Wedge2 Bak
capt 12 23
wedgetwo1223
very belated? 5/20 neglected
see polarization
see desantis say gay SEE FLORIDA HARMED
see bannon
see trump
see CRT
see drag trans
see own the libs
see troll caucus
see alt fact earth2 fascism
see hype fear anger
see moral panic groomer drag teletubbies dr suess woke
Barbie and taylor swift
aha: note that this are rarely central practical importance but loaded with emotion? low logos/relevance but high pathos, so good to hype up base, direct mail fundraising and clickbait. note also russian cointelpro disruption.
real polarization is 1% inequality, but useful diversion to divide a and conquer left-rt; cf beran something awful same root problem but opposite diagnosis and cures.
evangelicals often involved? anti-commie contributes to polarization?
when how did wedge issue --> own the libs? 4chan alt rt?
aha how much of this is just feeding soc media maw/ RW trumpista red meat?
orig i thot of wedge issue as one that riles but terribly important in Real world, but mask and climate matter
bak 11 21 html Crary
((( NOTE HOW FLORIDA HARMED
3/24
wASHINGTON (AP) — A new Biden administration rule that sets tougher standards for deadly soot pollution faced a barrage of legal challenges Wednesday, as 25 Republican-led states and a host of business groups filed lawsuits seeking to block the rule in court.
Twenty-four states, led by attorneys general from Kentucky and West Virginia, filed a joint challenge stating that new Environmental Protection Agency rule would raise costs for manufacturers, utilities and families and could block new manufacturing plants and infrastructure such as roads and bridges. Texas filed a separate suit, as did business groups led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers.
“The EPA’s new rule has more to do with advancing President (Joe) Biden’s radical green agenda than protecting Kentuckians’ health or the environment, said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, who is leading the joint lawsuit along with West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.
The EPA rule “will drive jobs and investment out of Kentucky and overseas, leaving employers and hardworking families to pay the price,” Coleman said.
READ MORE
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US’s largest public utility ignores warnings in moving forward with new natural gas plant
The soot rule is one of several EPA dictates under attack from industry groups and Republican-led states. The Supreme Court heard arguments last month on a GOP challenge to the agency’s “good neighbor rule,” which restricts smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas.
Three energy-producing states — Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia — challenged the rule, along with the steel industry and other groups, calling it costly and ineffective. The rule is on hold in a dozen states because of the court challenges.
In opposing the soot rule, Republicans and industry groups say the United States already has some of the strictest air quality standards in the world — tougher than the European Union or major polluters such as China and India.
Tightening U.S. standards “wouldn’t improve public health, but it would put as many as 30% of all U.S. counties out of compliance under federal law, leading to aggressive new permitting requirements that could effectively block new economic activity,’' Coleman said.
The EPA rule sets maximum levels of fine particle pollution — more commonly known as soot — at 9 micrograms per cubic meter of air, down from 12 micrograms established a decade ago under the Obama administration.
Environmental and public health groups hailed the rule as a major step to improve the health of Americans, including future generations. EPA scientists have estimated exposure at previous limits contributed to thousands of early deaths from heart disease and lung cancer, along with other health problems.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the new soot rule, finalized last month, would create $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032, including prevention of up to 800,000 asthma attacks and 4,500 premature deaths. The rule will especially benefit children, older adults and those with heart and lung conditions, Regan said, as well as people in low-income and minority communities adversely affected by decades of industrial pollution.
“We do not have to sacrifice people to have a prosperous and booming economy,″ Regan said.
Biden is seeking reelection, and some fellow Democrats have warned that a tough new soot standard could harm his chances in key industrial states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The EPA and White House officials brushed aside those concerns, saying the industry has developed technical improvements to meet previous soot standards and can adapt to meet the new ones. Soot pollution has declined by 42% since 2000, even as the U.S. gross domestic product has increased by 52%, Regan said.
The new rule does not impose pollution controls on specific industries. Instead, it lowers the annual standard for fine particulate matter for overall air quality. The EPA will use air sampling to identify counties and other areas that do not meet the new standard. States would then have 18 months to develop compliance plans for those areas. States that do not meet the new standard by 2032 could face penalties, although EPA said it expects that 99% of U.S. counties will be able to meet the revised annual standard by 2032.
Industry groups and Republican officials dispute that and say a lower soot limit could put hundreds of U.S. counties out of compliance.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned the White House in January that 43% of total particulate emissions come from wildfires, and called the pollution standard “the wrong tool to address this problem.’'
The EPA said it will work with states, counties and tribes to account for and respond to wildfires, an increasing source of soot pollution, especially in the West, where climate change has led to longer wildfire seasons, with more frequent and intense fires. The agency allows states and air agencies to request exemptions from air-quality standards due to “exceptional events,” including wildfires and prescribed fires.
Besides Kentucky, West Virginia and Texas, other states challenging the EPA rule include: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming.
All three cases were filed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
===
AHA NOTE ENABLED BY FOX bs GAS STOVES OFFSHORE WIND
an 5 24
florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday signed a bill that erases most references to climate change in state law, deprioritizes it in policy decisions, and eases regulations for natural gas pipelines while banning offshore wind installations in state waters.}:
DeSantis signed the bill despite the fact that Florida is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to the climate crisis—both from sea-level rise and extreme weather such as heatwaves and hurricanes. Indeed, on the day of the signing, Key West tied for its highest heat index on record at 115°C, heat that was made at least five times more likely because of the burning of fossil fuels.
"This purposeful act of cognitive dissonance is proof that the governor and state Legislature are not acting in the best interests of Floridians, but rather to protect profits for the fossil fuel industry," Yoca Arditi-Rocha, executive director of climate education nonprofit the Cleo Institute, toldThe Associated Press.
The bill's opponents told APthat it exes out nine references to climate currently on the books. It also takes steps to promote fossil gas—which already provides nearly three-quarters of Florida's electricity—and makes it harder to ban gas stoves and other appliances.
Further, AP reported:
The legislation also eliminates requirements that government agencies hold conferences and meetings in hotels certified by the state's environmental agency as "green lodging" and that government agencies make fuel efficiency the top priority in buying new vehicles. It also ends a requirement that Florida state agencies look at a list of "climate-friendly" products before making purchases.
The law, which goes into effect July 1, "is very much out of line with public opinion," Greg Knecht, director of the Nature Conservancy in Florida, toldThe Washington Post.A full 90% of Floridians believe climate change is occurring, 69% of them want the state government to act on it, a Florida Atlantic University survey found.
Florida is already seeing the impacts of the climate crisis from Wednesday's high heat and humidity in the Keys to last year's Hurricane Idalia. Moving forward, Florida was ranked 10th in a list of states or provinces with the most physical infrastructure at risk from climate impacts by 2050.
"This feels like Act 1 of a Greek tragedy," the Environmental Voter Project wrote on social media in response to the signing.
Knecht told the Postthat DeSantis and Florida's Republican-controlled Legislature were willing to address the effects of the climate crisis—the governor earmarked more than $28 million to study flooding vulnerability in each county last year—but would not acknowledge the cause of the problem or discuss solutions that involved reducing emissions.
"On one hand, we recognize that we're seeing flooding and we're seeing property damage and we're seeing hurricanes, and we're conveying to the public that we can build our way out of these problems," Knecht said. "And then on the other hand, we're turning around and saying, 'Yeah, but climate change isn't really real, and we don't need to do anything about it.'"
This may partly be because, as green advocates told Post, the climate crisis has become a culture war issue that DeSantis can use to attract media attention and right-wing voters, as he has done with high-profile attacks on abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights.
Others blamed the influence of the fossil fuel industry.
"Fossil fuel companies don't like competing with clean energy," Democratic Florida Senate candidate Carlos Guillermo Smith wrote on social media. "So they donated to Ron DeSantis who signed a law that bans offshore wind, eliminates energy efficiency grant programs, and deletes any reference to 'climate change' from state statute."
"GOP = Profits over people always," Smith said.
Progress Florida wrote: "While Gov. Ron DeSantis does the dirty work of corporate polluters, Floridians are left to suffer as the state becomes more unaffordable and the natural treasures of the people who have farmed, hunted, and worshipped here for generations are destroyed
---
an 2 24
florida public school students start learning about communism in 7th grade. That’s too late for some Republicans in the Florida House, who want teachers to instruct students as young as kindergarteners on concepts such as “cultural Marxism.” But what is it?....
mma 12 23
also soros and a witch
Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec accused Swift of being a “psyop” and “a statecraft asset for years” in a series of absurd social media posts and claimed “2024 will be the full payoff” for Democrats. In one post, Posobiec claimed that “conservatives who applaud Taylor Swift Time Mag award psyop” will be responsible for losing the country. Twitter/X, \12/6/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4014668); 12/6/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4014742); 12/6/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4014670); [12/6/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4014671)]
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-contributor-says-barbie-movie-trojan-horse-feminist-agenda
no lnx vid
The right-wing Barbie meltdown shows how reactionary forces are losing the culture wars
Ben Shapiro: “Get ready, folks. It’s going to be liberated Barbie time."
Special PROGRAMS
LGBTQ
WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES & SOPHIE LAWTON
PUBLISHED 07/18/23
Barbie
CitationAndrea Austria / Media Matters
The Barbie movie is scheduled to be released on July 21; as it stands, there is no evidence that anti-trans attacks by right-wing influencers have resonated with audiences at all. (Barbie is distributed by Warner Bros. Movies, which is currently being struck by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.)
Greta Gerwig, director of the film, recently explained the underlying thesis of her latest project in a New York Times Magazine article.
“People say, ‘Well, what’s the story of Barbie?’” Gerwig recalls. “The story of Barbie is the fight that’s been going on about Barbie.”
In keeping with recent anti-LGBTQ extremist campaigns, right-wing media personalities have now imposed their anti-trans agenda onto that fight. They certainly have the muscle memory for ideologically wrestling with toys: Great battles in the conservative culture war have been waged over Mr. Potato Head, Legos, Xbox, Muppets, and more.
Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and the gambit of right-wing blogs are outraged that Hari Nef, a transgender model and actor, stars in the movie as Doctor Barbie. (There are more than a dozen characters named Barbie in the movie, per IMDb, and an audio clip of each Barbie greeting each other by the same name has gone viral on TikTok.) This is not the first time Mattel has celebrated transgender representation through the Barbie brand: In 2022, the company released a doll version of Emmy-nominated actress Laverne Cox.
On June 30, Kirk called the movie “trans propaganda that is in this hyper-feminine, ultra pink propaganda thing, but it’s really been taken over by the trans mafia.” He later added the trailer for Barbie was “the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” then floated a boycott of the film.
Video
CitationFrom the June 30, 2023 edition of Real America's Voice's The Charlie Kirk Show
After repeatedly tweeting about Nef’s casting, Shapiro warned, “The new Barbie movie is going to be a woke bleep show.” He attacked Nef for writing a letter to Gerwig advocating that she be cast in the movie and predictably went on to repeatedly misgender her.
“Get ready, folks. It’s going to be liberated Barbie time.”
Video
CitationFrom the June 28, 2023 edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
On Fox, Campos-Duffy complained that “the left has given Barbie a complete feminist makeover,” then went on to misgender and attack Nef. “They couldn’t get a woman to play a doctor?”
Video
CitationFrom the July 3, 2023, edition of Jesse Watters Primetime
In a panel segment following her monologue, Campos-Duffy said Gerwig’sBarbie is “another indoctrination vehicle.”
On his podcast, right-wing pundit Dave Rubin asked, “Why do they go out of their way to have a biological boy play a girl who’s supposed to be completely a girl in the Barbie movie unless they’re trying to confuse kids?”
Right-wing blogs are also furiously churning out their own Barbie takes. Conspiracy theory-peddling website Revolver News ran a guest post by Federalist contributor Peachy Keenan titled “The Pink Menace” that described Gerwig as the “Destroyer of Dolls” and zeroed in on Nef, labeling her “Groomer Barbie.”
The Pink Menace
CitationScreenshot from Revolver News
An article on right-wing “media watchdog” NewsBusters asked whether the movie was preparing a “Woke Barbie Bait-and Switch” from its press tour to the actual contents of the film, suggesting (baselessly) that the promotion was intentionally papering over Barbie’s “potentially progressive leanings,” citing “the movie’s aggressively diverse cast” and the inclusion of Nef as Barbie.
Both Fox News and the Washington Examinerwrote about Christian movie review site Movieguide instructing audiences not to take children to see the upcoming movie.
From the decades-long legacy of the doll to the upcoming star-studded merchandisable movie, Barbie is a phenomenon. Social media users are flooding feeds with “Barbiecore”: hot pink outfit inspiration, adorably plastic makeup tutorials, and rankings of red carpet looks from the movie’s premiere events. There’s been an “explosion” of Barbie-themed launches selling out across the market — from frozen yogurt to shoes and clothes to couches.
Mainstream audiences simply do not hate transgender actors enough to hold back their enthusiasm for the film.
https://www.mediamatters.org/jesse-watters/fox-news-welcomes-swastika-wielding-teacher-latest-anti-trans-culture-warrior (https://www.mediamatters.org/jesse-watters/fox-news-welcomes-swastika-wielding-teacher-latest-anti-trans-culture-warrior)
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-west-coast-think-tank-helping-to-orchestrate-desantis-war-on-the-woke/
ref by an 3 23
it was the latest stop on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “where woke goes to die” tour. The focus was on higher education—specifically: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at Florida universities. The roundtable event featured speakers like Christopher Rufo, the lead architect of the GOP’s crusade against critical race theorywho is now helping to mastermind the ideological makeover of Florida’s New College. The gathering followed the by-now-standard script of education-themed right-wing grievance: DEI initiatives are a scam orchestrated by the “woke mob,” and Florida is not about to submit to them—not if the governor and his brain trust have anything to say about it.
The event would make headlines after an Axiosreporter called the official press release “propaganda” and was fired (https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/03/15/axios-reporter-ben-montgomery-fired/) as a result. But the ensuing furor over journalistic standards sidestepped what’s ultimately at stake in DeSantis’s war on the alleged woke excesses of the education establishment—a drive to deliver colleges and universities back to the rule of white male elites, and thereby turn back the clock on 75 years of progress.And at the center of this crusade is a West Coast bastion of cultural conservatism—the Claremont Institute, which served as a key intellectual recruiting ground for Donald Trump’s rise to power but has now shifted its allegiance to DeSantis.
DeSantis’s agenda was neatly distilled in the title of a new report by Claremont fellow Scott Yenor, who teaches political science at Boise State University: “Florida Universities: From Woke to Professionalism (https://dc.claremont.org/florida-universities-from-woke-to-professionalism/).” The paper was released in conjunction with theDEIroundtable, and claimed to document the unhinged course of DEI initiatives in Florida’s public university system, while also detailing steps the state can take to rein them in. Among Yenor’s recommendations: defund and dismantle all DEI offices in Florida’s colleges and universities, make collecting data on the basis of race and sex illegal, and scuttle any DEI-infused disciplines—education and law are particular targets—in favor of “science.” And that’s just the start. “From Woke to Professionalism” seeks to provide a playbook for Florida to go to war against the “reigning national civil rights regime.”
:{:{This means more than simply targeting the DEI establishment. Yenor also urges state officials to remedy what he sees as a core problem in higher education: too many women.}: State officials, he argues, should conduct civil rights investigations into academic programs, including education and nursing, in which women vastly outnumber men, while also ditching any curriculum or programs deemed “anti-male.” :{Disparate impact theory, a favorite target (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/disparate-impact/579466/) of the cultural right for its emphasis on systemic discrimination, gets repurposed here to boost the real victims of diversity policies: white men. MIRROR INVERT}:
}:
The report’s pivot away from DEI-bashing to the systematic purge of female students is part of Yenor’s ambitious proposal to correct what he sees as the damage done by feminism. Last year, he gave a speech (https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/583665-professor-sparks-outrage-by-saying-women-should-be-kept-out/) at the National Conservatism Conference in which he denounced colleges and universities as “the citadels of our gynocracy,” and derided career-oriented women as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome.” Traditionally male-dominated fields such as engineering, law, and medicine should stop trying to recruit women, he argued. The culture should return to urging women to pursue “feminine goals”—chief among them, staying home and having children in the interest of restoring strong families, and through them, a strong nation. Yenor’s bid to dragoon the nation’s women back into the separate sphere of domesticity and child-rearing is but one key directive he’s undertaken as head of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life. Together with Rufo—another Claremont scholar—Yenor has been dispatched to the Sunshine State front lines in what Claremont director Ryan Williams calls the “fight against woke leftism.” He will serve as Claremont’s new senior director of state coalitions, based in the state capital of Tallahassee.
Claremont’s leaders have marshaled so much early support behind DeSantis because they see him as a staunch ally in thwarting the alleged march of “wokeism” through virtually every American institution: the media, corporations, and education, from pre-K through college. They view DeSantis’s legislative assault on diversity and inclusion—including stripping the Walt Disney Company of some state tax breaks, reversing diversity policies, and sharply curtailing discussions of race and gender in Florida schools—as a model for right-wing activism across the country. Claremont and DeSantis both are holding forth Florida as a red-state template—a militant Republican state government providing a “blueprint” for rolling back civil rights across the country.
this tight ideological alliance explains why DeSantis’s brain trust is stocked with Claremonsters, as the think tank’s staff and fellows refer to themselves, who now play an outsized role in shaping policy. Rufo, for example, advised DeSantis on his Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits schools, colleges and businesses from teaching students and employees anything that would cause anyone to “feel guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” due to their race, color, sex or national origin. And when DeSantis orchestrated a takeover of New College, he tapped Rufo to lead the effort to remake the school as a “Hillsdale of the south,” referencing the fundamentalist Michigan college long positioned on the vanguard of right-wing culture warfare.
Even DeSantis’s new speechwriter (https://www.thebulwark.com/desantis-finds-his-voice-a-natcon-culture-warrior-who-praised-a-prominent-white-nationalist/) has Claremont ties. Nate Hochman, a rising star in the intellectual right’s amorphous coalition of culture warriors, self-proclaimed economic populists, and unabashed America firsters, is both a former Claremont intern and a fellow. Hochman, who proclaimed earlier this year that he hopes that the “Republican party agenda is going to cohere around the culture war as its organizing, totalizing force,” now will be able to bring that mandate into the forefront of DeSantis’s campaign messaging.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Claremonsters will continue chipping away at what they see as Florida’s misguided dalliances with the woke. In his road map for higher education in Florida, Yenor holds up as his model the University of California, Berkeley–in the 1950s, before the Free Speech movement and the hippies wrecked everything. The University of Florida, he writes, should be a beacon of academic freedom and meritocracy for the country, just as UC Berkeley was back then. Of course, UC Berkeley was also an elite, and almost entirely white, institution in the 1950s. Some 90 percent (https://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/karabel_report.pdf) of entering freshmen in the 1960s were white, and most hailed from families that were substantially wealthier than the typical Californian. And just one-quarter of students were women. For them, the school offered a 10-week course (https://150w.berkeley.edu/postwar-decline-women-students) on marriage, jokingly known to students as “From Courtship to Venereal Disease in Ten Easy Lessons.”
Elsewhere, Yenor has argued more explicitly that returning college to the elites should be the goal. Only 8 percent of Americans attended college as late as 1960, he pointed out in a recent op-ed (https://americanreformer.org/2023/01/higher-ed-reform/) for the Christian advocacy organization American Reformer. “The United States should move toward 8% from its current 46%.”
