We have to arm ourselves to defend against the deceitful language Republicans use when they lament our national debt. They've been threatening us with the same cruel cuts to social benefit programs for decades. They only care about the entitled rich. They care nothing about people who work for a living.

The only new development is that today Republicans actually have the power to inflict the consequences of their dastardly schemes upon the innocent, hardworking people of this country.

We can't let them get away with it. We have to make them own it in advance.

We've been trying to warn you, but nobody wants to listen to the facts. Republicans are dead set on stealing money from the working class and giving it to entitled billionaires who have never had to sweat a day in their lives.

They haven't even been hiding it!

If that doesn't make you mad now, it soon will.

Fortunately, there are signs that the delusional individuals who voted for this disaster are waking up to the fact that they are going to be the ones left holding the bill. They don't like it. That's good.

I saw a recent video of a town hall in which Republican voters were getting pretty spicy with one of their representatives. I'm so sick of how slick and entitled these Republican politicians are. When they start to get pushed, they always fall back on some authoritarian phrase like, “I have more money than you,” or “I am more educated than you,” or some other form of “I'm superior to you.”

They hear something they don't like and they tell the rest of us to shut up.

They rely on the model where they're the unquestionable authority next only to God and you're the insignificant peasant who needs to comply.

The problem is, Republicans take delight in talking like that to marginalized groups they've been indoctrinated to hate. But they get all confused and irritated when they find themselves on the receiving end. This is where the ideologies of hatred, racism, bigotry, and white supremacy all start to crumble. Those concepts don't create a coalition. They create division. Sooner or later the division descends upon the destructive monster and tears it in two.

The video with the angry town hall was hopeful because I like to see liars be reminded that the citizens of this country still have power. But even in watching the video, I was struck by how many uncontested lies the Republican representative was allowed to regurgitate into the room.

For example, he talks about the percentage of “mandatory spending” that's made up by Social Security. First of all, I think the number that he refers to is wrong even though he encourages people to go and check it themselves (he knows they won't).

But he's also being misleading in that he conveniently forgets to mention that the total federal budget is made up of mandatory spending and discretionary spending. The discretionary spending represents about a third of the total budget, so his percentages are twice wrong.

That's a thing with Republicans, you have to be mindful that one lie is never enough. They always have a foundational lie, and a point of focus lie. They'll debate the point of focus lie, and in so doing they normalize belief in the foundational lie. It's still a win to them even if they lose the point of debate (which they'll never admit to either).

In the case of the town hall video, the foundational lie was the true percentage that Social Security represents of the entire budget.

There are actually about four or five more lies thrown in for good measure, but we'll get to that.

For now, just remember that when Republicans say social security is X% of the mandatory spending budget, they forget to mention that the mandatory budget represents 66% of the total budget. So they're saying social security is X% of 66% of the budget, and because nobody wants to do math, the public stops asking questions.

It's a good rule of thumb to assume Republicans always have the percentages wrong. Don't be afraid of math.

Cultivating confusion is the whole point. Don't be afraid to say their words are misleading. They're designed to be misleading.

I'd advise you not to call them liars because you'll probably get kicked out of the meeting. You need to stay there. Call it misleading, and push back on the spread of misinformation.

What we really need to do is fortify ourselves so that we can force Republicans to speak plainly about what they're proposing. Authoritarians always crumble when you try to get them to state the facts because they don't want it to be clear. They don't want it to be clear because then they'll be exposed as con artists and frauds. So, instead of speaking plainly, they start bullying you with, “I'm the authority figure here! Do what I say!”

That's when you have them, because nobody wants to be talked to like that.

“What percentage is Social Security of the total budget? Forget about confusing us by presenting it as a percentage of mandatory spending.”

Then ask some further questions like:

“To be clear, when you say you want to cut Social Security, you only want to cut the benefit to us. You don't have any intention of cutting the payroll tax that we all have to pay? Is that accurate? Your proposal is that every member of the working class should still have to pay in and then you want to greatly restrict the amount of our money that we'll get back? That's the plan? And it's all so that you can offer major tax breaks to billionaires? Will the tax breaks to billionaires happen right away, or will you postpone them until the debt starts coming down? At what point will we start to see the benefit of our sacrifice?”

You have to ask questions like these. It's obscene that Republicans are allowed to float proposals like cutting Social Security without ever facing any real backlash. Why does anyone vote for these horrible people?

“What about all the money I paid in? I made that money. I earned that money. It's mine. Now the Republicans want to take it away? They want to steal from us? Aren't you afraid that the American public is going to be very, very, very angry about that?”

Make them squirm a little.

At this point, Republicans will start diverting the conversation to the handouts given to the poor. They want to divert your anger to a group they've trained their followers to hate. But what they always, always, always neglect is the billions of dollars in government money that is routinely handed out to the rich.

Let's start talking about that.

We should be talking about that.

I said before that Republicans speak in lies stacked upon other lies. This is the biggest one.

For a moment, forget about the concept of taxing the rich. Instead, let's just stop giving billionaires billions and billions of dollars in subsidies, forgivable loans, PPP loans, bail outs, inflated government contracts, and all the other ways (and there are many more) that the government funnels money to the rich.

The rich are bleeding us dry!

It's not Social Security.

It's not the poor.

It's not immigrants.

It's not any of the groups that Republicans indoctrinate the people to hate.

The rich are the ones who are responsible for our national debt.

It's the rich. It's the rich. It's the rich.

Stop giving them all our hard earned money. They didn't earn it. We did.

Rich people aren't rich because they work harder than you. They're rich because the government forks over funds hand over fist all while blaming you.

Now you're set to be punished for this longstanding lie.

For years and years, Republicans have pushed the lie that the only way to balance the budget is to cut Social Security, and that has never been the truth. They've never even tried other options.

In fact Republicans have had sufficient control in the government and enough of the Democrats are effectively conservative Republicans as well, that we've always only implemented Republican tactics.

These tactics are why we're seeing the disaster that we have today. They try to weasel out of this idea that all they have to do is increase taxes on billionaires to balance the budget. They rely on the general lack of an understanding of mathematics. They chop up the budget in bizarre and misleading ways.

They offer you a lot of absurd calculations that suggest it's not even possible to tax billionaires and get enough money out of them. But they never mention the astounding amount of taxpayer money that's used to subsidize the fortunes of billionaires.

Billionaires are handed free money for no effort, nonstop. What Republicans argue is that these funds need to be distributed in order to keep the economy running smoothly. But the reality is that industries don't need an endless supply of free government money to stay in business.

That's not how the free market is supposed to work.

That's why we have banks.

When airlines get into financial distress, they can mortgage their airplanes. They can get the money they need to keep going like any other business. They don't need to force taxpayers to bear the burden of any little economic hardship or headwind they encounter.

I've owned a business. We didn't get tens of thousands of dollars every time things got tough. We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and worked harder. But it's pretty hard to compete against groups that have an endless supply of free taxpayer money.

Let's have a level playing field for a change. Let's let billionaires bear the burden. Let's let them fail eve...