On Tuesday Senator Rick Scott of Florida released his “Rescue America” plan. The plan is divided into 11 major points of action, and it is a deep hole of crazy all the way down.

No Republican Party office holder can do anything without first paying fealty to The King of the GOP, so rest assured that that is covered in the document:

We will secure our border, finish building the wall, and name it after President Donald Trump.

I hope there is a naming contest.  OH PLEASE OH PLEASE OH PLEASE!!

There is the boilerplate GOP stuff, of course, like this about abortion:

Abortion kills human children. To deny that is to deny science.

Whether you believe in God or not, as a civilized people who accept science, we must protect babies, born and unborn, from all acts of violence.

The Supreme Court is set to essentially–and possibly wholly–abolish abortion, so that’s an easy promise to make. But that’s not going to be the end of the attack on women. See, last week all 3 Republican candidates for Michigan attorney general said they opposed the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court case that established that privacy is a right, and led to the eventual legalization of birth control. So as extreme as Scott’s positions are, there are far more extreme ones coming down the pike.

The BUT MUH FREEDOM people have a very detailed list of things the rest of us are going to be forced to do:

No federal program or tax laws will reward people for being unmarried or discriminate against marriage.

Even though many single moms heroically do the job of raising a family (as my mom often had to) children need and deserve both parents – and government should not be shy about saying so.

Hmmm, no more laws that “reward people for being unmarried”. That, and the criminalization of birth control, portend a pretty scary future.

But it’s not the culture war stuff that caught my eye—the Christian Nationalist stuff did. And then the document started to make more sense. Scott is the chair of the Republican National Senatorial Committee, which means his job is fundraising, and he released this document in conjunction with his responsibilities there.

Christian Nationalism is an ideology which merges radical right wing Christianity with democracy, and which seeks to privilege Christians and their beliefs above all. Christian Nationalism has been a staple in American politics for a century, and as our political conversation has become more radically right wing, its ideas are now openly flaunted by the Republican Party.

Christian Nationalism’s primary opponent is secularism, the non-prioritization of any or no religion over any other. Because Christian Nationalists believe that they have Christian privilege, everyone who is not one of them has to be destroyed.

The current target of their war on secularism is trans kids:  bathrooms, sports, etc. In the past their targets have been Catholics, immigrants, interracial marriage, same sex marriage, women voting, etc. Their targets shift as the larger environment shifts. And you can see their bigger goals in this document:

Humans are born male and female, there are two genders, and to deny that is to deny science.

No government forms will include questions about “gender identity” or “sexual preference.”

Yes, they want to legislate LGBTQ people out of existence (they want to do the same for BIPOC with similar proposals for reporting race).

But the clearest statement of their desire to impose their beliefs on the rest of us is in “Point Ten:  Religious Liberty/Big Tech” where they specifically call out secularism and accuse Big Tech of creating a new religion:

The Democrat Party and their Big Tech allies are not merely secular; they have virtually created a new religion of wokeness that is increasingly hostile toward people of faith, particularly Christians and Jews. They are determined to drive all mention of God out of public view. We will not be silenced, canceled, or told what words to use by the politically correct crowd.

Every American will be free to live out their religious convictions in the public square, not only in the home or a place of worship.

So they’re going to be harassing us at work, and when we renew our drivers license, when we’re at the post office, and when we’re registering to vote. And before anyone gets out the pitchforks, I am a practicing Christian, but I’m not a Christian Nationalist and I don’t want their right wing Christian nonsense shoved down my throat.

They want to empty the government coffers into their own pockets:

We will forbid government programs from discriminating against the 350,000 religious entities which operate schools, pregnancy resource centers, soup kitchens, drug addiction programs, homeless shelters, and adoption agencies.

And with the 1/6 insurrection still fresh in our minds, this, from that same section, is terrifying:

Remember – the Second Amendment was established in order to protect the freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment.

The saving grace of all of this awfulness (and you should read the whole thing) is that the attack ads against Republican Senate candidates write themselves. Let’s hope that actually happens.

This feels right to close out this post: