliban.

After reading the article, I recalled the excellent book that DailyKos’ creator Markos Moulitsas wrote in 2010, before its time, titled “American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right.” BTW, it was the same year I wrote the book that amazingly is still apropos titled “As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom.”

Moulitsas was ahead of his time with his characterization of the Republican Party. He saw what many were afraid to say publicly. In fact, when I brought the book to the attention of a few of the organizations I worked with, they thought the book’s title was either offensive or too hot to touch. The book was fact-based and used the realities mostly reported in the Traditional Mainstream Media.

Here is why understanding Hartmann’s and Moulitsas’ article and book, respectively, are important. They allow one to see the January 6th Capitol insurrection by the unpatriotic seditious terrorists in the proper context. The Trump movement is the culmination of one that would revert to the terrorist tactics of the Taliban. We were warned, and we are being warned.