The Road to Splitsville UNCONVENTIONAL

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Sometimes, during what William Burroughs or one of those guys called the “junk-sick dawn,” in those soul-eviscerating moments of existential self-evaluation, when we confront the essential meaninglessness of life and reach the state Sartre characterized as “nausea,” we ask ourselves, “Is this whole red-state/blue-state divorce scenario even remotely plausible?” We shuffle to the bathroom mirror, regard our wrecked, racked face with bloodshot eyes, and wonder, “Does it even make sense to imagine that we could be on The Road to Splitsville?” When we, the very authors of The Split, contemplate this possibility, what threatens then is artistic ruin, political despair, and personal humiliation.

And then we remember the Texas Republican Party and its biennial convention.

It is there where speakers hold forth, pass resolutions, and remind us that America has more than its share of deluded, deranged religious lunatics in positions of political power, for whom an eventual exit from the commonwealth might in fact be deemed a darned good idea, and something worth pursuing.

Reporter Robert Downen starts his quietly horrifying piece in The Texas Tribune about last month’s Texas GOP convention with a sketch of Mr. Steve Hotze, an “indicted election fraud conspiracy theorist” who has compared gay people to Nazis and who helped popularize the smear “groomer” concerning people of whom he disapproves. Hotze said, at the convention, that he was, per Downen, “pleased by the party's growing embrace of his calls for spiritual warfare with ‘demonic, Satanic forces’ on the left.”

“People that aren’t in Christ have wicked, evil hearts,” he said. “We are in a battle, and you have to take a side.”

This, we have to continually remind ourselves, is taking place, not in Salem, Massachusetts in the 17^th century, but at a political convention this past May, for one of the country’s two major parties, in one of the biggest states in the (still-extant) union.

Of course, it’s not all Satan-mongering and Taliban-like religiously-inspired reactionary bigotry. Some of the delegates’ business included prohibiting Republican candidates (and judges) from appearing on ballots for two years if they’re censured by the party. They also sought to mimic the very worst aspect of the national Electoral College we all know and loathe by requiring candidates for state-wide office to win a majority of Texas’ 254 counties, many of which are big in square miles but sparse in residents. (Luckily for the GOP, those folks are dependably Republican.) Thus, a Republican could lose the popular vote but win the acreage vote—and the election—just like the big boys in Washington, D.C.

But such anti-democratic schemes pale in outrageousness compared to the rationales put forth for them. The Republicans promoting these measures—good, pious Christians all—demand, for example, that the Bible be taught in public schools. Why?

Downen:

Those moves, delegates and leaders agreed, were necessary amid what they say is an existential fight with a host of perceived enemies, be it liberals trying to indoctrinate their children through “gender ideology” and Critical Race Theory, or globalists waging a war on Christianity through migration.

You, as a sane, educated reader of Wonkette, react to this with, “Wait—a war on Christianity though migration? Meaning, immigrants? Who, in the U.S., are mainly from Central and South American countries? Which are overwhelmingly Catholic? So Catholics are waging a war on Christianity? How’s that work?” Don’t ask.

Downen reminds us that the Texas GOP conventions have “traditionally amplified the party’s most hardline activists and views,” which is a decorous way of saying, “These people have always been feverishly demented and N-U-T-Z nutz.”

In 2022, for instance, delegates approved a platform that included calls for a referendum on Texas secession; resistance to the “Great Reset,” a conspiracy theory that claims global elites are using environmental and social policies to enslave the world’s population; proclamations that homosexuality is an “abnormal lifestyle choice”; and a declaration that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.

And now the nutziness is being compacted, compressed, and intensified. Predictably, as the Party, over the past two years, has become more radicalized, convention attendance has diminished—allowing the extremists to wield even more power. Summer Wise, a former member of the party’s executive committee, says, “the [party’s] infrastructure, leadership, decision-making process, power and influence are being controlled by a small group of people.”

The article features faces both familiar and un: Long-indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is here (“The Biden administration wants the illegals here to vote”), and Ted “The Most Despised Senator in Washington” Cruz makes an appearance (“Look at what the Democrats have done. If you were actively trying to destroy America, what would you do differently?”).

But our favorite—new to us but already rising with a bullet on our Top Forty list of Highly Repellent People—is Ella Maulding, a young lady known for her support of You-Tube-phenom, Trump-dinner-guest, real-life Nazi (and, per none other than George Santos, closeted gay “twink”) Nick Fuentes. Maulding is a fan of the Great Replacement Theory, “a conspiracy theory that claims there is an intentional, often Jewish-driven, effort to replace white people through migration, LGBTQ+ acceptance or interracial marriage.” Getta loada what this flower of Texas womanhood posts to her peeps:

Five hours after Paxton and (Lt. Governor Dan) Patrick spoke, Maulding took to social media, posting a cartoon of a rabbi with the following text: “I make porn using your children and then make money distributing it under the banner of women’s rights while flooding your nation with demented lunatics who then rape your children.”

We tell ya, it’s people like this that give right-wing anti-Semitic Republican theocrats a bad name.  

Still, it brings a certain balm: It’s not just that these Satan-citing, Nazi-approving, grotesquely hypocritical so-called “Christians,” with their medieval world-view, exist. We (and you) knew that. The thing is, they’re taking over the Texas GOP.

Just as, on the national level, the orc army of the MAGA Trumpists have alienated, driven out, and blackballed moderate, sane Republicans and conservatives, so have, in the Lone Star State, the krazees taken over on the right. How much of a stretch is it, then, to think that one day, after their continually-splintering factions have clashed over their rival purity tests, invoked Beelzebub and Asmodeus and Shub-Niggurath and other RINO’s against each other, and slugged it out to the last nutbar faction standing, whoever’s left will mount a successful campaign to withdraw Texas from the USA? ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, in our IMHO.

 So the heck with nausea and the dark night of anyone’s soul. Pass the popcorn.