“Too many of the wrong sorts of people go to college” is not exactly the stuff of campaign bumper stickers. DeSantis knows this firsthand, thanks to his ill-considered effort to escalate Florida’s assault on AP African American Studies into a full-scale attack on “Advanced Placement, Inc.” No doubt DeSantis and his corps of culture warriors calculated that the entire Advanced Placement program was a ripe target in the rolling war on wokeness, but the move was a political disaster (https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/02/16/desantis-advanced-placement-parents-students-college-board-international-baccalaureate/). Parents in Florida regard AP classes not as a manufactory of left-wing ideological conformity but as a crucial path to getting their kids admitted to select colleges—and saving money when they get there. And they’re not wrong—so the politically savvy DeSantis has since moved on to other targets.
nor does Yenor’s wide-ranging campaign against the “gynocracy” seem likely to resonate with the suburban women to whom the GOP tries intermittently to appeal. As Daily Beast columnist Michael Daly pointed out (https://www.thedailybeast.com/ron-desantis-rolls-out-red-carpet-for-scott-yenor-sexist-boob-from-idaho), DeSantis’s wife, Casey, who tweeted enthusiastically about Yenor’s Tallahassee appointment, holds a BA in economics—one of the disciplines Yenor regards as subject to gynocratic infiltration. And her mother is a speech pathologist—another of the female-dominated fields that he wants dismantled.
There are also growing signs that DeSantis’s war on wokeness is losing its luster among Florida voters. A recent poll (https://www.unfporl.org/uploads/1/4/4/5/144559024/unf_mar_statewide_2023.pdf) found that his marquee bill aimed at rooting out diversity efforts in the state’s higher education system is particularly unpopular. Sixty-five percent of voters, including 38 percent of Republicans, oppose it. And as his signature issue—limiting what students can learn and teachers can teach in Florida’s public schools in the name of parent rights—becomes synonymous with book banning (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/29/ron-desantis-book-ban-florida-2024-gop-primary/), his popularity is likely to dim further.
Of course, the GOP supermajority in the Florida state legislature will continue to rubber-stamp increasingly outlandish bills on gender and diversity, regardless of whether the public supports them. Indeed, the pliant legislative body is a big reason Claremont is so bullish on Florida spearheading the nation’s return to the pre–civil rights era.
When DeSantis officially launches his candidacy, he’ll point to a long list of right-wing policy accomplishments. But using the levers of power to ram through an unpopular agenda is not the same thing as winning over hearts and minds. As he sells a retrograde vision of America with the help of a militant right-wing intellectual cadre, DeSantis is likely to learn that lesson the hard way.
Jennifer C. Berkshire (https://www.thenation.com/authors/jennifer-c-berkshire/)Jennifer C. Berkshire hosts the education podcast Have You Heard (https://soundcloud.com/haveyouheardpodcast). She is the author, with Jack Schneider, of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door (https://www.wolfattheschoolhousedoor.com/).
3 23 rww
"The left has told us something that should put fear into the heart of every parent,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene began her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday morning. “They said they’re coming for our children.” Dressed in a light pink blazer and with straightened bleach blonde hair, Greene painted (https://www.c-span.org/video/?526366-1/cpac-2023-day-2) a gruesome (and fictional) picture: a multibillion dollar industry preying on kids and eager to subject them to life-altering surgery.
“I am going to be introducing my bill, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, that will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender care on children,” she said. The crowd roared in applause.
At CPAC, held this past weekend at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in National Harbor, Maryland, trans bashing—and talking about kids’ genitals—was a main theme. Panels were dedicated to it, speakers harped on so-called “transgender ideology,” and politicians threw out one-liners about trans people when they were short on applause. CPAC is a place where rhetoric and strategy are typically tested, where politicians get a sense of what lands with their base, and this past weekend, Republican politicians eagerly deployed transphobia for their gain. As they denied trans people’s existence, CPAC’s speakers paired their attacks with efforts to galvanize the conservative base ahead of 2024 and to take over public schools.
How Did We Get Here?
The panel following Greene’s provides some insight as to how we arrived at this place. Terry Schilling of the anti-LGBTQ American Principles Project took the stage with Chloe Cole, a woman in the process of reversing her transition, and Riley Gaines, a former Division 1 swimmer at the University of Kentucky who lost races last year to Lia Thomas, a trans woman. After describing the “transgender lobby” as “evil,” Schilling belabored the state of women’s sports.
Before “grooming” rhetoric was commonplace on the right, religious-right groups like Schilling’s began peddling stories about trans girls hurting girls’ sports. But this supposed concern was never about sports. In 2020, a Right Wing Watchinvestigation (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/unsportsmanlike-the-right-wing-attack-on-transgender-women-and-children/) found that while much of the anti-trans messaging focused on sports, a coalition of religious-right groups was busy taking action, drafting legislation not only to prevent trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams, but also to prevent (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/unsportsmanlike-the-right-wing-attack-on-transgender-women-and-children-part-ii/)trans kids from receiving gender-affirming care.Called “Promise to America’s Children,” the coalition included groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, Heritage Foundation, and Family Research Council—groups that have long been dedicated to rolling back rights for LGBTQ Americans. Thanks to these groups and allied state legislators, in 2023, some 400 anti-trans bills (https://translegislation.com/) have been proposed in 42 states and 9 have passed, according to a national trans legislation tracker (https://translegislation.com/).
vid?]
"The strategy is fearmongering and propaganda,” Schuyler Bailer, a trans rights activist (https://www.pinkmantaray.com/), told Right Wing Watch. “There’s absolutely no data to support the idea that trans people are an inherent threat to children.” In fact, gender-affirming care is supported by major health institutions, Bailer noted, with the American Medical Association declaring (https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-reinforces-opposition-restrictions-transgender-medical-care) it “medically-necessary, evidence-based care that improves the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people.” But the facts aren’t what these attacks are about.
“Republicans found that when they could paint trans people as deviant, nefarious, harmful people that are going to hurt you in the bathroom or groom your children as the narrative goes, they could drive votes,” Bailer said.
Religious-right groups like Family Research Council have been explicit that their attacks on trans people are part of what they see as an election-winning strategy. “Our goal: Make the SAFE Act THE ‘wedge issue’ of the 2022 midterm elections!” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins wrote (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/family-research-council-makes-it-explicit-attacks-on-trans-youth-health-care-are-2022-election-strategy/) in a 2021 fundraising letter for FRC Action.
The Right’s Strategy on Display
The right’s strategy was on display on CPAC’s mainstage.
Sebastian Gorka—a former Trump adviser and an alleged member (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/sebastian-gorka-made-nazi-linked-vitezi-rend-proud-wearing-its-n742851) of a Nazi-cooperating political group in Hungary
(https://youtu.be/JoMiF3KzS-Y?t=142) shortly before Marjorie Taylor Greene Friday to try to fire up the nearly empty room. He focused his sights on 2024.
“We have to win it so big that this radicalized party that thinks it’s OK to have open borders, to change the Constitution, to get rid of the Supreme Court, to,” he paused for effect, “mutilate young girls and boys as sacrifices on the altar of the transgender insanity. We have to so crush them at the next election that they collapse."
[vid]
*eron Greenesmith, a researcher at Political Research Associates, told Right Wing Watch Saturday that “CPAC is showcasing the truth of the right.” “Trans people have become, once again, the recruitment tactic and fundraiser of the right,” Greenesmith said. “Trans-supportive conservatives have ceded the floor to those who advocate openly for anti-trans violence.”
As these ideas about the need to “protect” kids and women snaked their way into right-wing media, the right has expanded its messaging. Now, right-wing activists say a shadowy “gender lobby” preys on kids to turn them trans. Politicians portray drag queens reading books to kids as “grooming” children. Gay teachers are “indoctrinating” children, they say, as are diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings.
Such fearmongering is effectively being deployed by groups like Moms for Liberty, which is trying to ban books about the LGBTQ experience, and Moms for America, a conservative group that urges right-wing candidates to run (https://moms4ed.us/) for school boards (https://wset.com/news/nation-world/moms-for-america-denounces-federal-interference-on-local-school-board-issues) and claims (https://twitter.com/momsforamerica?lang=en) to have more than 500,000 members across the country. Kimberly Fletcher, president and founder of Moms for America, made it clear to the CPAC audience that it’s not just trans people her group is organizing against, but the honest teaching of the history of our nation, sex education, and the tolerance and acceptance of the LGBTQ community writ large.
At a Thursday CPAC panel titled “One Tuff Mutha,” Fletcher claimed the left was coming after children, her voice quivering as she spoke. “They’re trying to erase us as moms,” she said. “And they know historically that’s what you do—that’s what Hitler did, that’s what Mao did, that’s what Stalin did. You take the children, you win the future.”
She listed a series of fears, her voice rising at each new alleged assault: “Everything that we’re facing: The CRT—the critical race theory is racism, that’s 101, that’s what it is. The comprehensive sex education, which isteaching kindergartners how to stimulate themselves. The gender confusion, where they’re having coming out parties since the first grade, and children are coming home terrified they’re suddenly going to turn into the opposite sex.”
She called on the audience to go on “the offensive,” asking kids to record their teachers. What we really need, she said, is “a new PPP”: “parents, pastors, and people of faith uniting together to save this country, protect our kids, and reclaim our culture, and restore the republic.”
The Right’s End Goal
Beneath the fearmongering about trans people as a tool to galvanize the base ahead of 2024 and to instigate a right-wing takeover of the schools is an even more dangerous ideology and agenda: a belief that trans people do not and should not exist.
On the third and final day of CPAC, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles made that stance explicit: “The problem with transgenderism is not that it’s inappropriate for children under the age of 9,” Knowles said. “The problem with transgenderism is that it isn’t true.”
“There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism,” Knowles said. “If it is false, then for the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” The crowd erupted in applause.
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as controversy ensued, Knowles insisted that he never called for the eradication of trans people but merely the eradication of an ideology. But transness is not an ideology, and ‘transgenderism’ is simply a phony term used by anti-trans activists. Based on Knowles’ remarks at CPAC and elsewhere, the results of such a call to action is clear: eliminating so-called “transgenderism” in public life as he emphatically calls for would make it impossible for trans people to live as themselves.
“It is a call for the eradication of trans people because you can’t separate transness and trans people,” Bailer told Right Wing Watch. “You cannot take away ‘transgenderism’ and leave the person. That’s not how it works.”
Bailer said that Knowles’ comments came up in the trans support groups he guides. His clients were terrified by the statement—not so much for Knowles’ transphobia but for the reception his comments received. “The cheering of the crowd—that was really disheartening and striking to receive watching that video,” he said.
In 2020, Right Wing Watch spoke (https://t.co/QwQ4CT3k6H) to LGBTQ activist and writer Charlotte Clymer as religious-right groups and far-right politicians were attacking trans girls in sports. When asked what their goal was with such attacks, she was blunt—and prescient.
“Their goal has been to wipe out trans people from the public square from day one,” she said.
Tags: Marjorie Taylor Greene (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/marjorie-taylor-greene/) Michael Knowles (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/michael-knowles/) Sebastian Gorka (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/sebastian-gorka/) Anti-LGBTQ (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/anti-lgbtq/) transphobia (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/transphobia/) Moms for Americ (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/moms-for-america/)a
}:
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Appearing to confess frustration, far-right Republican governor Ron DeSantis (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=Ron+DeSantis) says he is remaking Florida’s education system because even after turning the state’s Democratic Party into a "rotten carcass on the side of the street," the left "can still impose their agenda on my people."
That "agenda," apparently includes so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT), Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG), and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, according to far-right Fox News host Mark Levin who told the Florida governor the right is "in a culture war."
"We didn't start it," Levin told DeSantis. "But what I call the Marxist left, they started it. It is devouring our institutions. It is devouring our politics. It's devouring the private sector."
DeSantis did not disagree.
READ MORE: 'I Struck a Nerve': Robert Reich Makes the Case for Calling Ron DeSantis a 'Fascist' (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/09/i-struck-a-nerve-robert-reich-makes-the-case-for-calling-ron-desantis-a-fascist/)
As he uses the power of his office to pave the road for a likely 2024 run for the White House, DeSantis has not gone unnoticed. He has been accused of being "an Honest-to-God Semi-Fascist (https://prospect.org/politics/altercation-ron-desantis-is-an-honest-to-god-semi-fascist/)," turning Florida into "a laboratory for fascism (https://www.salon.com/2023/02/07/florida-is-officially-a-laboratory-for-fascism-in-the-us/)," running his state "like a fascist (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/02/ron-desantis-defamation-legislation)," and being a "fascist for our time (https://theberkshireedge.com/ron-desantis-a-fascist-for-our-time/)" and a "one-man civil rights wrecking ball, determined to neutralize any group that doesn't conform to his dangerously narrow view of social order."
All those accusations were before his Sunday night Fox News interview with Levin, who warned that "in the classrooms" there is "the sexualizing of little kids." Levin also said, "Disney, Walt Disney has to be rolling in his grave right now what's happened to Disneyland and Disney World and these other events in the culture."
Asked why he decided to take "the lead in taking this on as far as governors go," DeSantis bragged, "I got reelected November 2022. Largest vote than any Republican governor [in] Florida history has got, largest vote margin any governor candidates ever got. 1.5 million votes."
"I can win by 1.5 million votes. Make the Democratic Party in our state, basically, a rotten carcass on the side of the street. And yet, the left can still impose their agenda on my people if I'm not looking after fighting ESG and other woke companies and some of the stuff going on in the universities and the schools."
"And so I think I have an understanding that these fights are far broader than just one particular election. Yes, you do have to fight the woke in the halls of government and in the legislative chambers, and we have super majorities as Republicans in Florida so we will win all those fights, but you also have to be willing to defend your folks against this agenda being shoved down their throat from all these otherinstitutions,where these people aren't necessarily coming up for election."
DeSantis has infamously veered into pushing his supporters into local school board positions of power (https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-covid-health-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-b64d994ca9f2215d4326b395c5385b2d).
"So you talk about things with like the young kids and with Disney, and I see that not just through the eyes of a governor but also through the eyes of a dad," DeSantis continued. "You know, we have a six, a four, and a two-year-old at home. And we just believe as parents, we should be able to send our kids to school, have them watch cartoons without having somebody's sexual agenda shoved down their throats."
READ MORE: 'Political Theater': Conservative Rips Ron DeSantis for 'Sucking Up to the Anti-Vaxxers' (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/12/political-theater-conservative-rips-ron-desantis-for-sucking-up-to-the-anti-vaxxers/)
"And so when this issue came up, with the sexualization of the curriculum, of course in Florida, we think that that's inappropriate. And you know what? Republican, Democrat, Independent parents agree with us overwhelmingly."
That's debatable. In October Florida Politics (https://floridapolitics.com/archives/561035-poll-majorities-oppose-ron-desantis-backed-stop-woke-and-parental-rights-laws/) reported, "Majorities oppose Ron DeSantis-backed 'Stop WOKE' and parental rights laws," including his "Don't Say Gay" law.
In January, a study by UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute (https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Dont-Say-Gay-Impact-Jan-2023.pdf) found a large percentage of LGBTQ parents say they are concerned their families will be negatively impacted by DeSantis' laws, including HB 1557, the "Don't Say Gay" law – with some saying they already have been.
"Almost 9 out of 10 (88%) LGBTQ+ parents are very or somewhat concerned about the impact that HB 1557 will have on them and their children, with one in four reporting they have experienced anti-LGBTQ harassment since the law was passed and one in five reporting becoming less out in their communities since the law was passed. Parents have considered a variety of coping strategies in response to the bill, including moving out of the state (56%) and moving their children to a different school (11%). Over 16% of LGBTQ parents have already taken steps to move their families to another state."
Watch a short clip or the full interview below or at this link (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2023/02/desantis-on-fighting-the-woke-i-made-the-democratic-party-a-rotten-carcass-yet-they-can-still-impose-their-agenda/).
an $
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/culture-war-issues-human-rights/
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President Joe Biden has yet to say whether or not he plans to seek reelection in 2024. But during his 2023 State of the Union address (https://www.alternet.org/president-joe-biden-2023-sotu/) on Tuesday night, February 7, Biden focused heavily on his economic record, bragging that unemployment in the United States is lower than it has been in more than half a century and calling out Republicans who want to "sunset" Social Security and Medicare (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/08/state-of-the-union-brings-brief-unanimity-on-social-security-medicare.html).
Biden’s speech was followed by a GOP rebuttal from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (https://www.alternet.org/sarah-huckabee/), who was the Trump Administration’s second of four White House press secretaries (Sanders came after Sean Spicer and before Stephanie Grisham). While the economy dominated Biden’s speech, Sanders’ rebuttal was clearly aimed at MAGA culture warriors. And liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his February 9 column (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/opinion/culture-war-democrats-republicans.html) for the New York Times, argues that the dramatic contrast between Democrat Biden’s speech and Republican Sanders’ response speaks volumes about the priorities of the United States’ two main political parties.
"President Biden was evidently feeling feisty on Tuesday," Krugman writes (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/opinion/culture-war-democrats-republicans.html). "In particular, he kept baiting Republicans with the suggestion that a number of them are threatening Medicare and Social Security — which they are. Delivering the Republican response, Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the United States is divided between two parties, one of which is mainly focused on bread-and-butter issues that matter to regular people, while the other is obsessed with waging culture war. This is also true. But she got her parties mixed up — Republicans, not Democrats, are the culture warriors who’ve lost touch with ordinary Americans' concerns."
READ MORE: 'Salute their flags': Sarah Huckabee Sanders appears to attack LGBTQ Americans and BLM in SOTU response (https://www.alternet.org/salute-their-flags-sotu-response/)
Sanders’ speech, according to Krugman (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/opinion/culture-war-democrats-republicans.html), was quite "revealing" — and not in a way that made the Republican Party look good.
"Sanders’ speech was a diatribe against wokeness," the New York Times columnist observes (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/opinion/culture-war-democrats-republicans.html). “This is standard GOP fare these days and exactly what you’d expect in, say, an address at the Conservative Political Action Conference. But this wasn’t a CPAC speech; it was meant to address the nation as a whole and rebut the president of the United States…. Focus groups suggest that most people don’t know what 'wokeness' means, or why they should fear it.”
Krugman continues (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/opinion/culture-war-democrats-republicans.html), "But wait, it gets worse. Sanders seemed to say — although her syntax was a bit garbled — that woke policy was responsible for 'high gas prices' and 'empty grocery shelves.' So, first of all, how does that work? How did critical race theory cause a global spike in crude oil prices, which raised prices at the pump all around the world? How did it snarl supply chains and cause a worldwide shortage of shipping containers?"
Comparing Biden and Sanders’ February 7 speeches, Krugman stresses, one saw a contrast between a Democratic president who got into concrete specifics on the U.S. economy and a Republican who didn’t.
READ MORE:Conservative mocks Sarah Sanders’ 'deep plunge into dystopian culture wars' to rebut Biden’s 'raucous' SOTU (https://www.alternet.org/joe-biden-speech-2659387772/)
"Just to be clear, there are culture warriors on the left, and some of them can be annoying even to social liberals," Krugman notes (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/opinion/culture-war-democrats-republicans.html). "But few have significant power, and they certainly don’t rule the Democratic Party, which isn’t locked into a closed mental universe, impervious to inconvenient facts, whose denizens communicate in buzzwords nobody else recognizes. Republicans, however, do live in such a universe — and what Sarah Huckabee Sanders showed us was that they can’t step outside that universe even when they should have strong political incentives to sound like normal people and pretend to care about regular Americans’ concerns."
READ MORE: 'Insulting': Right-wingers torch Sarah Huckabee Sanders' State of the Union response (https://www.alternet.org/insulting-sarah-huckabee-sanders-sotu/)
Read Paul Krugman’s full New York Times column at this link (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/opinion/culture-war-democrats-republicans.html) (subscription required)
tucker is unelected member of troll caucus
aha [amanda] earth2 = --> fascism
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The political media fascination with Rep. George Santos (https://www.salon.com/2022/12/28/george-santos-is-the-partys-future-a-shameless-con-man/), the New York Republican who appears to have faked approximately 95% of his life, is such that it was inevitable that it would draw a "savvy" backlash piece scolding the press about their priorities. The wannabe party pooper finally emerged last week at the Washington Post in an opinion column headlined, "Real people don't care about George Santos (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/26/santos-scandal-bores-americans/)." In it, self-assigned buzzkill David Byler argued "America doesn't seem to care" about Santos, which he can tell based on Google search traffic.
