My friend Alex wrote an excellent post a few days back about how he was a victim of the “cancel culture” right-wingers are currently wringing their hands about. You see, he was posting links to his blog on his own web page and in several Facebook groups and one Trump-loving hypocrite took umbrage at the links in one of those groups. How do I know? I was the owner of the group and got the complaints. The group was for writers of a now-defunct site and quite a few people promoted their work there. Alex also happened to be an Admin for the group. We ignored the reports, but Facebook didn’t and took the action he details in his post. In effect, the Trump-lover “canceled” him and deprived him of the income he was receiving from his blog since his Facebook posts drove a huge amount of traffic to his blog.

You see, this new generation of right-wing GOP’ers has a policy of when I do it, it’s the right thing to do and when someone else does it, then it’s wrong.

This brings me to what’s been weighing on me for a while now and just finally tipped me into the camp where I’m writing about it.

Last year, in a Facebook group for the town I live in, one of the locals announced she was running for a state office. Let’s call her “Bev”. (I would use her real name since she ran for office and it’s public, as are other things that I detail here, but I’m doing her a kindness.) Now, even knowing she was running as a Republican, I thought there was a possibility someone local would be different than the Republican Party as a whole and considered her candidacy.

In that same group, someone asked her if she supported President Trump. Bev said she would answer that in a direct message.

That lost her any chance that I would consider her candidacy.

You see, by not being willing to declare her position publicly on this, I saw a sign of not being trustworthy. Why would she refrain from taking a position publicly? The most obvious reason is that she was hoping to play both sides, depending on who she was talking to.

Yesterday there was a story in our local newspaper about a meeting of the County Republican Party. In it, they gave a hard time to a young (Republican) State Representative who had voted in a way they didn’t agree with. Lo and behold, there was Bev, quoted in the article saying that she lost her job at a local restaurant this past year when business dried up (I would assume she means in regard to the COVID restrictions in place since that’s what the vote they disagreed with was about.)

This past year was insane here. I’ll be the first to admit that last March through Memorial Day weekend was tough on a lot of businesses. That’s a slow time, to begin with, and adding the COVID shutdown to it made it a scary time for all. However, once things did reopen with provisions for outside dining, most restaurants had a fantastic summer. We were overrun with people who couldn’t travel to other places so they came to the great outdoors. It was a boon for many businesses even as they struggled to cope.

You see, there weren’t enough people to fill all the jobs that were available. Normally, for the summer, many businesses hire J1s. These are people from other countries who are allowed to come in on a temporary work visa. Storyland couldn’t open fully last year and one of the reasons was the lack of J1 employees. Many of these employees had 2 or more jobs while they were here.

There were plenty of jobs to be had last summer. If you wanted to work. Even now, I look through the help wanted ads and there are so many openings at so many restaurants. I have to wonder if the one restaurant Bev worked at either decided not to open or didn’t bring back all of their staff because they couldn’t use them all with decreased capacity, why didn’t she just get a job elsewhere instead of expecting the restrictions to be lifted for her?

Isn’t that what the GOP defenders would be saying if it was a “millennial” whining like this?

The hypocrisy is just stunning.

And that, my friends, is why I can’t even consider local GOP candidates anymore. They are all cut from the same cloth.