Saturday, March 6: Marion County GOP Precinct Committee people (PCs) caucused to elect a County chair. In a February 26 letter to Marion County PCs, State GOP chair Kyle Hupfer wrote “this is something I usually don’t do.” He said he’d kept mum for 4 years.

He said “I trust our grassroots leaders to make the right decisions for their own community.” And then he says he wants his “letter to be one point of reference as you decide how to vote.” He then says the state party has an obligation to “step up.”

To be clear: the last County chair was tight with the State leaders. She was not produced by an element out of control of the State. Biden/Harris won Marion County with 63%. That was not the result of messaging, but of demographics and a GOP ticket led by an evil incompetent.

History sometimes rhymes. We should ponder what Will Rogers wrote, after FDR’s election, in a column on 11/27/32 where the term “trickle down” first appeared. He described how the GOP leadership “didn’t start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.”

The GOP decries a lack of “new” candidates, yet imposes its will on the GOP in the State’s most populous county resulting in being shut out of all nine county-wide offices, the office of Mayor of Indy, and reduced to 5 of 25 seats on the City-County Council.

The reason the GOP has lost Marion County is reflected in 256 PCs and vice-PCs able to vote today. Few were people of color, some were under the age of 50, and some were women. Median GOP person, though, was a white male well over 50.

The individual voted out of the Oval Office on November 3 has cast a pall redolent of Big Mac farts on the GOP. Racism is the greatest evil this country faces as the economy of the early years was stoked by slavery and by theft of land from, and genocide of, indigenous peoples.

The evil still emanates. People were not automatically equal, even under our laws, in 1865, and despite Brown v Board of Education and the Civil Rights and Voting acts, they still lack that equality. The Southern Strategy solidified racism in the GOP.

This iteration of the GOP advances welfare - for billionaires. It runs up huge deficits and wages undeclared wars, then blames others for the causes. The attacks of 911, carried out mostly by Saudi nationals, occurred as a result of our blundering into Gulf War I.

Under Indiana law the “two major” political parties enjoy specific advantages. We cannot allow racists, misogynists and advocates of theocracy to control one of the two major political parties. We can (1) fight the party itself, (2) fight from within the party or (3) change the law.

I am the elected Republican PC for Washington Township, 21-01. I favor (1) and (3). If we can “primary” right-wing GOP candidates as was done to others 10 years or so ago, that would be beautiful. Today’s GOP caucus dampened my optimism that can occur.