Our nation was founded by puritans, so as soon as people had a laugh over Santos, inevitably someone would shake their finger disapprovingly. But there were some flaws in Byler's argument, starting with his assumption that Santos' own embarrassed constituents (https://www.npr.org/2023/02/04/1153843337/george-santos-new-york-district) are not "real" people. There's also the fact that Google Trends isn't a very exacting measure of interest in a subject, as it only measures if people are searching out information. It doesn't capture people who read articles they saw on social media or directly on a news website. Traffic to stories about Santos is plenty healthy on that front.
But perhaps most importantly, this narrow-minded focus on search traffic ignores what a lot of the sneered-at political observers saw coming a mile away: The imminent George Santos makeover into MAGA's Next Top Superstar.
Santos may not matter to "average" Americans, but his story is being leveraged directly into the right-wing propaganda machine that currently controls the Republican Party. On Thursday night, for instance, Santos was sanctified into the echelon of MAGA saints by the Pope of neo-fascism himself, Tucker Carlson. In a typically dishonest segment on his wildly popular Fox News show, Carlson painted Santos as a hapless victim (https://www.mediaite.com/tv/tucker-carlson-ignores-virtually-every-george-santos-lie-to-say-the-media-covers-him-for-lying-about-playing-volleyball/) of the bigoted news media by pretending that the only thing Santos lied about was his volleyball career. (Which is one of the more minor fake careers and hobbies Santos has claimed on his resume.) Media Matters has a sample of the extremely silly diatribe (https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-gives-passionate-defense-george-santos):
It was a tissue of lies constructed to deceive the American people. There was no volleyball scholarship. There was not a single dollar of volleyball scholarship. George Santos made it all up out of whole cloth, out of thin air. George Santos is an ersatz volleyball player. A fraud, a ghoul. People voted for this man believing he had played collegiate volleyball on a scholarship and he hadn't.
And yet tonight ladies and gentlemen, this thief of volleyball glory strides the halls of the United States Congress unimpeded by law enforcement. It's like another insurrection.
Carlson doesn't really have arguments or evidence, but he does do a bang-up impression of someone sarcastically brushing aside nonsense. Except what he's brushing away is usually pretty serious stuff, such as fascist attacks on democracy, attempts to save lives during a pandemic, or, in this case, unbelievable amounts of fraud that look potentially criminal in many cases (https://www.salon.com/2023/02/02/video-shows-george-santos-fume-as-hes-confronted-with-fbi-investigation-into-alleged-dog-scam/). With Santos, the number of lies Carlson is ignoring is truly staggering. Santos lied about his resume, his religion, his marriage (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/the-everything-guide-to-george-santoss-lies.html), his family history, and claimed connections he doesn't have to the Holocaust, 9/11, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and an assassination attempt that appears fictional. It is really no exaggeration to say it's easier to list the things he hasn't lied about (his age and his birthplace in Queens).
But just as Catholic saints get their status through martyrdom, the saints of MAGAdom must get theirs through falsified tales of victimhood at the hands of "woke mobs" or the "fake news media."
People right-wingers hate are alarmed at Santos and his staggering trail of fraud. So if the "libs" have a negative reaction to Santos, in the troll-based logic that drives the modern GOP, that must mean he's their newest champion. And let's just state for the record that, while Byler may not see left-leaning news consumers as "real people," he probably wouldn't say the same about the millions of Trump voters whose entire worldview is shaped by the crap that Fox News pours into their heads every day.
Carlson didn't reach the conclusion that Santos is the latest MAGA idol all on his own. Practically from the moment that Santos's deceit was exposed by the New York Times, Steve Bannon, the Joseph Goebbels-wannabe who frequently sets the GOP agenda with his popular "War Room" podcast, was championing the pathological liar (https://www.salon.com/2023/01/20/bannon-calls-santos-bulletproof-after-photos-circulate-of-the-congressman-in-drag_partner/). Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida (https://www.salon.com/2023/01/12/they-come-for-the-fighters-gaetz-asks-santos-about-funding-as-guest-host-of-bannons-war-room/) and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (https://www.salon.com/2022/12/28/in-disarray-mtg-bashes-tulsi-gabbard-over-george-santos-interview/) have also rallied to Santos' side, claiming he's only a target because he's a "fighter." It's unclear who he has ever "fought" for besides himself, but then again, the same could be said of most MAGA figures, from Donald Trump on down.
It's not a mystery why these leaders think the right-wing audience is ready to accept Santos as the next MAGA savior. All that matters to the modern right is "owning the liberals," and who better to do that than someone who lies constantly for no apparent reason other than the sheer thrill of it?
Certainly, Santos seems to grasp that the move that will take him from a low-level con man to the ranks of the richest MAGA grifters is to lean into trolling. So he's been rolling out the standard issue liberal-owning stunts for weeks now: Flashing the white supremacist-aligned "OK" (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/did-rep-george-santos-flash-the-white-power-symbol-in-the-house-chamber) hand signal during a House vote. (He even knew how to do it so it was clear enough to photograph but so quick he could pretend later it wasn't intentional.) Wearing an assault rifle pin while playing dumb (https://www.salon.com/2023/02/03/you-cant-make-this-st-up-wear-tone-deaf-rifle-pins-amid/) about why it offends people to celebrate the preferred weapons of mass shooters. Feeding the press donuts and acting (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/31/george-santos-congress-00080229)like they had somehow become complicit in the evil by eating them. Getting into Twitter fights with drag queens (https://people.com/politics/george-santos-trixie-mattel-twitter-exchange-drag/), who are the favorite punching bag of the authoritarian right. (Santos seems to have a past as a drag queen, as well, but this is just part of a favorite right-wing trolling tactic, to recruit members of a hated minority to speak out against their own.) Dunking on former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for criticizing him by tweeting "cry about it."
Reports suggest Santos is delighted by all the negative attention he's getting in the press. An exceptionally short-lived aide recorded a conversation in which Santos was dressing him down, and right in the middle of it, Santos suddenly exclaims (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/leaked-audio-george-santos), "Don Lemon just texted me — I'm sorry, I'm listening to you — Don Lemon just texted me!" Getting his name on CNN, even during a story on how he is the worst, was just that thrilling to Santos.
Santos even hired former Steve Bannon employee and professional troll, Vish Burra, as a top aide (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/vish-burra-george-santos). Burra's defense of Santos is cynical and self-congratulatory: The lying is a form of "shitposting," which is internet speak for saying outlandish things to draw outrage and attention. For the Trumpist right, aggressive trolling is what politics is all about.
Imagining that they're outraging the left is what the GOP audience gets out of this. (No one tell them that the left's reaction to Santos is more amusement than genuine fury.) But there's an even darker reason that Carlson, Bannon, Taylor Greene, etc. have decided to rally round Santos: He's very useful as a weapon in their larger war on truth.
As with Trump, it's overly simplistic to look at these people, with their non-stop disinformation, as mere liars. Liars are people who are sincerely trying to deceive people. In many cases, it's not at all evident that right-wing audiences actually believe the asinine B.S. that is rolled out by the likes of Carlson and Bannon. For instance, the "outrage" over M&M spokescandy shoe choices (https://www.salon.com/2023/01/13/tucker-carlson-is-once-again-enraged-by-woke-mandms-lack-of-appeal/) is less sincere anger than it is a collective bit of performance art. Both Carlson and his audience merely pretend to be mad as a way to keep ironic distance from their own weird sexual hang-ups. Similarly, conspiracy theories like Trump's Big Lie are often less about true belief and more about displaying fealty to their tribe.
There's a point to right-wingers constantly saying and "believing" things they know not to be true. It's about devaluing empirical reality. Fascists want "truth" to flow from what the right-wing authority figures say is "true," not from lived experience or verifiable facts.They are trying to construct a world where facts don't matter, and only power does. The first step is getting their tribal community to agree collectively to stop distinguishing between true and false and to only claim to believe what is convenient for their leaders or their cause.
For that goal, Santos is useful. He is living the fascist dream of a man whose entire existence seems unmoored from the power of facts. If the MAGA leaders can turn him into a hero, he'd be a living exemplar of their post-truth yearnings: "Truth" can be whatever you want it to be. After all, right-wingers already hate the way facts — Trump lost the election, COVID-19 is real, LGBTQ people exist — get in the way of their desires. They just need permission to let go of that last tendril of reality and start living purely in their authoritarian fantasy world. Santos shows the way. It's unlikely he will be going away any time soon.
but recall if gubmint inherently bad/evil rubes have no expectation that it could help them [or already is, massive red state rural subsidies from blue states
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Republicans are resorting to their age-old tactic of manufactured moral outrage to distract from the fact that they have no economic agenda other than to enrich the already wealthy. It would be laughable if their culture wars didn’t have a deadly impact on people’s lives. From attacks on the right to an abortion, to the right to be transgender, to the right to study accurate history, conservative attacks on vulnerable populations have reached a fever pitch. And it’s destroying the nation.
This article was produced by Economy for All (https://independentmediainstitute.org/economy-for-all/), a project of the Independent Media Institute.
As if overturning Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court in 2022 wasn’t enough, 20 GOP state attorneys general are now targeting pharmacy chains Walgreens and CVS (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mailing-abortion-pills-could-break-law-republican-ags-tell-pharmacies-2023-02-02/) for fulfilling mail orders of the abortion drug mifepristone. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a federal agency, in January expanded availability (https://apnews.com/article/abortion-health-medication-d5fc3d5990dced69b0bf93a4760250fe) of the drug across the country. The abortion pill was relatively unknown some years ago but is now used in more than half of all abortions nationwide (https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2022/02/medication-abortion-now-accounts-more-half-all-us-abortions), likely in response to the rapidly disappearing access to surgical abortions. Now, as they go after mail-order abortion pills, Republicans are showing just how hell-bent they are on ensuring that the bodies of women (and transgender men) remain glorified baby incubators.
Republicans claim that in addition to protecting the life of a collection of fetal cells that they are determined to personify (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/us/abortion-anti-fetus-person.html), they are working in the interests of women’s health. Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey explained his opposition (https://apnews.com/article/abortion-missouri-state-government-west-virginia-united-states-us-food-and-drug-administration-a1b1a387788bb5aaa39c9ce4128d77ab) to the abortion pill in a written statement, saying he was merely “protecting the health of women and their unborn children.”
However, not only are abortion pills safer than penicillin or Viagra (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/07/10/abortion-pill-restricted-fda-record-safer-than-penicillin-viagra/5412810002/), but going through pregnancy and childbirth is far more dangerous (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-abortion/abortion-safer-than-giving-birth-study-idUSTRE80M2BS20120123) to women’s health than aborting a fetus. According to a New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/24/well/mind/abortion-access-mental-health.html) report on one study of the effects of abortion restrictions on women, “Women who were denied an abortion and gave birth reported more chronic headaches or migraines, joint pain and gestational hypertension compared with those who had an abortion.” Furthermore, “They also reported more life-threatening complications like eclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage, and burdens that included higher exposure to domestic violence and increased poverty.” (It is a wonder that some of us choose to have children at all.)
The GOP’s war on transgender people has also gained steam (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/us/politics/transgender-laws-republicans.html).Just as Republicans are determined to control the bodies of people who want to terminate pregnancies, they are battling the right of transgender people to transition via surgeries, hormone supplements, or other gender-affirming medical treatments. It’s a shocking attack on people’s right to be who they want and need to be—one that targets young people in particular.
Again, the right wing uses concerns over health as cover for its attacks on human rights. For example, GOP lawmakers in Texas (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/republican-states-aim-to-restrict-transgender-health-care-in-first-bills-of-2023) have introduced 35 anti-LGBTQ bills, three of which would view medical care as child abuse. But, even though the vast majority of the anti-LGBTQ bills that are introduced fail to become law (https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-foundation-state-equality-index-91-of-anti-lgbtq-bills-in-2022-failed-to-become-law), according to the Trevor Project (https://www.thetrevorproject.org/blog/new-poll-emphasizes-negative-impacts-of-anti-lgbtq-policies-on-lgbtq-youth/), the debate itself is deeply traumatizing for young people. The organization found that “86% of transgender and nonbinary youth say recent debates around anti-trans bills have negatively impacted their mental health.” It has further encouraged bullying, and the risk of suicide.
Writing in the Nation (https://www.thenation.com/article/society/transgender-abortion-rights-attacks/), Amy Littlefield and Heron Greenesmith point out how “The right is deploying tactics against trans rights that are eerily similar to those mounted against abortion rights over the past five decades.” It’s the same Republican playbook over and over: claim that attacks on vulnerable people are in their own best interests to distract from the fact that the party has no actual plan to make people’s lives truly better.[b/c that wd PO olig and corps]
Like the attacks on abortion and transgender rights, Republicans are also so worried about the supposed harm to students of American history that their third major battlefront is educational courses that question white supremacy and its impact. Claiming they are fighting a college-level academic approach to history called critical race theory (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/so-much-buzz-but-what-is-critical-race-theory), GOP leaders such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are busy banning books (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/books/book-bans-libraries.html) and classes at all levels of education. DeSantis’s latest assault is a ban on a new AP-level high school African American studies course (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/us/desantis-florida-ap-african-american-studies.html) that the College Board spent years devising and is set to pilot in 60 schools across the country.
The pushback by DeSantis and his allies has already yielded results. The College Board seemingly capitulated (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/us/college-board-advanced-placement-african-american-studies.html) and sanitized the AP course, paring back mentions of Black feminism, queer theory, and the Black Lives Matter movement and replacing it with a new section on Black conservatism.
The move came at the same time that congressional Republicans took aim at Representative Ilhan Omar (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/us/politics/ilhan-omar-house-committee-republicans.html) (D-MN), unceremoniously stripping her of membership in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy justified his ousting of Omar from the committee over her alleged antisemitism (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kevin-mccarthy-says-will-remove-ilhan-omar-committee-assignment-antisemitism-speaker) because she has criticized the state of Israel. Never mind that criticism of Israel is not equivalent to racist attacks on Jews; two of the GOP’s own representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/06/politics/republican-paul-gosar-white-nationalists-kfile/index.html) (R-AZ), whose antisemitism is well documented (https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/28/mcconnell-greene-gosar-white-nationalist-event-00012401), are now poised to regain (https://www.npr.org/2023/01/25/1151335616/mccarthy-democrats-schiff-swalwell-intelligence-committee-assignments) their committee seats.
In a speech (https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/02/02/ilhan-omar-foreign-affairs-committee-house-floor-vpx.cnn) on the House floor, Omar rightly pointed out that the Republican attack was about “who gets to be an American.” She called out the GOP for its earlier culture war aimed at the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and for spreading rumors (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/us/politics/ilhan-omar-house-committee-republicans.html) that he was a secret Muslim and not a natural born U.S. citizen.
The message that emerges from the conservative party is that those who are not either straight, white, cisgender men, or in service of white supremacist patriarchy, had better fall in line or face prohibition and the threats of violence.
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are busy readying their pitchforks over the federal government’s debt, hoping to extract austerity measures (https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2023/01/24/gop-social-security-medicare-debt-limit/) in exchange for their support to raise the debt ceiling. According to the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2023/01/24/gop-social-security-medicare-debt-limit/), “the party has focused its attention on slimming down federal health care, education, science and labor programs, perhaps by billions of dollars.” And, some have “pitched a deeper examination of entitlements,” which is a euphemistic way of saying they want cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Aggressively bombarding women, transgender people, Black people, immigrants, and people of color over their bodily autonomy and their gender and racial identity is a tactic that Republicans hope will keep conservative voters loyal to the GOP and lets them off the hook on regressive economic policies. It’s a classic bait and switch—one that we ought not to fall for.
an badash 1 23
From electric vehicles (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/this-is-toyotas-boldest-ev-rebranding-exercise-yet/2023/01/30/7d1af020-a063-11ed-8b47-9863fda8e494_story.html) to cosmetics (https://cosmeticsbusiness.com/news/article_page/Avons_boldest_and_most_expensive_rebrand_yet_People_were_saying_it_feels_a_bit_dated/206491), and even the word “mummy (https://observer.com/2023/01/museums-rebrand-mummy-as-mummified-persons-to-humanize-egyptian-remains/),” there is a lot of rebranding going on (https://www.axios.com/2023/01/26/the-rise-of-corporate-rebranding).
Bowing to anger from right-wingers and conservative commentators, M&M’s decided to rebrand the decades-old multi-colored candies after outrage over its latest addition, purple, and its new “spokescandy,” also named “Purple.”
“Roughly a year ago, Mars Wrigley updated the look of its M&M’s characters (https://www.mars.com/news-and-stories/articles/mms-creating-a-more-inclusive-world), announcing an initiative to make the mascots fit a ‘more dynamic, progressive world.’ As part of these changes, the company introduced new designs of some of M&M’s characters and wrote weirdly elaborate backstories (https://twitter.com/kelsaywhat/status/1617576474701357056) for others. Most notably, the company made the green M&M less ‘sexy’ (https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22893919/green-mms-change-mars-candy) by shortening her legs and replacing her high-heeled boots with sneakers,” Vox Media’s Polygon (https://www.polygon.com/23567793/m-and-m-spokescandies-controversy-explained-shoe-change-green-tucker-carlson) reported last week.
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson infamously has waged war on the “woke” spokescandies, declaring at one point, “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous.”
Fast forward to now: Actress and comedian Maya Rudolph is their new spokesperson, although the “spokescandies,” perhaps after some additional rebranding, will be returning in a new ad on Super Bowl Sunday.
Which brings us to the rebranding of another icon: Jesus Christ.
He too will be part of the Super Bowl Sunday ads.
READ MORE: Trump-Aligned Christian Nationalist Group ‘Taps Into Unholy Well’ That Threatens Democracy (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2023/01/trump-aligned-christian-nationalist-group-taps-into-unholy-well-that-threatens-democracy/)
Over the next three years a $1 billion mostly-dark-money campaign – which reportedly will include funds from billionaire right wing anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ funder (https://www.advocate.com/religion/2019/3/19/christian-foundation-huge-funder-anti-lgbtq-hate-groups) David Green (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=%22David+Green%22), the founder of Hobby Lobby – will promote Jesus in ads, including during the Super Bowl on February 12. Those two Super Bowl ads to “to redeem Jesus’ brand” will cost $20 million, Religion News Service (https://religionnews.com/2023/01/26/he-gets-us-organizers-hope-to-spend-1-billion-to-promote-jesus-will-anyone-care/) reports.
The campaign to promote Jesus includes $100 million in ads declaring “He Gets Us,” from “the Servant Foundation, an Overland Park, Kansas, nonprofit that does business as The Signatry (https://thesignatry.com/press/bill-high-fnc/),” RNS adds.
The “donors backing the campaign have until recently remained anonymous — in early 2022, organizers only told Religion News Service that funding came from ‘like-minded families who desire to see the Jesus of the Bible represented in today’s culture with the same relevance and impact He had 2000 years ago.'”
But the full list of donors remains unknown.
“Jason Vanderground, president of Haven, a branding firm based in Grand Haven, Michigan, that is working on the ‘He Gets Us’ campaign, confirmed that the Greens are one of the major funders, among a variety of donors and families who have gotten behind it.”
READ MORE: Pelosi Attack Video Release Leads to Criticism of Musk, Right Wingers Who ‘Trafficked in Homophobic Conspiracy Nonsense’ (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2023/01/pelosi-attack-video-release-leads-to-criticism-of-musk-right-wingers-who-trafficked-in-homophobic-conspiracy-nonsense/)
In a Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/12/he-gets-us-christians-jesus/) interview last year, Vanderground “said Christians see their faith as the greatest love story, but those outside the faith see Christians as a hate group.”
But rather than try to convince self-identified followers of Christ to act as Jesus would want, right-wing interests are spending $1 billion to convince others of what Christianity is supposed to be about.
“Our research shows that many people’s only exposure to Jesus is through Christians who reflect him imperfectly, and too often in ways that create a distorted or incomplete picture of his radical compassion and love for others,” Vanderground told The Washington Post. “We believe it’s more important now than ever for the real, authentic Jesus to be represented in the public marketplace as he is in the Bible.”
Some are not impressed, and are more-or-less asking, “What would Jesus do?”
