Delete and Denigrate

A safe republican seat in PA-18 suddenly isn’t so safe anymore.  The polls closed last night and it’s still too close to call.  Republicans are blaming the candidate, of course.

Jason Smith, my congressman here in Missouri’s Eighth Congressional District also occupies a safe seat.  Judging from his Facebook posts, he is still madly in love with the idiot in the White House.

You will note that Facebook says there are 62 comments about this post.  Yet, only 14 were showing when I checked a few minutes ago.

So, my tax dollars are being used to delete over 80% of people’s comments.  Fortunately, I know that Smith censors, since he’s been blocking me for months now. Ergo, I take screen shots of comments whenever I can.  I could give you five names right now of people who made perfectly civil comments on his post that have been deleted.  They just didn’t agree with him.  Only fawning is allowed.

Jason Smith is very much in the Trumpian mold of putting people down, dividing people into camps (democrats and liberals being useless, stupid, divisive, and many other terms), using Jesus as a shield to hide his hate, and so on.

He graduated from law school in 2004 and ran for office in the Missouri State House a few years later.  He’s been employed by the taxpayers ever since, making him a career politician, which is hilarious since he doesn’t like career politicians.

As you can no doubt see from his post above, he is a white supremacist.  He also hates women.  Again, in the Trumpian mold.

This district is overwhelmingly white.  And only about 85% have graduated from high school.  So you can imagine what comments appear on each of his posts.  But the only people who get deleted are the ones who disagree, and if you post a link or two to support your comments, you are going to get deleted very quickly indeed.

Women get deleted much faster than men.

I like to look at people’s profiles.  The hardcore Smith supporters have Christ or God all over their Facebook pages.  These tend to be the ones who call people names.  I’m sure there is no connection.  I’ve seen confederate flags and white power symbols on his supporters pages.  They get quite defensive, though, if you mention race or racism.   That’s playing the race card and only they get to do that.  As you can see from the post above, the dog whistles are there.

Indeed, one deleted comment said, “So, Jason, you’re saying SeMoans’ values and things they hold dear rhyme with ‘wormy spaniels’?  I’m unclear.  And, ‘contemptuous attitude’?  Do you mean ‘uppity’?  Realize, there are folks in the Bootheel who can decipher smoke signals, sir.  And dog whistles too.”  These comments, which give me hope, I cannot support because I’m blocked.

So let me just vent about that.  Because I want to call Jason Smith a liar, a thief, and a hypocrite of the highest order.  He is exactly the guy that Jesus would have cast out of the temple.

Every time Smith deletes a comment, he is stealing at least one voice, and for sure any possibility of community with like minded people.  I hate not being able to “like” someone in this district’s comment.

I’ve never seen any politician behave like this before, and I’ve lived in conservative districts my whole life.  Justin Amash was my “representative” before we moved to Missouri and I routinely commented on his posts.  I don’t like his politics much, but the man has town halls, and uses social media to explain his votes.  I can give him props for that.

Jason, on the other hand, doesn’t have town halls, provides no specifics on his votes, lies to his constituents, and then, insults them by censoring them.  His own chief of staff, Mark Roman, argued with me about whether or not I was “conforming” to Jason’s “community standards”.

And they don’t respond to constituents emails either.

So, Kathy Ellis is running against Jason for the seat in November.  Jason has raised over a million dollars and Ms. Ellis has raised about $35,000.  I’ve sent her money and will continue to do so.

Smith has received thousands and thousands of dollars from big corporations like Anheuser-Busch, UBS, Bank of America, and big Ag.  Also from PACs and groups like the NRA, who has awarded Smith with an A+ rating.  The vast majority of his money is coming from outside the district, and a surprising amount from out of state.  All of this information can be found on OpenSecrets.org.

He has also gone from being about $500,000 in debt to having over a million dollars in assets.  Government, which he hates, has been very, very good to him.

Fewer and fewer people are voting these days.  And I get that, I really do.  There is too much money in politics, for one thing.  I stopped supporting the Democratic party years ago, when they veered too far to the right, becoming moderate republicans in all but name.  The parties have changed the rules to benefit them, not the citizens.  The system is rigged.

But.  This year it matters a whole lot, because if we don’t have some checks on the idiot in the White House, life in America is going to get much worse.

This regime has no interest in governing.  That requires compromise, give and take.  This regime wants to rule.  And if we don’t vote in November, they will.