“They are latching on to this touchy-feely, conveniently vague, designer Jesus,” podcaster, author, and secular activist Seth Andrews told RNS. Andrews “poses the question of what Jesus would think of the amount of money spent on the ads. Would he prefer that the money be spent on ministering to people’s physical needs or making the world a better place?”
READ MORE: McCarthy Sat for an Interview With Trump Jr. – One Bragged About an ‘Illegal’ Act, One Wished His Dad Would ‘Show Some’ Love (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2023/01/mccarthy-sat-for-an-interview-with-trump-jr-one-bragged-about-an-illegal-act-one-wished-his-dad-would-show-some-love/)
“Or would he say, no, go ahead and spend $100 million to tell everybody how great I am?”
On-air, CNN said, “at first blush, it can all read like a stand against radical right-wing politics and related divisiveness,” but adds that “some are calling this a ‘right-wing stunt for politics.'”
“‘He Gets Us’ is funded by anonymous donors acting through a Kansas non-profit linked to staunchly conservative causes,” CNN’s report (video below) notes, saying it “raises alarms for some skeptics.”
Watch CNN’s report below or at this link (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2023/01/1-billion-campaign-from-group-linked-to-staunchly-conservative-causes-will-try-to-redeem-jesus-brand-in-super-bowl-ads/).
an 12 22
Far-right Republican culture warriors have a long history of becoming deeply upset over things that, unlike health care, the economy or foreign policy, have absolutely no effect on voters’ lives.Fox News’ Sean Hannity, in 2009, was relentlessly mocked by his critics after throwing a temper tantrum because then-President Barack Obama put Dijon mustard on a hamburger (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hannity-attacks-obama-for_n_198851). During the 2012 GOP presidential primary, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/excusez-moi-gingrich-may-also-speak-french/) insisted that now-Sen. Mitt Romney (who ultimately won the nomination) wasn’t a true conservative because he spoke French.
In 2014, Fox News pundits were outraged because Obama wore a tan suit (https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/28/politics/barack-obama-tan-suit-fifth-anniversary/index.html) during a news conference.
The U.S. has had two different presidents since Obama left the White House, but one thing that hasn’t changed since then is the ability of far-right GOP culture warriors to become outraged over unimportant things. In a late December edition of the Daily Beast’s podcast “The New Abnormal,” host Andy Levy and Media Matters’ Andrew Lawrence look back on some of the “dumbest” and “silliest” things that “triggered” and outraged Republicans (https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-most-absurd-republican-temper-tantrums-this-year?ref=home) and right-wing media pundits in 2022.
READ MORE: Watch: Candace Owens self-rationalizes 'healthy discrimination' against 'men that paint their nails' (https://www.alternet.org/candace-owens-self-rationalizes-discrimination/)
“Conservatives get triggered over the darndest things,” the Daily Beast says in a description of the podcast. “From Lizzo playing a Founding Father’s flute to a gay PDA in a Disney movie, 2022 was full of right-wing outrage so dumb that ‘The New Abnormal’ politics podcast host Andy Levy and Media Matters’ deputy director of rapid response Andrew Lawrence decided to round up the most ‘offensive’ instances in the show’s latest episode.”
Levy and Lawrence noted that a long list of right-wing media figures, including Ben Shapiro, became furious when R&B/hip-hop star Lizzo played James Madison’s flute. Lawrence explained, “She’s incredibly talented, and all it was just a Black woman playing James Madison’s flute that no one knew existed. It just sent them off the deep end…. Three or four days that we waste just talking about this nonsense.”
Levy noted that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson was outraged over an M&Ms commercial, angrily claiming that the commercial was making the female cartoon characters more “androgynous.” And Lawrence interjected, “It’s so silly. It’s so ridiculous. But it feeds into — you know, especially with Tucker Carlson — the whole gender roles and masculinity is disappearing is such a huge part of his program. And those kind of insecurities are what he feeds into to draw viewers to his show.”
Lawrence added, “For the rest of us, it’s just silly…. The rest of the country is: Who cares?.... But if you’re a conservative and you’re looking for something to get angry about, this fits. It gives them something to be angry about.”
READ MORE:Gavin Newsom pushes national Democrats to turn up the heat in culture-war battles: report (https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/gavin-newsom-pushes-national-democrats)
Levy and Lawrence both stressed that as “silly” and “dumb” as right-wing media pundits can be, their “nontroversies” fit into the us-versus-them narrative that Fox News and other media outlets are pushing.
Lawrence told Levy, “All of these things are dumb and they’re silly, and they’re good to make fun of. But they all have sort of a deeper cultural meaning and a much more dangerous cultural meaning.”
READ MORE:'Violation of my constitutional rights': Newsmax host attacks drag queens while defending Donald Trump (https://www.alternet.org/newsmax-host-drag-queens-rights/)
an ah 12 22
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top White House medical adviser to President Joe Biden and long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has been serving in the United States’ federal government since the late 1960s. Fauci, who will be celebrating his 82nd birthday on December 24, 2022, has been in the United States’ federal government since the late 1960s. And he has never had a problem serving under conservative Republican presidents, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
The younger President Bush, in fact, had nothing but praise for Fauci when he presented him with the 2008 Presidential Medal of Freedom. (https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/06/images/20080619-24_p061908db-0104-515h.html)
But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci became a major target of the MAGA movement. Countless MAGA culture warriors, consumed with identity politics, have turned hating Fauci into a popular pastime. Tesla CEO and new Twitter own Elon Musk, who supported President Joe Biden in 2020 but often sounds very MAGA in his rhetoric, bashed the retiring NIAID director when, on December 11 (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601894132573605888), he tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” [// desantis BS]
READ MORE: Elon Musk dethroned as richest man in the world: report (https://www.alternet.org/elon-musk-2658958396/)
Many Twitter users have been calling Musk out for that tweet. But liberal Washington Post opinion columnist Greg Sargent, in his December 13 column (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/12/musk-fauci-right-wing-information-warfare-how-to-respond/), stresses that Musk is unfazed by such critics because his motivation is appealing to the “right-wing information ecosystem.”
“By now, it should be obvious that for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself,” Sargent explains. “In the brutal competition of the so-called attention economy, provoking large-scale outrage and loathing is not an incidental feature of making controversial arguments. It has become a key marker of success.”
Sargent continues, “Over the weekend, Elon Musk called for the prosecution of Anthony S. Fauci, the leading infectious-disease expert in the Biden Administration. 'My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,' Musk tweeted, mocking transgender people for good measure. Musk then endorsed a complicated right-wing conspiracy theory about Fauci’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Democrats and other Musk critics reacted with an explosion of outrage.”
Twitter users who vigorously defended Fauci against Musk ranged from Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota (https://twitter.com/amyklobuchar/status/1601972027727945728) to former CIA Director John O. Brennan (https://twitter.com/JohnBrennan/status/1601949081189900288). The latter told Musk, “Dr. Fauci is a national hero who will be remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness & many contributions to public health. Despite your business success, you will be remembered most for fueling public hate & divisions. You may have money, but you have no class.”
READ MORE:How Elon Musk is positioning himself as a 'hard-right culture warrior': journalists (https://www.alternet.org/elon-musk-twitter-2658957418/)
Sargent stresses, however, that while Brennan and Klobuchar’s defenses of Fauci are “reasonable,” they also “seem fundamentally out of touch with basic realities of how right-wing information warfare really works.”
“This sort of info-warring, at bottom, is what characterizes Musk’s transformation into the world’s richest right-wing troll,” Sargent explains. “Tons of pixels have been wasted on efforts to pin down Musk’s true beliefs, but whatever they are, we can say right now that he’s consciously exploiting fundamental features of the right-wing information ecosystem.”
Sargent adds that offending liberals is the whole point of an “info-warring” tweet like Musk’s December 11 attack on Fauci.
“It’s understandable that Musk’s critics are trying shaming and outrage, in that this could further drive advertisers away from Twitter,” Sargent writes. “But paradoxically, it might also help Musk…. In much of the right-wing info-ecosystem, liberal outrage is a sign of an attack’s effectiveness. It can be only confirmation that the Libs Were Owned. Shaming is useless in such an environment, and in some ways can backfire.”
READ MORE:Elon Musk’s epic bumbling is a daily reminder that America is not a meritocracy (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/elon-musk)
"tastes like I'd rather be fat': GOP senator wails about kale and yoga mats while calling Democrats 'berserk' (https://www.alternet.org/2022/12/john-kennedy-kale-democrats-berserk/)
Brandon Gage (https://www.alternet.org/author/brandongage)
United States Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) railed against "high-IQ stupid people" and "wokers" during a speech at a campaign stop for Georgia's scandal-plagued Republican...
https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/sen-john-kennedy/
call crackhead for help ad
girl athletes recall rt xian natl are fine with big gubmint to go after enemy or threat
https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/florida-history-of-mentrual-periods/
less gender more ranger, chuck norris
an 8 22
Last Thursday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was the featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas. His speech glittered (https://miniszterelnok.hu/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-at-the-opening-of-cpac-texas/) with antisemitic, homophobic, and white supremacist rhetoric including “replacement theory." Orbán even railed against a “mixed-race world," and his address was met with a standing ovation by the audience.
CPAC itself was a weekend jam-packed with right-wing lawmakers and celebrities including former President Donald Trump, who overwhelmingly won its 2024 presidential straw poll.
But according to conservative columnistMax Boot, Orbán's keynote appearance at CPAC's opening night personified the Republican Party's abdication of liberal democracy.
READ MORE: [Donald Trump dominates 2024 CPAC straw poll (https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/donald-trump-dominates-straw-poll/)
"Something profound has changed in recent years," Boot wrote in an editorial in Monday's (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/07/vicktor-orban-republican-party-cpac-dallas-new-fascism/)Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/07/vicktor-orban-republican-party-cpac-dallas-new-fascism/). "Ten years ago this month, Republicans nominated a national ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan, a centrist former governor and a budget policy wonk. Now we have the coup-coup caucuscheering Viktor Orbán. This is the Trump effect: The former president has made the marginal into the mainstream of the Republican Party, and vice versa."
The evidence of the GOP's descent into fascism, Boot explained, is unmistakable.
"Republicans are nominating far-right fanatics who claim that the 2020 presidential election — and any election that they lose, for that matter — was 'rigged.' By refusing to accept electoral defeat, they embrace authoritarianism," Boot said, noting that candidates for secretaries of state in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/us/politics/gop-election-deniers-trump-arizona-michigan.html) "deny the legitimacy" of President Joe Biden's landslide victory over Trump.
"Two of those candidates, Arizona secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem and Pennsylvania governor nominee Doug Mastriano, were outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. If elected, they are no more likely to certify a Democratic victory in 2024 than they are to embrace critical race theory," Boot noted. "Meanwhile, most House Republicans who voted to impeach (https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/02/politics/primary-election-results-arizona-michigan-missouri-2022/index.html) Trump for inciting an insurrection are being driven out of Congress. Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer was the latest to lose a primary (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-republicans-who-voted-to-impeach-trump-face-primaries/2022/08/02/0cf13578-1244-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_10) last week to a proponent of the 'big lie.'"
READ MORE: Trump at CPAC: 108 minutes in speech filled with 'unapologetic fascism': report (https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/trump-at-cpac/)
Trump-backed hopefuls for governorships and United States Senate are also attempting to out-MAGA each other.
"Guns have become a de rigueur accessory in GOP campaign commercials (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/31/republicans-guns-ads-posts/?itid=lk_inline_manual_13). Arizona U.S. Senate nominee Blake Masters wants to lock up (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/opinion/blake-masters-arizona-senate.html) Anthony S. Fauci for trying to slow the spread of COVID-19. And Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake wants to lock up (https://twitter.com/jeremyduda/status/1444484819312787459?s=20) her opponent for certifying Biden’s election victory," Boot continued. "Masters and Ohio U.S. Senate nominee J.D. Vance are both bankrolled (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/peter-thiel-2022-elections-blake-masters-jd-vance/?itid=lk_inline_manual_14) by tech tycoon Peter Thiel, who has concluded that freedom and democracy aren’t 'compatible (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-prince-curtis-yarvin).' Thiel’s 'house political philosopher (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets)' is far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who is also close to (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/opinion/blake-masters-arizona-senate.html) Masters and Vance. Yarvin has mused that we may need an 'American Caesar (https://theweek.com/politics/1003035/the-far-right-contemplates-an-american-caesa)' to take control of the federal government. Trump is auditioning for the role; his henchmen are plotting (https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-presidency-schedule-f-federal-employees) to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with ultra-MAGA loyalists in 2025."
Boot then lamented that "the libertarian-leaning Republican Party I grew up with in the 1980s is long gone and not coming back." The party, Boot added, has weaponized the concept of freedom to further its extremist agenda.
He pointed out that GOP voters at large "want Americans to be free to carry weapons of war or spread deadly diseases but not to terminate a pregnancy or discuss gender or sexuality in school," and that "Republicans, once suspicious of government power, are now eager to use it to impose their agenda."
Boot alluded to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – widely believed to be eyeing a presidential run in 2024 – as an example of how far the GOP has strayed from the mainstream and its "small government" credo.
DeSantis, Boot said, "is establishing his culture-war credentials by, most recently, suspending (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/04/desantis-suspends-democratic-elected-prosecutor-who-signed-pledge-abortion-transgender-cases/?itid=lk_inline_manual_18) an elected prosecutor who vowed not to 'criminalize personal medical decisions,' such as abortion or 'gender-affirming healthcare.' DeSantis even threatened (https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/conservatives-reveal-what-they-mean) to investigate parents who take their kids to drag shows."
Boot concluded his piece by recommending a new label for what the Republican Party has become.
"The most apt phrase for this American authoritarianism is the New Fascism, and it is fast becoming the dominant trend on the right," Boot wrote. He also warned that "if the GOP gains power in Washington, all of America will be in danger of being Orbánized."
READ MORE:DeSantis called out for political double standard on enforcing laws: 'Better start suspending those people too' (https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/ron-desantis-slammed-for-political-double-standard-on-enforcing-laws/)
an 6 22
many twt
'Manufacturing hysteria’: Activist who weaponized CRT tells conservatives to make drag queens ‘more lurid’
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement June 18, 2022
Christopher Rufo, the far right activist who intentionally turned a college-level school of thought to examine social structures for systemic racism into a fear-mongering right-wing nationwide panic, is now focusing his attacks on LGBTQ people, by effectively weaponizing transgender identity.
Rufo, a senior fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, is the man behind the right’s false panic and fury over CRT, Critical Race Theory. He’s bragged he wants to “have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” and “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”
Now he’s applying that model to attack the LGBTQ community – especially transgender people and drag queens.
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Rufo wants the right to turn a commonly used phrase, “drag queen,” one that many people both gay and straight use to refer to themselves, into something “more lurid” and sexual.
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“Conservatives should start using the phrase ‘trans stripper’ in lieu of ‘drag queen,'” Rufo said openly Friday on Twitter, despite drag queens not generally being transgender. “It has a more lurid set of connotations and shifts the debate to sexualization.”
He thinks the 1.6 million people across America who identify as transgender should be victims of his weaponization of their very being.
Rufo knows what he’s doing is twisting language into an attack, and admits that when he uses the word “trans” people think “transgender,” but he outright states: “we can say that ‘trans’ is a stand-in for ‘transvestite,'” which is a word not commonly used in decades.
it's a spiritual/ culture war? kids are target? troll caucus goes 1st and worst?
aha/hmmn gop /troll backlash against woke corps (nfl, sedition caucus) but mickey an odd enemy? just recycle of smurf commie moral panic BS? the big lie relies on outragousness? qanon cannibal pedophiles? wedge issues pink pill work well 2022, all they have?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/ted-cruz-complains-lesbian-toys/
buzz disney
https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/robert-reich-gop-culture-wars/
Former United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich posted a new video on Tuesday in which he enumerated the parallels between Russian President Vladimir Putin's propaganda and the messaging emanating from the GOP and its media pundits.
"Why do Putin and the Republican Party sound so much alike? Simple," Reich began. "Their culture wars have similar agendas. Both are trying to distract attention from the economic looting by their respective oligarchies."
Reich explained that figures like ex-President Donald Trump, Fox News stooge Tucker Carlson, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), and the right-wing at large have a vested interest in keeping the American population divided because their ultimate collective goal is total economic domination.
"Sowing racism, homophobia, and transphobia creates life-or-death dangers for many people in our society. For both Putin and the American right, it serves to divert attention from the economic plunder by the ultra-rich," he said "They want people to fear one another rather than unite behind higher wages, better working conditions, and a fairer economy — and against authoritarianism."
Reich then offered some advice on what can be done about it.
"To fight back, we must fight widening inequality while defending marginalized communities from these demagogues’ attacks. The real threat is not diverse identities – it’s corporate greed and political corruption," Reich concluded. "We have to see the culture wars waged by Putin and America’s right for the cynical strategies they are, and build a future in which prosperity is widely shared."
Watch below:
(https://youtu.be/_-nO8cBD79k)
3 22 digby
no lnx
Former president Donald Trump had another of his interminable rallies this weekend. He said the usual things delighting his South Carolina crowd and boring the rest of us into a coma. This time, however, he did add one memorable new line to the script which got people's attention:
As we watch the horrific carnage unfolding in Ukraine and the repressive crack down in Russia, comments like that are all the more chilling. He truly does want to emulate Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. As the Washington Post reported recently, he has repeated his earlier admiration for Kim's "total control" as well:
He espoused praise for North Korea's brutal leader, marveling at how Kim's generals and aides "cowered" when the dictator spoke to them. "Total control," Trump said of how Kim ran the country, describing generals snapping to attention and standing up on command. "His people were sitting at attention," he added. "I looked at my people and said I want my people to act like that."
I have little doubt that if he wins another term, he will be much worse than he was in the first. He won't make the mistake of hiring people who might stand in his way a second time.
However, as we know, Trump isn't really serious about governing and wouldn't know how to do it efficiently even if he were. It doesn't make him any less dangerous, of course. His chaotic narcissism can do as much damage as a serious ideological authoritarian could. But he's laid out a style template for someone who is serious, showing them exactly the attitude that appeals to the MAGA base. And nobody in GOP politics is as ready to seize the mantle as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump 2.0.
The personality and affect have been evident since DeSantis won the governor's seat back in 2018. The Trumpian pettiness, the contempt, the reflexive hostility seem to come naturally to him. He treats the press like dirt and thinks insults are the highest form of humor. If he has any personal warmth or human compassion it's certainly well hidden. He even gestures like Trump.
But with DeSantis, it's more than just style. He's got the Republicans in Florida working together like clockwork to enact the most authoritarian agenda in the country, calibrated perfectly to appeal to the base in advance of his re-election campaign --- and a potential presidential run in 2024.
Florida has been at the leading edge of COVID denialism from the very beginning, but in recent days DeSantis and his hand-picked science-denying surgeon general have taken it to a new level. They had already turned masks into a battleground with the governor taking it upon himself earlier this month to scold high school kids for wearing them in his presence, declaring that it's time to end the "COVID theatre." This was ironic since it turned out that many of the kids had been told by their parents to wear them and DeSantis' numerous assaults on education over the past year have been rationalized as a defense of "parental rights." Then last week the surgeon general went even further, defying the CDC and most physicians by recommending that kids not get vaccinated for COVID-19. DeSantis and his medical henchman seem determined to keep the virus circulating as long as they can.
Meanwhile, the legislative season just coming to a close has produced such an astonishing array of right-wing culture war victories delivering on Desantis' "anti-woke" agenda that it's hard to know where to start. Building on last year's education wrecking ball in which they banned Critical Race Theory from schools despite the fact that they were not teaching it, instituted a requirement that schools teach about the "evils of communism" and passed a higher education law that allows for budget cuts to colleges based on student and faculty surveys about "viewpoint diversity" (which DeSantis defines as "indoctrination") this year they took it to a whole new level. Salon's Amanda Marcotte offered this tart analysis of the "Stop WOKE Act" "
The legislature also passed the "Stop WOKE Act," which bars both schools and businesses from having any training or program that supposedly causes an "individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin." This has been largely covered as a ban on any kind of diversity training, but it's even more expansive than that. As I note in Friday's Standing Room Only newsletter, conservatives can also block anti-sexual harassment trainings by claiming it's guilt-tripping men to tell them that ass-pinching is not allowed in the workplace.
The "fuck your feelings" crowd sure are sensitive snowflakes, aren't they?
Maximum leader DeSantis also got his wish for a first in the nation election police force which will report directly to him. I've got a tip for them: it turns out that the Republican Party in south Florida changed the registrations of hundreds of Democrats to Republican without their permission. That's a crime. In fact, DeSantis might end up regretting this one. If the election police are on the level (which is unlikely, I know) it's almost certain they will be putting many more Republicans behind bars than Democrats. Even Trump's Chief of Staff just blatantly committed it in the last election.
And then there is the grotesque "Don't Say Gay" law which prohibits teachers from discussing the subject in grades K-3. But because it uses the new vigilante system of civil law harassment, and is written so poorly, it will result in a chilling effect on all school districts and will result in small kids with gay parents being treated like aliens and many LGBTQ kids being shoved in the closet. If you doubt their intentions, just listen to DeSantis' vile press secretary:
Those of you who are of a certain age will hear the echoes of one of Florida's original homophobic crusaders Anita Bryant whose "Save Our Children" campaign was based upon the noxious lie that gays were "recruiting" the nice Christian children of the sunshine state.
Under pressure, the CEO of Disney, the state's largest employer and a major DeSantis donor belatedly objected to the bill and spoke to the Governor about it. DeSantis didn't budge and Disney announced that they will be suspending all political donations in the state of Florida after which the governor had a full blown meltdown:
Florida Republicans believe these Commie Symp mega corporations have no right to criticize them.
There was a time when business property rights were sacrosanct in the GOP as a matter of principle. But in the new authoritarian right, if a business doesn't toe their bigoted line, the government "won't stand for it."
Donald Trump is still likely to get the nomination and we can only hope and pray he doesn't win. His dictatorial impulses are well known. But Ron DeSantis is the future of the Republican Party and he's figured out how to take all that right-wing hate and grievance and put it into practice. You don't want to know what he could do on a national level.
an ah 1 22
arizona’s political landscape has changed considerably from what it was 30 or 40 years ago. On one hand, Arizona — once a deep red state that was synonymous with the GOP conservatism of Sen. Barry Goldwater and his successor, Sen. John McCain — has evolved into a swing state. But on the other hand, Arizona’s far right has become increasingly dangerous. And Arizona-based journalist Katya Schwenk describes some of those dangers in an article published by the Phoenix New Times (https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/wave-of-far-right-legislation-from-arizona-lawmakers-alarms-civil-rights-groups-12793881) on January 11.
The fact that Arizona has become more Democrat-friendly than it was in the past is evident in some statewide victories of the late 2010s and early 2020s. The state now has two Democratic U.S. senators: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Sen. Mark Kelly. And President Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020’s presidential election. But Arizona still isn’t a deep blue state like California or Massachusetts. Gov. Doug Ducey is a conservative Republican, and Sinema and Kelly are centrists. Sinema, a frequent source of frustration to Democratic progressives, has often praised McCain as her hero and is on very friendly terms with his daughter: GOP activist Meghan McCain, formerly of the popular ABC talk show “The View.”
Meanwhile, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party is Kelli Ward, a far-right MAGA extremist who hated John McCain and considered him a RINO: Republican In Name Only. Ward is so far to the right that if Goldwater were a young Republican in 2022, she would surely consider him a liberal or a RINO — which is ironic in light of the fact that during the 1960s and 1970s, Goldwater was considered an arch-conservative.
Ward is hardly the only MAGA Republican in Arizona who is pushing an extremist agenda. Anti-vaxxer Kari Lake (https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/kari-lake/), who appears to the frontrunner in Arizona’s 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary, is right out of the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Lauren Boebert school of MAGA lunacy. And as Schwenk’s article shows, some Republicans in the Arizona State Legislature are becoming increasingly unhinged.
Schwenk explains, “Felony charges for providing healthcare for transgender youth, a statewide ‘Donald J. Trump Day’ holiday, hundreds of millions in funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall — these are just a few bills that the Arizona legislature will be considering in the coming months…. Whether such legislation will successfully wind its way through House and Senate committees is more of an unknown. Although Republicans hold a trifecta in Arizona — control of both chambers and the governor’s office — their majorities in both the House and the Senate are relatively slim.”
Nonetheless, the fact that MAGA Republicans are even proposing such bills in the first place is troubling. Darrell Hill, policy director for the Arizona American Civil Liberties Union, told the Phoenix New Times, “We’re seeing a lot of ‘culture war’ bills, a lot of bills that would impact the civil rights of Arizonans — and we’re worried.”
Democrat Rebecca Rios, former minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives, told the New Times, “The current Arizona GOP have turned into extremists who care more about attacking democracy, attacking our teachers and schools, and working on bills like ‘Donald Trump Day.’”
One of the extremist bills sponsored by Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers, a MAGA Republican and member of the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers (https://american-ledger.com/public-safety/arizona-gop-state-senate-candidate-wendy-rogers-member-of-extremist-oath-keepers-militia/), is Arizona Senate Bill 1047. If it passed, Schwenk notes, “Schools could face thousands in civil penalties if they do not display American flags in every classroom and recite the pledge of allegiance.”
“It’s already law in Arizona that public schools must display a large American flag in each classroom and display, next to it, a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” Schwenk observes. “Schools must also set aside time to recite the National Anthem each day. But SB 1047…. would cause schools to face thousands of dollars in fines for violations of any of those requirements. The Arizona Attorney General would be directed to collect up to $1000 in civil penalties from schools — for every violation identified.”
Under the Rogers-sponsored Arizona Senate Bill 1045, Schwenk notes, “Any health professional that provides gender-affirming care to trans youth could be charged with a felony.”
==
an 12 21
Midterms are coming. In case that phrase doesn't already inspire enough dread, it looks like this particular round will be defined by an escalation of the already gross "woke wars" going on in the Democratic ranks.
A chorus of increasingly loud voices in the Democratic Party aren't focused on the threat of gerrymandering (https://www.salon.com/2021/11/16/already-has-enough-safe-seats--through-redistricting-alone--to-win-back-in-22/), voter suppression (https://www.salon.com/2021/03/27/conservative-groups-are-writing-gop-voter-suppression-bills---and-spending-millions-to-pass-them/), or that whole thing where Republicans plan to simply void elections when they don't like the results (https://www.salon.com/2021/06/14/its-not-voter-suppression-stupid-the-gops-new--and-old--weapon-is-vote-nullification/). Dealing with that problem is hard and requires serious actions like ending the Senate filibuster (https://www.salon.com/2021/06/22/manchin-and-sinema-make-their-choice-defend-the-filibuster-or-democracy/). So instead, the ire is being turned on a soft and easy target to blame: the small number of people in the Democratic caucus who use politically correct terms like "Latinx" and "pregnant people."
In a recent piece for the Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/12/democrats-lose-culture-war/620887/), Ronald Brownstein writes about centrist critics who argue that "Democrats have steered off track on cultural issues because the party is unduly influenced by the preferences of well-educated white liberals." (Its an argument that ignores that Black Lives Matter, the movement that most angers the cultural right, is spearheaded not by white liberals, but Black activists.) In a similar piece in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/opinion/trump-democrats-republicans.html), Thomas Edsall notes the evidence that "working-class defections (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/the-tyranny-of-the-unwoke-white-swing-voter.html) from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/30/democratic-party-culture-divide-wars-working-class-blue-collar-221913/) than by economics," and that many political strategists believe "Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues."
A particularly humorous example of the genre arrived this week from writer Zaid Jilani's newsletter (https://www.persuasion.community/p/progressives-need-to-focus), in which he chastised the AFL-CIO for sending out a tweet celebrating International Pronouns Day (https://twitter.com/AFLCIO/status/1450886988714987523?). "Most Americans are probably wondering what in the world International Pronoun Day has to do with wages, benefits, or conditions," he griped.
Most Americans?
The tweet in question, as of this writing, has 32 retweets on it and 35 likes. And that really underscores the major flaw of this argument: It presumes that right-wing anger at the left is an authentic and unmediated direct reaction to anything real-life Democrats are saying and doing in the world. And the evidence for that presumption is weak indeed.
None of this is to deny that the majority of white Americans, especially non-college-educated white Americans, are in a constant fit of outrage over "wokeness." I, too, have Facebook and two working eyeballs and can see that is true. But they're mostly not reacting to anything the Democrats are actually doing. No, mostly what gets white America going is bullshit, and lots and lots of it, being heaped out at an astounding rate from a well-funded GOP propaganda machine whose reach dramatically eclipses even the fondest dreams of any Democratic communications specialist. And that bullshit-generating engine doesn't need progressives to say a single, solitary word to keep their bullshit generation systems going. All progressives could shut up forever, and the right-wing noise machine wouldn't skip a beat.
Look, for instance, at what the two biggest news stories the shameless hucksters at Fox News are hyping right now: The Jussie Smollett (https://www.salon.com/2020/02/25/jussie-smollett-not-guilty-plea-trial/)guilty verdict and the arson of the Fox News Christmas tree (https://www.salon.com/2021/12/08/meghan-mccain-suggests-fox-christmas-tree-arson-is-worse-than-gops-on-democracy/). I would absolutely bet my life savings that both stories have a lot more Americans talking than the AFL-CIO's opinion on pronouns. And both are being hung by the propagandists around the necks of Democrats, even though Democrats have literally nothing to do with either crime.
Fox News is running with a bunch of "gotcha" attacks on prominent Democrats (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/flashback-biden-harris-led-frenzy-amplify-jussie-smollett-false-claims), such as Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who initially supported Smollett in the days after he claimed, falsely, to be the victim of a hate crime. Thebad faith of this is extreme, of course. Those folks are more properly understood as Smollett's victims because he took advantage of their generosity in order to perpetuate this hoax. But it doesn't matter to the liars of Fox News, because this one random man's bad actions are useful for perpetuating a hoax of their own: The claim that racism isn't real, and that it's just something Democrats make up to score political points.
The umbrage over Smollett's fake hate crime is particularly hypocritical, as Fox News is currently in the process of also falsifying a hate crime against themselves. The Christmas tree burning did happen, to be clear. But it is not a "hate crime," as multiple pundits at the network (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-uses-christmas-tree-fire-excuse-attack-political-opponents) falsely claimed. (Which is a designation they refused to acknowledge for the Charleston church shooting (https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/1468941074538409991).) And it certainly isn't comparable to the bombing of Pearl Harbor (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-contributor-compares-christmas-tree-fire-bombing-pearl-harbor), as one Fox News yapper dramatically declared. It appears it was committed by a mentally ill homeless man who blamed the arson (https://www.yahoo.com/news/suspect-fox-news-christmas-tree-163332912.html) on "mothers who rape their daughters." But that didn't slow down the faux outrage or efforts to pin the blame on Democrats.
No doubt the right-wing propaganda machine went out of their way to make progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York (https://www.salon.com/2021/02/02/mocking-alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-trauma-is-really-about-covering-for-trumps-violent-coup/) and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota (https://www.salon.com/2021/11/29/ilhan-omar-hangs-up-on-lauren-boebert-after-anti-muslim/) national figures, but it's naive to think that it's really due to anything either of those women say or do. It's because both are good-looking young women of color, and because Omar wears a head covering. Just the look of them sets off all sorts of ugly instincts in some white men, instincts that are tied up with, let's face it, a gross mix of racism and sexual desire that produces some really nasty emotional reactions. That stuff is way more powerful than words can ever be, and the GOP propaganda machine shamelessly exploits that.
The bleeding of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party has been going on for a long time — indeed, the decline started before Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were literally born — and unsurprisingly, the loss of those voters correlates strongly with the rise of right-wing media empires (https://www.salon.com/2021/02/18/rush-limbaugh-captivated-dads-like-mine-and-created-the-modern-american-fascist-aesthetic/).
Which isn't to say that the audiences for the AM talkers and Fox News, much less the people who breathlessly share every bit of fake news generated by Russian bots they find on Facebook, are merely empty ciphers for this crap. There are very real changes going on in the United States. People of color are an ever-larger share of the population. Kids really are moving away from small towns and suburbs for college and never coming home. There's nothing that Democrats can or should do about that.
But the real problem here is a huge, well-funded machine on hand to tell aging white voters in rural and suburban areas that their resentment of these changes is justified, they are the real victims here, and they are right to be hiding in their homes, too afraid of the larger world to bother to get to know it.
Democrats can try to run away from the culture war all they like, but it won't work. It won't stop the two changes driving all of this white resentment. More importantly, it certainly won't stop the relentless churn of lies generated by Republican propagandists feeding people's worst instincts. Unfortunately, the only real way to deal with this culture war is to win it. Only by making a forceful case for progressive values and taking right-wing nonsense head-on is there any hope of defanging it.
We saw this most recently in Virginia, where a GOP hoax about "critical race theory" took over the gubernatorial race (https://www.salon.com/2021/11/05/democrats-can-win-the-culture--but-they-have-to-take-on-the-fight-early-and-often/), helping GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin defeat McAuliffe. "Critical race theory," at least how Republicans use it, is just a nonsense scare term. But with only a little digging, it was easy to discover that the right-wing agenda underneath all the hype (https://www.salon.com/2021/12/02/republicans-on-education-is-the-most-crucial-part-of-their-push-for-fascism/) — removing all negative portrayals of slavery and Jim Crow from public schools — is utterly indefensible. Sure enough, once liberals in the state finally started to push back against the book burning posse (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/19/spotsylvania-comes-its-senses-rescinds-order-banning-books-school-libraries/), the right lost the argument and the left won. But by then, it was too late to save McAuliffe's campaign.
Looking further back, we saw the same thing with the debate over same-sex marriage. Republicans leveraged lies about "threats to traditional marriage" for years as a wedge issue against Democrats. But when Democrats stopped running from the issue and instead decided to fight back — and win — they defanged it completely. Now most Americans support same-sex marriage (https://news.gallup.com/poll/350486/record-high-support-same-sex-marriage.aspx) and Republicans basically gave up talking about it.
Bashing progressives and telling them to shut up is always a temptation, not because it works, but because it feels easy. It's certainly easier to tell progressives to shut up than, say, pass the Build Back Better plan so Democrats have something to run on, other than a bipartisan roads-and-bridges bill that Republicans can also take credit for. And it's a whole lot easier to tell progressives to shut up than it is to build up the kind of media empire that could compete effectively with right-wing propaganda.
But just because it's easy doesn't mean it's effective. Time spent on pursuing easy-but-useless strategies instead of rolling up sleeves and starting in on the harder-but-more-effective solutions is just time wasted.
11 21
...
Plugged-in voters understand that the solution to this problem is to elect more Democrats, to create majorities strong enough that the Joe Manchins and Kyrsten Sinemas of the world can't derail the agenda. But low information voters, the kind who are most likely to tune out during an off-year, only see that Democrats can't get squat done and so they see no reason to vote. As one Democratic pollster told the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/12/more-women-are-tuning-out-politics-danger-sign-democrats-virginia-beyond/), voters are saying, "It doesn't matter who we elect, it's all the same."
Also predictable: That Republicans would fire up some nutty culture war lies and start a racist panic (to be dropped the second it is no longer useful). They do this every time,as those of us who remember long-forgotten issues like "the caravan (https://www.salon.com/2018/11/23/caravan-invasion-corporate-media-ignores-its-own-role-in-spreading-panic/)" and the "Ground Zero mosque (https://www.salon.com/2010/12/31/park_51_a_look_back/)," which were once treated by Republicans as the most pressing issues of our time. Republicans signaled for months ahead of time that they were going to make transphobic urban legends (https://www.salon.com/2021/03/04/mr-potato-head-dr-seuss-and-trans-kids-how-democrats-are-already-letting-republicans-win-in-2022/) and this bullshit about "critical race theory" (https://www.salon.com/2021/06/15/why-the-panic-over-critical-race-theory-is-the-perfect-right-wing-troll/)the center of the campaign. But instead of hitting back hard and fast, Democrats let the situation fester. It was only at the last minute that McAuliffe's campaign started pointing out that "critical race theory" is a pretext for what is outright government censorship, no different in its origins than the Nazi book burnings (https://mailchi.mp/salon.com/standing-room-only-the-coup-plotter-who-was-caught-on-camera?e=912ad27ec2). By then, however, it was a matter of too little, too late — the Republican spin already dominated the narrative.
There's a tendency in both the mainstream media and the hot take industry of social media to reduce the complex math of elections to simplistic narratives about voters "switching" sides. But that's really not how these things work. A bunch of Biden voters didn't see a few school board tantrums on the local news and suddenly become Tucker Carlson fans. The people who have always been bigots were hella fired up. A huge chunk of the "everyone else" category that constitutes the Democratic base is demoralized and checked out.
Getting racists to stop being fired up by race-baiting is probably a lost cause. So Democrats have to figure out how to outnumber them — and that requires getting their own people energized. The first step is to give would-be Democratic voters something to vote for,especially when there's no cartoon villains like Trump for people to vote against.
a niche for anyone who has procreated?
https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/professional-conservatives-find-path-victory-ginned-outrage-over-critical-race
Born in a constellation of right-wing think tanks, the outrage against “critical race theory” spent over a year (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-critical-race-theory-obsession) in the metastasizing embrace of right-wing media, churning up hatred against discussions of race in schools.
As this deceptive marketing reached a fever pitch, there was an explosion in Facebook (https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/inside-right-wing-echo-chambers-attempt-use-facebook-gin-outrage-about) groups (https://www.mediamatters.org/education/no-left-turn-education-leading-anti-critical-race-theory-group-frequently-pushes-toxic) being formed or shifting their focus to opposing critical race theory in schools. These groups were a nexus for supporters to organize in-person disruptions (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/critical-race-theory-invades-school-boards-help-conservative-groups-n1270794) at school board meetings.
This astroturfed frenzy against supposed CRT in schools led to threats and harassment (https://www.npr.org/sections/back-to-school-live-updates/2021/08/30/1032417970/school-board-members-hostile-meetings-mask-mandates-politicized) against school board members nationwide, and, in Virginia, helped propel (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/us/elections/glenn-youngkin.html) Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s mansion.
Assigning national importance to a statewide election can be reckless; anti-CRT outrage did not (https://www.ydr.com/story/news/2021/11/03/voters-in-tense-york-suburban-race-reject-conservative-candidates-focused-on-masks-and-crt/6265407001/) prevail (https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/anti-critical-race-theory-focus-fails-in-wisconsin-school-board-recall-election/article_ae029169-38af-5b9e-a7ab-4df424b7d66e.html) everywhere (https://ctmirror.org/2021/11/02/critical-race-theory-divides-then-unifies-guilford-as-republican-school-board-candidates-are-defeated/) in the 2021 election. But for the effort and money that conservative activists and media put into defining the Virginia gubernatorial race with critical race theory, it is clear that these charlatans will attempt to export the Virginia playbook nationally in 2022 and beyond[twt.]
as Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who helped launch the campaign (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-critical-race-theory-attacks-are-supercharging-racist-movement-undo-decades), has explained, the goal is to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category” so that people “read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” Other right-wing institutions and groups, like the Heritage Foundation, joined in the fray with events (https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/heritage-foundations-critical-race-theory-expert-extremist-who-thinks-women), activist toolkits (https://heritageaction.com/crtbook), model legislation (https://www.manhattan-institute.org/copland-critical-race-theory-model-legislation), and pushes (https://heritageaction.com/toolkit/rejectcrt) for bans made in concert with lawmakers.
From there, advocacy groups use this think tank framework to generate local outrage against critical race theory.[IT'S A FRANCHISE MODEL?! MLM?] According to an NBC News analysis (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/critical-race-theory-invades-school-boards-help-conservative-groups-n1270794), there are now “at least 165 local and national groups that aim to disrupt lessons on race and gender,” and several of the most prominent ones (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-anti-critical-race-theory-parents-are-also-gop-activists) are headed by Republican activists and strategists. These groups cram local controversies into the CRT framework established by Rufo and others, disrupt school board meetings, and place spokespeople in media appearances -- sometimes professional spokespeople, who are instead described (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-anti-critical-race-theory-parents-are-also-gop-activists) as local parents.
The noise and attention from these professionally operated, think tank-inspired groups then generates coverage from an obsequious and obsessive (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers) right-wing media, champing at the bit for any angle that will hurt Democrats and help Republicans. Empowered by the outrage suddenly all over TV -- to the tune of hundreds of Fox mentions per month (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers), plus loads more from OAN and Newsmax -- GOP politicians find incentive to take legislative action to drastically limit (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-states-banning-critical-race-theory/) the teaching of civil rights, sometimes even banning books (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/texas-schools-books-race-sexuality/2021/10/27/dcaa30c2-3738-11ec-8be3-e14aaacfa8ac_story.html) altogether. [AND WORDS]
This feedback loop (https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/guide-right-wing-medias-critical-race-theory-strategy) is a concerted strategy whose first trial run (https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/rights-cynical-critical-race-theory-obsession-breaks-through-va-gov-race) was the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election. It is not a grassroots movement, it is not a natural response to alleged left-wing excesses, and it is not about what is best for children. It is a top-down attempt by professional political operatives to morph political landscapes to suit their racially regressive needs. And, at least in Virginia, it seems to have worked. [twt.]
as Rufo promised, the professional outrage against critical race theory has only just begun. As the next election looms, critical race theory (or similardog whistles like “parents’ rights”) will suddenly get thousands (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers) of TV mentions again, and professional GOP operatives will again call themselves mere concerned parents. Think tankers may even publicly discuss their exact plans again, because they know it won’t cause any harm; enough of (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/virginia-election-shows-democrats-public-school-problem.html) the mainstream (https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/bidens-struggles-education-wars-propel-youngkins-virginia-victory-2021-11-03/) media (https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2021-10-26/youngkin-mcauliffe-tangle-over-education-in-bid-for-suburban-virginia-voters) will still cover these anti-CRT outrages as grassroots “education” issues, instead of what they are: a think tank astroturf project.
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-turning-vaccine-resisters-culture-war-heroes
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0H3vp2oz1tV3svXi2suaaZ
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/episodes
OCTOBER 1, 2020 (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/gmhwdon/making-republicans-environmentalists)
Making Republicans Environmentalists Again
HOW TO SAVE A PLANET
The Republican Party has been almost uniformly opposed to climate action for years – nobody more so than President Donald Trump. But it wasn’t always like this. On today’s episode, we look back at how conservatives came to see the denial of climate science as a kind of badge of honor – and we talk to two conservative activists who are trying to change that. (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/gmhwdon/making-republicans-environmentalists) rachael waldholtz (sp) 3 forks: #1 1980 RR ~ epa/ regs #2 1988 hansen 1989 GCC, 1992 Rio supposed to do binding targets bush "pariah" 1998 smoking gun memo
read the full memo we mentioned in the episode - the Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan (http://www.climatefiles.com/trade-group/american-petroleum-institute/1998-global-climate-science-communications-team-action-plan/) (get ready to be mad)
#3 afp bus tour gas, heat house tired of al gore hypocrisy, "cap and Tax" --> policy fight to threat to your way of life; kochs take advantage of crisis --> culture war /part of identity 2008 high tide of gov't distrust, so small am't of money (goes over sea wall and flooded agw action machinery metaphor Inglis; [RepublicEN inglis talk to crazy uncle]
am conservation coalition ACC10yo gop activist noted at cpacs nothing on envir except to trash/denial; testimony w/ greta so press but he called out both side i call BS dems have not tried to work w/ gop [b/c preserve as an issue to beat up?] benjy backer
badge wedge issue?
lind graham
https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/absolutely-bizarre-lindsey-graham-torched-for-declaring-he-will-go-to-war-for-what-chick-fil-a-stands-for/
tx long req alamo praise?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/greg-abbott-2653567926/
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/how-ron-desantis-has-positioned-himself-as-a-leading-maga-culture-warrior-conservative/
ah
although Florida is a swing state, Gov. Ron DeSantis has not governed as a moderate conservative like Maryland's Larry Hogan, Massachusetts' Charlie Baker or Vermont's Phil Scott. DeSantis has governed from the far right, making it abundantly clear that he is a Donald Trump loyalist through and through. Never Trump conservative Max Boot, in his June 22 column (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/22/ron-desantis-is-showing-trump-level-skill-waging-culture-war/) for the Washington Post, describes DeSantis as a strident culture warrior and lays out some of his possible political motivations for being so devoutly Trumpian.
"The winner of 'The Apprentice: Culture Warfare Edition,' so far, appears to be Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of Trump's new home state of Florida," Boot explains. "He is setting himself up as Trump's running mate or successor byshowing a genius for appealing to every disreputable prejudice of the GOP base. This man knows how to outrage Democrats and therefore, delight Republicans."
Some of the Republicans who were scathing Trump critics when they ran against him in the 2016 presidential race are now afraid to say one word against him — Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, for example. The problem with Rubio and Cruz, Boot argues, is that they come across as less "authentic" than DeSantis.
"Former President Donald Trump is America's premier culture warrior," Boot observes. "No other modern politician has displayed as much talent at dividing Americans, peddling disinformation, demonizing minorities and exacerbating social problems. Many have tried to imitate him only to fall short because their performances were inauthentic and unconvincing. I'm looking at you, Marco Rubio; you, too, Ted Cruz."
In 2020's presidential race, Boot was among the anti-Trump conservatives who endorsed now-President Joe Biden over Trump — and he was highly critical of the Trumpified Republicans who turned the coronavirus pandemic into a culture war battle. DeSantis, according to Boot, was more concerned about playing the MAGA card than dealing with the deadly realities of COVID-19.
"Other governors saw the COVID-19 pandemic as a public health crisis," Boot observes. "DeSantis, following Trump's lead, saw it as an opportunity to score populist points with the base. He was one of 16 governors never to issue a statewide mask mandate, and he banned municipalities from punishing people who refused to follow local mask orders. In September 2020, even while the pandemic continued to rage, he allowed restaurants and other businesses to reopen at full capacity."
Boot continues, "Last month, he signed an executive order and legislation preventing businesses from insisting that customers be vaccinated. This caused a showdown with cruise lines that want to use "vaccine passports" to lure travelers. DeSantis acts as if mask mandates and vaccination passports — both sensible precautions — are actually 'Deep State' plots that must be resisted at all costs."
In Florida's 2018 gubernatorial race, the far-right DeSantis narrowly defeated the liberal Democratic nominee: former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum. But as close as that race was, DeSantis hasn't reached out to Democrats in his state — and he is still playing the MAGA card at every turn.
"Now, as the pandemic fades, DeSantis is scoring points on other issues of concern only to the Trumpist base," Boot observes. "Appealing to Trump voters who think that the 2020 election was rigged, DeSantis went on Fox News to sign a bill making it harder to vote in Florida. DeSantis won't say if he thinks President Biden won legitimately. Appealing to right-wingers mad that Trump has been kicked off Twitter and Facebook, DeSantis signed legislation that would fine social media companies that suspend state or local candidates close to an election and make it easier to sue tech companies."
It remains to be seen whether or not Trump will run for president in 2024. DeSantis is being mentioned as a possible running mate if Trump runs — or as someone Trump is likely to endorse if he stays out of the race.
Whatever happens in 2024, Boot emphasizes, DeSantis is making sure that MAGA voters know how much of a Trump loyalist he is.
"Mask mandates, vaccine passports, voter fraud, tech company censorship, transgender athletes, undocumented migrants, Critical Race Theory — DeSantis pushes every single right-wing hot-button issue," Boot writes. "He understands how to demonize and polarize for political advantage — and he doesn't care about how much collateral damage he inflicts. Little wonder he is being talked about as the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination if Trump doesn't run — and maybe even if he does."
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
This Trump supporter could be the first Floridian prosecuted under Ron DeSantis' new anti-protest law (https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/desantis-2653522421/)
but culture war eruption hysteria eg gay teletubbies
aha this kinda harkens back to cold war red scare blacklist commies tiring to brainwash, kids most vulnerable ; urban legend grounded in fear (of some new thing?)
hype fear anger emotion note pedophile was red pill entry drug for women into Qanon
chris h msnbc sez official that 2022? election will be cult war:
"woke" military aha last fed/gubmint institution to fall, once sacrosanct b/c manly, trad conservative and defend us from evil commies; god bless our troops almost secular so common?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/fox-news-2653517083/
gen milley vs gaetz "take their budget" [grn beret?]; i'm a wht guy want to understand rage; biggest 2 wars bloody ~ racist = nazi and csa/kkk? read mao and marx, not commie
dr suess, mr potatohead, smurfs commie; sesame str?
note biden bills popular so gotta go wedge:
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/mitch-mcconnell/?rs=182
no lnx pix vid
'Behind us': Mitch McConnell giggles as he shares his extremely whitewashed version of US history
Walter Einenkel and Daily Kos June 03, 2021
The New York Times' 1619 Project was created in order to refocus American history on its story of race and economics. The 1619 date is a reminder of the first enslaved Africans brought by ship to the early European settlements in North and South America. This is history that has long been available to people to discover, but has also been ignored and frequently hidden or suppressed in our country's official retellings of our collective story. Conservatives across the country, bereft of any ideas since feudalism, are recasting the 1619 Project and other critical race theory educational initiatives as an attack on our country. In their estimation, only white males like themselves are allowed to feel persecuted, and any discussion of race and the moral anchor that systemic racism has moored our country's progress forward is an assault on their monopoly on power. They are right about the latter.
On Wednesday, Sen. McConnell took time away from never passing any legislation that wasn't voter suppression-related or a tax break for the richest amongst us, to speak at a press conference in the Citizens Union Bank in Shelbyville, Kentucky. McConnell's fellow Kentuckian Republican Rep. Joseph Fischer recently filed Bill Request 60, for the upcoming 2022 state legislature session that would limit how race and the history of racism in our country is taught.Here's an elementary school level bit of math for you: Kentucky + Republican Rep. + bill about the teaching of race and racism = X* Here's another equation for you math nerds: Mitch McConnell + statement about race and education + microphone = X
*Answer: Imaginably racist.
Answer: Very imaginably racist.
On Wednesday,McConnell told the press that the fact the world participated in slavery and the slave trade during the 17th century means that in America historians marking the first enslaved Africans brought to the Americas isn't important history. That's what he argued.
"Behind us?"
Man, turtles live a long time.
McConnell's answer came out of a question from The Courier Journal concerning his support or opposition to the kinds of constraints his fellow Republicans are trying to put on public school teachers and educators. He went on to say that the federal government shouldn't tell schools what to teach, and he also didn't seem to knock the fact that Republicans across the country are the only political group telling schools what they should teach.
Mitch McConnell has previously described the focus on the 1619 date in American history as an "exotic notion." He has also categorized any push for education curriculums to include more comprehensive teaching on systemic racism, "activist indoctrination." McConnell's intellectually dishonest angle on the 1619 date is that by calling attention to our country's founding dependence on cheap labor and the evolution of our nation's racism, we "denigrate and downgrade" other, more positive and less uncomfortable, achievements that our country has made.
It's a garbage argument as pointing out our country's systemic racism, and very specifically highlighting 1619 as a date, is clearly an important part of our nation's story. Millions of Americans of all races, cultures, and creeds have been directly affected, and continue to be affected, by those decisions. The Civil War that McConnell says put this sin "behind us," is only fought because of that date, and to deny it and the existence of its reach is incongruous with even the words coming out of the Kentucky senator's disingenuous yap.
McConnell's attempt at speaking out of both sides of his mouth included this statement: "I think trying to completely denigrate and downgrade American historical moments like 1776, 1787,1965—critical moments—is a mistake." If you want to know what truly denigrates and downgrades our country's history, and specifically what those dates mark, all you need to see are McConnell's own actions in orchestrating a filibuster of a commission into the events of Jan. 6—something that had the bipartisan support of his own constituents. As for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Republican Party is in the middle of generating hundreds of voter suppression laws throughout the country.
Here's McConnell telling people that systemic racism and our country's use of slavery and racism as a controlling economic foundation is "exotic."
UofL VP of diversity and equity calls McConnell 1619 comments 'troubling'
The Senate Minority Leader said he disagreed with The New York Times' '1619 project.'
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an 521
newsmax host loses it over Lucky Charms 'gay leprechaun' and Kellogg’s 'forcing kids to be confused about their gender' (https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/newsmax-host-loses-it-over-lucky-charms-gay-leprechaun-and-kellogs-forcing-kids-to-be-confused-about-their-gender/)
David Badash (https://www.alternet.org/author/david-badash) The New Civil Rights Movement (https://www.alternet.org/author/the-new-civil-rights-movement)
May 26, 2021
Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield had a homophobic Tuesday night freak out over kids' breakfast cereals.
After being strongly criticized two weeks ago for disgusting antisemitic remarks, Stinchfield is back to....
521 an
Texas House votes to remove state funding from sports teams that don't play national anthem at games
The Texas Tribune May 25, 2021
"Texas House votes to yank state funding from sports teams that don't play national anthem at games" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
The Texas House gave preliminary approval on Monday to the so-called“Star Spangled Banner Protection Act," a conservative-backed bill that would require any professional sports teams with contracts with the Texas state government to play the national anthem before the start of a game.
Senate Bill 4 was passed on a voice vote, with no changes by the House. It is expected to receive a record vote and final passage on Tuesday and head to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk.
House Republicans defeated several proposed amendments along partisan lines, signaling more division on the issue in the lower chamber than was seen in the Senate, which passed the bill last month with overwhelming bipartisan support and only two votes against it.
Athletes protesting the national anthem has become a divisive and partisan issue since NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling in 2016 to protest police brutality against Black Americans.
In February, Patrick named the bill one of his legislative priorities after Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, stopped playing the anthem before home games, which went largely unnoticed during the pandemic with no fans in the stands.
That decision quickly drew the ire of conservative lawmakers in the state.
“Sell the franchise & some Texas Patriots will buy it," Patrick said in a tweet at the time. “We ARE the land of free & the home of the brave."
In a public response to the outcry condemning his decision, Cuban expressed support for the anthem, but he said team executives “also loudly hear the voices of those who feel that the anthem does not represent them." The NBA later said all teams would play the anthem before games.
During Monday's debate on the House floor, opponents questioned the constitutionality of a law that they said ties funding to free speech by threatening negative action against sports teams that choose to express their opinions by declining to play the anthem.
“Once again, we're carrying legislation that is openly and aggressively unconstitutional," said state Rep. Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat who unsuccessfully tried to turn the bill into a resolution, allowing the House to take a stand in favor of the anthem without the force of law.
The bill's House sponsor, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, said the bill does not violate free speech because teams can still choose not to play the anthem and forgo the funding and business relationship with the state.
“It's very simple. If they do not want to play the national anthem, they don't take the tax dollars," Burrows said. “If we're going to go ahead and subsidize with hard-earned American dollars the sporting facilities and the teams in the different ways that I think is articulated in this bill, then this would apply."
Attempts by Democrats to require teams to play both the “Star-Spangled Banner" and “Lift Every Voice and Sing," or to choose between them, were shut down along partisan lines.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing" is commonly known as “the Black national anthem," said Rep. Jasmine Felicia Crockett, D-Dallas, who authored one of the amendments.
“I don't even understand why we would feel the need to force someone into singing any song," Crockett said. “But if we are going to force people to sing a song, we should at least be mindful of the people playing on these teams, the people that are actually in the stands supporting these teams."
Burrows opposed the amendments “with the deepest amount of respect to my friend and colleague" because he wanted to avoid any changes to the bill, which would slow its progress to the governor's desk during the final week of the legislative session.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/24/texas-house-national-anthem/.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
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aha/hmmn pot and gay marriage lost status as wedge? how?
std boogie man roger stone dirty trick is to run fake/3rd cand to split vote, sometimes pick someoe w/ same name
https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/gop-spolier-candidate/?rs=182
ablind veteran who ran for Congress in Minnesota last year under the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party now alleges he was tricked into running by a Republican Party operative to siphon votes from then-Democratic-Farmer-Labor Congressman Collin Peterson in Minnesota's 7th Congressional District, according (https://www.fox9.com/news/grassroots-or-astroturf-congressional-candidate-says-he-was-tricked-into-running-by-rnc-strategist) to local news outlet KMSP.
Kevin Ne Se Shores, said the report, "was surprised by the unsolicited call he got in June of 2020 from a man who encouraged him to run against Congressman Collin Peterson (D-MN) as a candidate for the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party. Shores, who suffers from Gulf War Illness, used cannabis to get off pain killers. He told the FOX 9 Investigators he assumed he was being recruited by a member of the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party. 'I was under the impression he was a part of that political party,' Shores said. 'That was my assumption.' He was wrong."
"Unknown to Shores, the man who called encouraging him to run was a Republican strategist, Kip Christianson, who at the time was on the payroll of the Republican National Committee, according to the Federal Election Commission," said the report. Shores also alleges that Christianson paid his $300 candidate filing fee, telling him, "Don't worry about it."
Shores only later became aware that Christianson was an RNC employee and 2016 Donald Trump delegate for Minnesota.
Ultimately, Shores lost the nomination (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-minnesota-house-district-7.html) for the third party to Rae Hart Anderson, and the combined 24,000 votes for the Grassroots Legalize Marijuana Party and the Legal Marijuana Now Party would not have been enough to secure re-election for Peterson, who lost to former GOP lieutenant governor Michelle Fischbach by 50,000 votes.
However, in races further down the ballot, GOP covert support for the Minnesota cannabis parties may have spoiled state Senate races, and may have been decisive (https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/did-minnesotas-marijuana-legalization-parties-kill-marijuana-legalization) in helping Republicans retain control of the chamber — which ironically makes cannabis legalization far less likely in the state.
Congressional candidate says he was tricked into running by RNC strategist | FOX 9 KMSP..[vid]
aha: answer to how do we get ppl to brk solidarity and vote against own interests [ eg fill in the public swimming pool in GA summer]
https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/noam-chomsky-republican-party/
alexh
The United States has had 17 different presidents during Noam Chomsky's lifetime, from Calvin Coolidge to Joe Biden — and the left-wing author, now 92, has lived through major historical events including the Great Depression, Watergate, 9/11, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Chomsky discussed the challenges of the Biden era during a recent interview with author/journalist David Masciotra for the Los Angeles Review of Books (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dismantle-all-of-this-stuff-a-conversation-with-noam-chomsky/).
Chomsky discussed his most recent book, "Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance," in the interview with Masciotra, warning that people who are hurting economically can be manipulated by far-right extremists. Chomsky has been a blistering critic of neoliberal economics, which he said continues to fail millions of people in the United States.
"I've seen it over and over," Chomsky told Masciotra. "During the Kennedy and Johnson years, the technocratic and meritocratic elite, my colleagues from Harvard and MIT, were flocking down to Washington to show how the world should be run. Well, in Vietnam, we saw what came of that. It was not unpredictable. Those of us in the streets were warning of it all along. Now, it is the same. Neoliberalism, whatever is in the minds of people who advocate for it — maybe they don't even think about it — is an explicit effort…. to hand power to private institutions, which are dedicated to self-enrichment."
Neoliberalism, Chomsky added, only worsens the divide between the haves and the have-nots in the United States.
"The majority of the population gets by paycheck to paycheck," Chomsky told Masciotra. "Real wages have stagnated for 40 years. The gains of productivity growth concentrate in very few pockets. This leads to…. unfocused anger. Is it surprising? People aren't told what is really robbing them. Instead, they are told that it is immigrants, Blacks, some pedophiles from outer space, if you believe QAnon — anything but what is actually happening."
When economic conditions are unfavorable to the working class, Chomsky noted, Republicans try to distract their voters with "cultural issues."
"The Republicans, who are the party of the superrich, understood in the 1970s that you can't get votes by coming to people and saying, 'I want to rob you, and hand everything you have over to the rich and corporate sector,'" Chomsky explained. "Somehow, that doesn't work. You have to turn to what are called 'cultural issues,' meaning everything but what matters for your life. So, Paul Weyrich, one of the main Republican strategists, by the mid-1970s got a flash of insight and realized that if the Republicans pretend — stress 'pretend'— to be opposed to abortion, they'll pick up the evangelical vote and the northern Catholic vote."
Noting that the Republican Party is becoming "increasingly dangerous and brazenly antidemocratic," Masciotra asked Chomsky to discuss the political climate of 2021. And Chomsky agreed with his description of the modern GOP.
Chomsky said of the Republican Party, "They can mobilize the people they've turned into raging monsters, and get them to attack these communist rats who want the country flooded with rapists and murderers so that the White race suffers genocide. You know the whole story. That's the Republican Party. It's not a political party anymore. It's very dangerous."
The 92-year-old author added that scapegoating is an effective tool of the far right in 2021 just as it was when he was a kid during the 1930s and Jews were targeted by Nazis. He explained:
There are other parts of it that are just as dangerous. For example, just recently, Pew Research Center came out with one of its regular polls (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/14/as-the-u-s-copes-with-multiple-crises-partisans-disagree-sharply-on-severity-of-problems-facing-the-nation/ft_2020-07-14_nationalproblems_01/) on major issues facing the country. They had a choice of 15 major issues, and people were asked to rank them. It was divided between Republicans and Democrats. Take a look at Republicans. At the very bottom — 13 percent — the most important question that has ever arisen in human history:global warming. They don't call it that. They call it "climate change," which is more neutral. But only 13 percent think that is a major problem.It is only the most important problem that's ever arisen — the question of survival. Then you go to the problems they are most concerned about — illegal immigration, the deficit. This is the result of very effective propaganda. Imposing common sense, manufacturing consent, year after year — turning people into the kind of people that supported the Nazis. Going back to my childhood, I remember them right here in the United States. These were the people who wanted to get rid of the Jews, because "the Jews are destroying civilization."
"If people are isolated, atomized, with no support groups, no involvement in constructive activities, they are prey to this attack on their moral and intellectual integrity," Chomsky continued. "Go back to what I said, the Republican leadership is overjoyed at the moves toward some humane behavior on the part of Democrats. They know, especially with (former President Donald) Trump — who is a genius at this —that they can organize and mobilize crazed groups who really believe they need their guns to save the White race from genocide. You can drive people to that."
aha: echo escal: hype/ fear wedge
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-right-wing-lies-move-through-fox-cycle-biden-administration
matt g
fhe relentlessly dishonest right-wing press is spending the Biden administration whipping itself into a frenzy over its own lies, fabrications, and distortions. Every day seems to bring a new hysteria: Joe Biden wants to take your hamburger (https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/foxs-news-side-spreads-fake-story-biden-wants-ban-hamburgers)! The left has canceled (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-dr-seuss-obsession-reveals-dishonest-desperation-right-wing-war-cancel-culture) Dr. Seuss! The stories -- often total nonsense but touching on potent culture war fights (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/no-war-culture-war-why-right-wing-media-cant-stop-finding-things-be-outraged-over) -- burn through right-wing social and news media, turn into conservative canon, and are quickly replaced with fresh outrage.
Our late colleague Simon Maloy developed a concept (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-black-panthers-and-same-old-pattern) during the Obama years to explain how these sorts of bogus right-wing stories kept turning into national news. He called it “the Fox Cycle” (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-cycle-bogus-right-wing-attack-mainstream-news): The right-wing fever-swamps (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-cycle-blithering-nonsense-breaking-news) would generate a story; Fox News would give it copious, aggrieved coverage; the network would pressure mainstream news outlets to pick up the story; they would do so, even crediting Fox for being ahead of the curve; and the story would eventually be proved false or misleading -- but only long after the damage had been done. A few years ago, I pointed out (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-trump-fox-feedback-loop-nationalized-local-city-council-vote) that then-President Donald Trump’s habit of live-tweeting Fox supercharged that process: News outlets reporting on his angry responses to TV segments were bringing his Fox-fueled falsehoods to their own audiences.
With a new Democratic administration in office a decade after Simon’s posts, right-wing media are still furiously churning out bullshit that gets amplified by Fox. But the contours of the Fox cycle have shifted due to changes in the mainstream press, the right-wing media, and the Republican Party over the intervening years.
The Fox Cycle in the Biden years follows a pattern that is becoming increasingly familiar:
- A right-wing outlet manufactures a bogus story.
- The bogus story goes viral.
- Fox News picks up the bogus story, reports on it incessantly.
- Republican politicians promote the bogus story to attack Democrats.
- Responsible news outlets debunk the bogus story.
- Repeat.
What’s changed?
The distinction between right-wing media personality and Republican politician has increasingly dissolved (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/30/republican-politics-right-wing-media-continue-fuse/). [eg gaetz] The right-wing press celebrated (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/wallace-daniels-response-star-born) particularly (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-news-fawns-over-rock-star-paul-ryan) simpatico (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-friends-attempts-recruit-ben-carson-next-fox-candidate) GOP politicians throughout the Obama years -- none more so than Trump himself (https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/donald-trump-fox-news-timeline-relationship). But now, prominent GOP legislators seem driven to build their brands and their power within the party by spending their days trying to create viral content on Twitter and then going on Fox to talk about their posts. Some even have their own podcasts, or openly aspire to right-wing TV gigs. They are incentivized to comment on whatever is stirring up the right-wing press that day, which in turn gives the story more velocity.
Responsible news outlets are now more wary of falling for these bogus stories, and they produce reports debunking them far more quickly than they did a decade ago. Reporters used to interpret incessant Fox coverage as a signal that they were missing out on an important story; now, they seem more likely to correctly view that coverage as a sign to look deeper and figure out how the right-wing press is misleading its audiences.
But thanks to the increasingly impermeable bubble that the right-wing press has created for those audiences, they are unlikely to see those mainstream media debunks. Right-wing outlets may be shamed into pulling down (https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york-post-pulls-down-debunked-reports-that-kamala-harris-book-was-given-to-migrant-kids?via=twitter_page) their false stories or offering half-hearted corrections (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/27/when-reality-conflicts-with-culture-wars-fox-news-can-struggle-pick-side/?itid=ap_philipbump), but by then misinformation has already become conservative canon.
And as my colleague Parker Molloypointed out (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-invented-biden-ban-meat-because-theyre-incentivized-lie) yesterday, the more responsible news outlets seem unable or unwilling to impose real consequences on the perpetrators. No one is losing their seat on a Sunday show for repeatedly promoting lies or conspiracy theories. Everyone just moves on, and the cycle continues.
Here are three case studies from the last week where this pattern played out over a matter of days.
The lie about Biden banning burgers
trms? notes that gop not about ideas or even policy, just own the libs eg matt gaetz angling for some fox pundit talk radio gig before scandal? cruz and hawley trump mini-me's, trump kid general in meme war
literally red meat for the base: gubmint gonna take your guns, burgers, gasoline...
https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/how-larry-kudlow-set-off-a-right-wing-anti-biden-smear-campaign/
How Larry Kudlow set off a right-wing anti-Biden smear campaign
Jon Skolnik and Salon April 26, 2021
Fox News host and former economic Trump adviser Larry Kudlow set off something of a right-wing smear campaign over the weekend when he went on a tirade against President Joe Biden's nonexistent plan to force "plant-based beer" upon the American public, calling Biden an "ideological zealot" intent on scrapping America's most cherished tradition of meat-eating.
In a Fox News interview on Thursday, Kudlow erroneously attacked Biden for putting forth a climate plan that calls for the elimination of meat, eggs, and dairy from the American diet. "There's a study coming out of the University of Michigan which says that to meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to…stop eating poultry and fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats," he started. "Ok, got that? No burger on July 4. No steaks on the barbecue. I'm sure Middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those Brussels sprouts?"
Kudlow, notably livid over the thought grilling vegetables –– let alone foreign ones –– continued to rail against Biden's new climate action plan.
"You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag. Call it July 4th Green. Now, I'm making fun of this because I intend to make fun of it. This kind of thing is stupid. It comes from a bunch of ideological zealots who don't care one whit about America's well-being. Not one whit."
It should be noted that beer, generally made from water, grain, hops, and yeast, and barley malt, is already, in fact, plant-based. Furthermore, nothing in President Biden's plan so far calls for a prohibition on meat consumption. The original culprit of this misinformation, a Thursday Daily Mail article headlined "How Biden's climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH," speculated that Biden intends on "cutting red meat consumption by 90% and animal products by 50%."
The article, quickly feasted upon by Kudlow and amplified Fox Newswithout the slightest fact-check, was then picked up by Republicans in government, including Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who spread the lies to their voting bases.
"Joe Biden's climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030. They want to limit us to about four pounds a year," tweeted Boebert. "Why doesn't Joe stay out of my kitchen?"
"Not gonna happen in Texas!" Gov. Abbott tweeted, with a screenshot of Kudlow's broadcast.
Greene, posting a picture of Biden eating a hamburger with others a table, echoed: "The Hamburglar. No burgers for thee, but just for me."
The misinformation also came into the good graces of Donald Trump Jr., who declared most proudly, "I'm pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday. That's going to be a hard NO from me."
On Saturday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explained how Kudlow's remarks planted the seeds for a concerted misinformation campaign.
"If you read what Kudlow actually said,'' Krugman argued on Twitter, "he's cagey — doesn't say that Biden proposed this, only that some people say this is what would happen. But Fox viewers won't notice, which is the intention. This is what right-wing politics is down to.It's all false claims about evil liberals, which the base is expected to believe because it's primed to believe in liberal villainy. They're not even trying to engage on actual issues."
The White House has thus far released scant information about any formal plan to address emissions. According to the Washington Post, on Thursday, the President made vague remarks about investing in "American infrastructure and American innovation" in order to build "a critical infrastructure to produce and deploy clean technology."
The right's outrage was widely mocked online by the left, who were quick to point out that Biden's apparent political aversion to meat has no factual or historical basis at all. On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., took a jab at his conservative colleagues . "Excited to be watching the Oscars with an ice cold plant-based beer," he tweeted, with a picture of himself holding a beer while watching the Oscars. "Thanks Joe Biden."
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common dr 421
...Oh, for a simpler, saner time – and I don't mean that white American idyll that never was, a rightwing fever dream in which all is falsely remembered as sunshine, jellybeans and petroleum products burnt without a care. Rather, as columnist Frida Ghitis notes, "It wasn't very long ago that the country had two reality-based, generally centrist parties. Democrats and Republicans, with different philosophies, debated the merits of their ideas, in search of a workable compromise.
But then, bit by bit, the GOP started veering in a different direction. By the time Trump became president, the maximalist, nativist, conspiracy-driven, scandal-manufacturing, hate-stoking wing was already ascendant, propelled by the engines of Fox News and other far-right provocateurs. Trump's victory was the coup that toppled the old GOP and turned it into the extremist MAGA machine.
:{
}:
And now, what's left? A handful of old-fashioned, conservative Republicans in Congress and their supporters who apparently still believe in some semblance of democracy and the republic that gave their party its name. But they're overwhelmed by a crowd of fanatics and sycophants: men and women, in Frida Ghitis' words, busily "promoting the delegitimization of America's duly elected president, people who are endorsing or refusing to rectify dangerous lies."
You know who they are: Cruz, Hawley, Graham, Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al. They include, of course, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, "rewarded by recklessness," to use campaign strategist Rick Wilson's phrase, and as of this moment still standing, despite more and more evidence of his misogyny and possible abusive behavior, sexual and otherwise.
:{
}:
Like so many among these ranks, Trump fanboy Gaetz is one of the smarmy, privileged, attenuated frat boys who refuse to believe that rules and norms apply to them – much like the man who was their president and would be forever more if the rest of us become indifferent and lower our guard. Gaetz cares about his job title only as far as it gets him booked on talk shows and the lecture circuit – so far, he has failed to sponsor a single piece of significant legislation.
In his new memoir, former Republican House Speaker John Boehner describes these types of Republican rabblerousers as "the chaos caucus," not caring about the country but only about their power base and appearances on Fox News and right wing talk radio: "They didn't really want legislative victories," Boehner writes. "They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades."
Not that Boehner is blameless. He and so many Republican colleagues let themselves be bullied, then acquiesced to our current dilemma, yielding to those pledged to lunacy and a lemming-like fealty to a president as bereft of thought and feeling as they are. You see the results: a shattered party not of ideas and programs, but only insults and bogus intrigues. No wonder the Biden infrastructure proposals infuriate them; they have nothing to offer in return.(Remember Trump's Infrastructure Week, always imminent but never occurring over the whole four years of his presidency?)
They fear any and all success during Biden's first term. Think back to 1993, when now anti-Trumpist conservative Bill Kristol advised Republicans to shun any healthcare plan from Bill and Hillary Clinton. In a memo—Kristol was then head of the Project for the Republican Future—he warned his colleagues, "It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."...
an 221
Although Texas can be very Democratic in its large urban centers — from Houston to Dallas to El Paso to Austin — Republicans have maintained control of the state government. And many of them are the type of far-right Republicans who push Culture War themes and use dumb phrases like "owning the liberals." But San Antonio-based journalist Adam Serwer, in an article published by The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/texas-pays-price-culture-war/618107/) on February 22, argues that fighting the Culture War didn't prevent Texans from freezing in their homes without electricity, heat and running water during a recent cold snap.
Texas recently suffered snowy, icy winter weather and freezing temperatures that are more typical of Pittsburgh or Boston than Houston, Austin or San Antonio. Tragically, Texas' power grid couldn't handle the increased demand for electricity, and millions of Texans lost power and were unable to heat their homes during the frigid weather.
"Many Texans were without power, water, or both for days, left to choose between the risk of contracting COVID-19 at a shelter and the danger of freezing in their home," Serwer explains. "I consider us fortunate….. Our roof did not collapse. Our home did not catch fire and burn down, as nearby firefighters struggled with empty fire hydrants. We did not run out of food. We were lucky."
twt]
serwer goes on to say that all the misery in Texas could have been avoided if Republicans in the state government had spent more time worrying about good governance and less time obsessing over the Culture War.
"The crisis in Texas was preceded by more than a decade of Republican control of state government, as politicians focused on Culture War grievances rather than the nuts and bolts of governance," Serwer argues. "After the near collapse of the power grid exposed its failures, the state's political leadership attempted to cover for those failures by doubling down on those same grievances."
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Fox News' Tucker Carlson (https://www.thedailybeast.com/seth-meyers-debunks-tucker-carlsons-insanely-obvious-texas-lies) and others on the far right have been claiming that green energy is responsible for Texas' electricity woes, which is total nonsense. Carlson made the idiotic claim that in Texas, wind turbines were too delicate to handle severe cold. First, Texas is much more reliant on fossil fuels than wind turbines. Second, European countries like Denmark and Sweden — which are known for cold, snowy winters — do fine with green energy in January and February because their systems are adequately winterized. Texas Republicans failed to winterize, and its power grid suffered an across-the-board failure.
Serwer writes, "I doubt that 'We'd freeze to death to own the libs' is a popular sentiment in Texas, but drawing that impression is easy if you're outside the state, listening to its Republican officials. As the journalist Brian Kahn noted on Twitter, when California was struggling with much smaller blackouts in late 2020, ambitious Texas Republicans were sneering at the state on social media…. Texas politicians were so interested in California's struggles last year because California is an easy conservative shorthand for liberalism, and what ambitious Republicans have discerned from the success of Donald Trump is that the best way to attract conservative support is to show that they, too, enjoy it when liberals suffer."
But during the recent cold snap, Serwer adds, Texans have been the ones suffering.
"Texas has trended blue in recent years, but the Texas GOP remains ruthlessly competent at the work of winning elections even as it fails at governing," Serwer explains. "That absence of political competition breeds complacency….. In the contemporary Republican Party, governance has taken a back seat to waging the Culture War. Whether you are a competent public official who serves your constituents well matters less than your ability to illustrate your contempt for the rival party's constituency in word and deed."
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/tracing-the-roots-of-city-boy-trumps-racist-suburban-dream-nonsense-all-the-way-to-rush-limbaugh
no lnx twt many
It’s no surprise that the current occupant of the White House is running for reelection on racism. Given his track record, it would be a surprise if he weren’t. Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric has always centered on fearmongering around crime, going back not just to the start of his presidential campaign in 2015, but back to the 1980s. Now he’s at it again, this time with a focus on the suburbs and, in anachronistic language that evokes June Cleaver or Carol Brady, ”suburban housewives.”
Based on his rambling, Trump seems to think the suburbs are still filled with white women in aprons making their kids PB&J on Wonder BreadTM with the crusts cut off, dutifully fixing after-work martinis for their husbands. Trump thinks he can scare those white-lady aprons right off with tales of Black and brown criminals descending upon their neighborhoods, and present himself as the white (orange?) savior who will keep their neighborhoods safe by keeping them white. This particular dog whistle is not one Trump invented, of course. Among others, Rush Limbaugh has been blowing it for years.
Let’s start with Trump’s current campaign. On June 30, President Shitgibbon tweeted that he was “studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact” on the suburbs. He also claimed that his opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, wants to make things “much worse”—correction: “MUCH WORSE.” Trump added that he “may END!” the AFFH.
The AFFH refers to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, enacted in 2015, under the Obama-Biden administration. Barack Obama’s AFFH rule updated a previous regulation governing discrimination in housing and real estate, which wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do as required by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
What Obama did was mandate that local governments that received federal money to build housing must “identify and address patterns of racial segregation outlawed under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by creating detailed corrective plans.” In other words, he simply wanted to make sure that cities and towns followed existing law. Radical, I know. To clarify, the AFFH would not destroy, abolish, or even fundamentally alter the nature of housing in the suburbs. It’s just a boogeyman Trump’s using because he thinks it will scare the white ladies of Westchester County and beyond into voting for him.
A few weeks after the initial tweet, on July 23, this appeared on Herr Twitler’s feed.
Less than a week later, on July 29, the White House announced that it was revoking the AFFH. This formal revocation came on top of action Trump took in January 2018, which de facto blocked the rule from taking effect by pushing back its effective start date to at least November 1, 2020. The Trump administration has taken numerous other steps to hamstring the federal government’s efforts to enforce fair housing and desegregate neighborhoods.
The same day the rule’s revocation was made public, Trump followed up with a tweet that, as many have noted, said the quiet part out loud.
That same day, Trump echoed his tweet in remarks to an audience in Midland, Texas. “There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs,” he declared, adding that “it’s been going on for years. I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia.”
Whereas Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson and his minions have portrayed the gutting of Obama’s fair housing rules as merely making things simpler by reducing unnecessary paperwork, President Charlottesville just came right out and revealed the real motivation for these changes. He’s vowing to make sure the people he considers undesirable from “low-income housing” projects can’t move in next door—and assuming it’s an effective strategy.
Apparently, Trump convinced himself that his previous tweets were too subtle. He decided that it would help if he named someone who would supposedly help Joe Biden take aim at the suburbs if he was elected. Since President Barack Obama is no longer on the ticket, the Orange Julius Caesar must have figured he needed a substitute of a similar hue.
[twt]
When pressed on what he meant by that tweet, Trump, as The New York Times put it, “told on himself.”
“They’re going to, in my opinion, destroy suburbia, And just so you understand, 30 percent-plus of the people living in suburbia are minorities,” Trump rambled. “African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic American—they’re minorities. Thirty percent. The number is even higher, it’s—they say 35, but I like to cut it a little bit lower. You know why? That way I can never get myself in too much trouble with the fake news.”
Women of all races have been calling Trump out on this hate-filled nonsense. “I think people may make assumptions,” one white Kentucky stay-at-home mother of three told the Daily Beast. “And I think that’s something the president has done, unfortunately, is make assumptions that all white women are going to support him. And we’re not.”
Writer Ally Henny, on the other hand, was explicit in her explanation of why Trump is choosing his words so carefully.
Most recently, perhaps having decided that race-baiting the suburbs from Trump’s own mouth and tweets needed some fleshing out as a campaign strategy, the impeached president and his HUD secretary “wrote” an op-ed piece, placed behind The Wall Street Journal paywall. It’s a bit more subtle, and makes passing mention of Americans of color also living in the suburbs, but this slick product can’t unsay what the racist-in-chief already put out there.
As Media Matters laid out, Trump’s racist suburban shtick strongly echoes the work of right-wing author and commentator Stanley Kurtz. In 2012, Kurtz published a book called Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. If you’re wondering whether Kurtz has spent a lifetime studying housing policy, don’t bother. His previous book was 2010’s Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. There is something that is definitely not “expertise in housing policy” running through both tomes.
Back to 2020. On the morning of June 30, Kurtz published a National Review piece claiming that if Biden won the presidency, he would go beyond the AFFH and adopt a policy advocated by Cory (not “Corey”) Booker; he further asserted that Biden’s true intention is to “abolish the suburbs.” Trump’s tweet saying the same went live about 12 hours later. Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis pointed out the connection between Kurtz’s article and the Trump tweet.
Stanley Kurtz leads us to the other right-wing blowhard mentioned at the beginning of this post, namely the man with whom Trump defiled the Medal of Freedom: Rush Limbaugh. In doing research for my recent book, I analyzed multiple examples of Limbaugh slamming Obama over his policies regarding the suburbs—most of the time citing Kurtz. A week before Kurtz’s book came out in 2012, Limbaugh started talking about it, quoting from it, and using it to paint President Obama as anti-suburban and, in so many words, anti-white. This went on for the remainder of Obama’s time in office.
On July 26, 2012, Limbaugh offered lengthy quotations from the Kurtz book, which regaled its readers with lies about Obama’s “lifelong hostility to the suburbs.” The 44th president apparently had it in for suburb dwellers, whom he supposedly believed “were just greedy racists who didn’t want to share their tax money with the urban poor.” We know exactly which group of people Limbaugh means when he talks about “the suburbs,” and who he means when he talks about “the urban poor.” This is the very same dog whistle Trump is blowing now, eight years later, when he’s fighting to keep the presidency.
Limbaugh did this over and over again. The next day he claimed that suburbanites were Obama’s “real enemies,” and six days after that, Limbaugh predicted that the first Black president would “abolish” the suburbs. In September 2013, the racist host said that President Obama would “destroy the suburbs,” and in July 2014, Limbaugh spouted off about “Obama’s war on the suburbs”—during a segment where he specifically went after the AFFH rule Trump so desperately hates, which was then under consideration. In a July 2015 master class on race-baiting, the host tied his suburbia-based attacks on Obama to “forced busing,” as well as to “attacks on the South” and “attacks on the Confederate flag.”
This went on and on. In addition to the examples above, Limbaugh threw out similar suburban dog whistles during the Obama presidency here, here, here, here, here, and here—each “here” represents a different day’s broadcast. And of course, Limbaugh is still at it in 2020. He even blew his dog whistle during his reaction to Rep. John Lewis’s funeral.
Thanks to reporting from New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, we know that Trump got many of the specific topics for his race-baiting rhetoric from talk radio. In the run-up to the 2016 campaign, onetime top Trump aide Sam Nunberg did a “deep dive into talk radio”—listening for “thousands of hours” and then giving “reports” to Trump on what was really motivating the right-wing base. Limbaugh has the largest audience in talk radio, and has for as long as such ratings have been measured. Trump’s recent dog whistles on the suburbs and Biden are wholly unoriginal: They’re virtually a carbon copy of Limbaugh’s language on the suburbs and Obama—language which itself was cribbed from Stanley Kurtz.
When it comes to the suburbs, and other policies that relate to race and economics more broadly, Limbaugh and Trump have sought to win over middle- and working-class white Americans by falsely claiming that former President Obama and future President Biden want nothing more than to take away what they have earned—whether it’s money or safe neighborhoods—and give it to Black and Latino Americans who supposedly don’t deserve it.
Playing to racial anxieties and ginning up fear and hatred are the only ways the Limbaugh-Trump Republican Party can get the support of those voters, given that GOP policies actively work against their economic interests while favoring those of the real elites—the top 1%. To defeat Trump and the Republican Party made in his image, Democrats must help these voters recognize that Republicans are spewing hate in order to keep white Americans and Americans of color from coming together on the basis of shared interests.
One way to do so is to point out what the Trump party actually does when it gains power. The Trump presidency’s singular legislative accomplishment is a multibillion dollar tax giveaway to millionaires and billionaires, that does little to nothing for the average American of any race. The other major legislative effort undertaken by Trump & Co. was repealing the Affordable Care Act, which expanded coverage to tens of millions of Americans. Thankfully, that effort failed, but it too would have mostly helped the wealthy by giving them a tax cut, and harmed the folks—again, Americans of every race—earning around or just below the national median income who had gained coverage.
Republicans can’t sell their economic policies to middle- and working-class white voters, so all they have left to peddle is hate. That’s why Trump is now trying to scare white suburbanites with tall tales about poor people moving in from cities, or, as he did just a few days ago, revisiting some of his worst rhetoric from the 2016 campaign about immigrants and crime.
When thinking about where Trump comes from, most people associate him with the city. Trump Tower, his erstwhile home, sits in midtown Manhattan. He claims to have “built” skyscrapers, but mostly he just got paid to place his name on other people’s buildings. However, he grew up in 1950s Jamaica Estates, a neighborhood that, although it was located in Queens, New York City, much more resembled a wealthy suburban enclave. It was, according to a New York Times article, “an exclusive and nearly all-white place, resistant to outsiders and largely impenetrable to minorities.” Trump himself described it as “safe” and “an oasis” when compared to other parts of Queens, which he viewed as “rough.”
This mindset—the idea of a suburban environment as a place where white people with enough money to escape the inner city’s poor neighborhoods of color, as well as enough power to keep non-whites from moving in—is at the core of Trump’s race-baiting on the suburbs. Trump understands, and hopes to exploit in this year’s election the very racist fears that once motivated the white flight from American cities in the 1950s and ‘60s. So does Rush Limbaugh, whose racist rhetoric throughout the Obama presidency laid out the blueprint that Trump is now using to attack Joe Biden.
Two months before Election Day, it appears that the white suburban women who elected Trump in 2016 (and to whom Trump thinks this hate-filled nonsense will appeal) are not responding to his dog whistle, at least not in large enough numbers to reelect him. Perhaps they’ve evolved in terms of their fears and prejudices. Or perhaps they’ve simply come to realize that The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote poses a far greater danger because of his manifest unfitness to lead our country.
Making sure they remember that and come out to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket is one thing we can all help to make happen.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)
==
// Lib U ex jock uses homophobe as wedge issue to flank conserv senate; wedge issue --> fear/ anger hype?
6/20 aha big ramp up on militarization and criminalization eg
omg in wake of milley and sec at st john 180, this pow #3?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-nominee-for-key-pentagon-position-accused-is-an-islamophobic-conspiracy-theorist-who-called-obama-a-terrorist-leader/
trump nominee for key Pentagon position accused is ‘an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who called Obama a terrorist leader’
Written by Alex Henderson June 16, 2020
President Donald Trump has nominated retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata for a key position in the Pentagon, but Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, according to CNN, have vowed to oppose the nomination in light of Tata’s history of hateful anti-Islam rants.That includes Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the leading Democrat on the SASC.
In 2018, CNN reported, Tata described Islam as the “most oppressive violent religion I know of” and called former President Barack Obama as a “terrorist leader” for — as he saw it — being overly pro-Islam. Tata was vehemently critical of the Obama Administration’s deal with Iran and claimed that it came about because ofObama’s “Islamic roots.” Obama, Tata claimed, did more to “help Islamic countries than any president in history.”
Anthony J. Tata
@ajtata
If true, and it appears to be, #Obama and #Clinton are guilty of sedition and/or treason 18 U.S. Code 2384 #MAGA #trump2020 #ComeyMemos #Kanye2024 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2384 … https://twitter.com/_vachellindsay_/status/988616258022076416 …
8:31 PM - Apr 23, 2018
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In addition to Reed, Senate Democrats who have told CNN they will oppose Tata’s nomination include Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Gary Peters of Michigan. Warren told CNN, “An Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who called President Obama a ‘terrorist leader’ should not be #3 at the Pentagon. Anthony Tata is by far Trump’s most unqualified and ill-suited senior defense nominee.”
In May 2018, Tata attacked former CIA Director John Brennan and tweeted, “Might be a good time to pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol. Your call. #Treason #Sedition #crossfirehurricane #Obamagate.”
andrew kaczynski??
@KFILE
17h
Replying to @KFILE
The "Manchurian candidate" Obama conspiracy article shared and endorsed by Tata claimed that Obama let ISIS grow on purpose in Iraq and Libya, saying the "deviousness of the Obama sedition runs deep."https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/tata-pentagon-nominee-kfile/index.html …
Democrats on key Senate committee oppose Pentagon pick as more inflammatory tweets emerge
Several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Monday that they would oppose the nomination of retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata to oversee the Pentagon's policy shop.
cnn.com
andrew kaczynski??
@KFILE
Tata accused Obama administration remembers of treason several times, saying former CIA chief John Brennan should "pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol. Your call."https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/tata-pentagon-nominee-kfile/index.html …
View image on TwitterView image on Twitter...
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aha: this has existed for a while as dirty tricks tactic (us vs them enemies; dirty germy foreigners; we are victims? amplifty and acclerate by trump and soc med echo escalator post truth
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-uses-his-weird-grip-on-republicans-to-stoke-a-nihilistic-culture-war/
no lnx pix
trump uses his weird grip on Republicans to stoke a nihilistic culture war
Donald J. Trump holding a rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, on May 8, 2019 // Office of the President of the United States/Donald J. Trump
Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon May 29, 2020
I don’t think there’s ever been a U.S. president with more influence with his political base that Donald Trump. All presidents are defended by those who support them, of course. Even the most unpopular failures have diehard fans who stick with them to the bitter end.
But Trump is unusual in that he has only ever attempted to govern on behalf of the people who support him and has no feeling of responsibility toward any other citizens. He has taken the already polarized Republican Party and turned it into a cult of personality. His influence over the 40 to 45% of the population who seem to idolize him is immense.
Perhaps it’s because Trump was a celebrity with a TV show long before he entered politics that makes his fans love him so unconditionally. Whatever it is, Trump and his supporters have an unusually personal and almost intimate bond. It’s clear after three and a half tumultuous years that they will follow his lead no matter what.
The political implications of this are profound. This weird relationship between president and base now completely dominates the Republican Party, apparently making it impossible for any prominent national figure in the party to allow even the smallest daylight between himself or herself and Trump. (Frankly, very few even seem to be trying.)
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The red MAGA hat serves as an official symbol of Trump loyalty, and there is a certain part of his following that uses it as a tool of intimidation. Even more disturbing, there has been a spate of mass shootings and other acts of violence by people who have named Trump or his ideas as motivation.
In order to maintain his supporters’ devotion, Trump has stoked the culture wars at every turn, ruthlessly dividing the country in order to keep his fans engaged. They receive such hypocritical gestures of solidarity as his newfound “pro-life” zealotry with enthusiastic gratitude — but what they really love are his brutal assaults on those they consider their political and cultural enemies. In that, Trump and his base are one.
So it should come as no surprise that when Trump faced the first crisis of his presidency that was not of his own making — and failed to meet the challenge — he would reflexively fall back on culture-war tactics to reinforce his base. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been abysmal, with the death toll now over 100,000 and the economy in dire straits. After bungling the response so badly that it will be studied by historians for centuries as an example of poor leadership, Trump is returning to his original instinct, which was simply to deny that the whole thing mattered, or was even happening.
His supporters have eagerly followed his lead, defying public health guidelines and demanding that their governors “reopen” immediately (or in Trump’s own words of incitement, that they “liberate” their states.) Trump clearly believes that he can wish away the virus — or at least people’s concern about the virus — by pretending that the crisis is over and that we can go back to normal.
As we speak, he’s arguing with the state government of North Carolina about the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled for late August in Charlotte. Republican officials had reportedly been discussing how they could stage the event while observing CDC social distancing guidelines, and everything had been going smoothly. Trump, however, wants his big party, and wants it to be crammed with people screaming ecstatically at his every word. What he doesn’t want is anyone wearing masks.
In fact, wearing a mask, or rather not wearing one, is fast becoming as much of a symbol of Trump fealty as those red MAGA hats. Trump’s allies on Fox News have pushed it hard among the faithful (with the unexpected exception of Sean Hannity.)
Acyn Torabi
@Acyn
Laura’s war against masks continues
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As Salon’s Igor Derysh reports, studies show that people who watch Fox are far more inclined to defy public health guidelines. But really, it’s Trump himself who has turned masks into a culture-war symbol by ostentatiously refusing to wear one.
This makes little sense, of course, if he genuinely wants to reopen the country in a way that allows workers and consumers to feel safe going about their business. Masks and social distancing are common-sense ways to begin doing that, and normalizing that behavior will bring back the economy more quickly. But Trump has decided to pretend that the crisis is over, as I said earlier, and mask-wearing and social distancing don’t exactly send that message.
I also suspect that his resistance is largely due to vanity. The man truly believes that wearing one will make him look foolish (which can only be described as amazing) and he may also have concerns about the mask rubbing off his thick orange makeup.
All of this comes as he’s also implying it’s somehow weak, unmanly and un-American to wear one. In fact, he’s seized upon this as a new attack line against Joe Biden:
Judd Legum
@JuddLegum
New Trump ads on Facebook mock Biden for wearing a mask
View image on Twitter
Some Republicans are actually pushing back on this, notably state governors who will have to deal with the resurgence of cases if people follow Trump’s dangerous example. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has urged people to wear them. It’s hard to know why these dissenters are stepping up now, but maybe it’s because they see something really dark and ugly taking hold among the Trump faithful.
For instance, Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature who have been railing against public health measures turned out to have concealed the fact that one of their own members had contracted the virus. They quarantined themselves but never told their Democratic colleagues, allowing them to potentially expose their family members and loved ones without knowing it.
According to the Washington Post, there are businesses in various parts of the country now barring customers from wearing masks in their establishments. This was from an interview with Kevin Smith, proprietor of the Liberty Tree Tavern in Elgin, Texas:
“If we’re only allowed to be at 25 percent capacity, I want them to be the 25 percent of people that aren’t p—–, that aren’t sheep,” Smith told The Washington Post. “Being scared all the time isn’t good for your health. It suppresses your immune system.”
Trump posted this tweet yesterday, cutely pretending that he was just making an observation:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
So many different viewpoints! https://twitter.com/leesmithdc/status/1265629746450358273 …
Lee Smith
@LeeSmithDC
Terrific ?@molmccann? piece in ?@FDRLST? — masks aren’t about public health but social control. Image of Biden in black mask endorses culture of silence, slavery, and social death. https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/27/mandatory-masks-arent-about-safety-theyre-about-social-control/ …
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The science is clear on this: Masks work. If everyone wore them when they were out in public it would make a significant difference in slowing the transmission of the virus. These people are pretending to be tough, but in reality they’re just following the example of the president and living in denial.
Imagine a world where, instead of behaving so foolishly, Trump modeled sensible behavior by wearing a mask and social distancing and encouraging businesses to open up responsibly? His followers would buy red MAGA masks by the truckload and turn social distancing into the mark of macho American individualism. But he can’t do that, of course, because stoking the culture war is literally his last hope of winning re-election.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/never-trump-conservatives-like-meghan-mccain-are-trying-to-whitewash-sarah-palins-role-as-the-proto-trump-dont-let-them
no lnx vid twtr
'Never Trump’ conservatives like Meghan McCain are trying to whitewash Sarah Palin’s role as the proto-Trump. Don’t let them
Image via Shutterstock.
Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos May 26, 2020
Like many of the so-called #NeverTrump crowd, Meghan McCain would like to airbrush history when it comes to explaining how and why Donald Trump came to be the bullying, dominating leader of the Republican Party—to paint Trump as an aberration who seized control of the party from the outside.Recently, she even tried to blame Barack Obama for the Trump phenomenon: “The culture war that I believe is real, and is raging in this country, I believe was ushered in with his administration,” she said, “and then exacerbated in the Trump administration.”
That, of course, is not what happened. The culture wars are a strategy that had its beginning during the Reagan Administration and were cooked into a concrete form by GOP “thinkers” like Patrick Buchanan and Newt Gingrich, but completely consumed the party beginning in 2008, when McCain’s father, John, selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. So I wrote a Twitter thread replying to McCain, laying out this history with video documentation.
Here’s the thread. So far, unfortunately, McCain hasn’t responded. Other “NeverTrumpers”—with similar ties to the 2008 McCain campaign—have in fact contacted me, and I hope to have a fuller report on their responses soon. In the meantime, enjoy the links and the videos.
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
1) A thread about Sarah Palin, who in many ways was the key figure in the transformation of the Republican Party into the know-nothing, anti-science, conspiracy-theory-loving, cultishly authoritarian Party of Trump it is today. W/ video.
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David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
May 20, 2020
Replying to @DavidNeiwert
2) I've been thinking a lot about Palin in no small part because of the way Trump-hating Republicans like @MeghanMcCain are rewriting history by trying to blame Barack Obama for Trump, because apparently he, not the GOP, stoked America's culture wars when he was president.
View image on TwitterView image on Twitter
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
3) Let's be clear: the GOP has been stoking these culture wars as a means of winning election since at least the days of Ronald Reagan and his presidency. But they embraced it openly beginning in 1992 with Pat Buchanan's "cultural war" speech.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2olwuAy3_og …
YouTube ?@YouTube
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David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
Replying to @DavidNeiwert
4) This M.O. never ceased configuring Republican politics in the ensuing years, notably during the Bush years. But unquestionably the person who most made these culture the entire raison d'être of the GOP was John McCain's 2008 running mate, Sarah Palin.https://www.journalism.org/2008/11/20/sarah-palin-and-the-culture-wars/ …
Sarah Palin and the “Culture Wars”
A distinguishing feature of the coverage of the race was how – with the notable exception of abortion – there was little discussion of the
journalism.org
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David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
May 20, 2020
Replying to @DavidNeiwert
5) I became intimately familiar while on assignment in Alaska to examine Palin's connections to the extremist right, mainly the "Patriot"/militia movement, during her time on the Wasilla city council and then as the city's mayor. She had a fondness for the John Birch Society.
View image on Twitter
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
6) Our story ran in early October, but it unfortunately didn't make it onto the radar of the national media. Still, it remained a solid story that revealed a great deal about the political creature McCain and his campaign had unleashed.https://www.salon.com/2008/10/10/palin_chryson/ …
Meet Sarah Palin's radical right-wing pals
Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin's political career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. "Her door was open," says Chryson -- and still is.
salon.com
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David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
May 20, 2020
Replying to @DavidNeiwert
7) It emerged later that Palin had watched my appearance on CNN to promote the piece and had gone nuts, creating a huge fight within the campaign that she lost, thereby inspiring her to infamously 'go rogue' for the duration. Guess I did my part.https://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/how-i-helped-drive-sarah-palin-crazy …
How I Helped Drive Sarah Palin Crazy By Digging Into Her Past
My first week on the job here at Crooks and Liars, I went on CNN Newsroom with Rick Sanchez to talk about an investigative piece co-written with Max B
crooksandliars.com
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
8) However, this extremism had of course already bubbled up during the campaign -- reflected not just in her red-meat speeches but in the effect she had on crowds. This report from Al Jazeera still haunts me.
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David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
May 20, 2020
Replying to @DavidNeiwert
9) The key here is that after the election, Palin didn't tone down the extremism, but rather stepped it up. She was one of the first figures from the GOP establishment to embrace the "Birther" conspiracy theories.
Embedded video
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
10) Of course, we also know who not only followed suit, but launched his entire political career on the back of this fraudulent and racist conspiracy theory.
Embedded video
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David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
May 20, 2020
Replying to @DavidNeiwert
11) Palin also played a key role in the increasing radicalization of the GOP, particularly through her connections to the Tea Party, which quickly became a major conduit for "Patriot"-style and Christian nationalist extremism.http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2010/04/video-sarah-palins-speech-to-women-of.html?m=0 …
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
12) Palin also did a lot to pave the way for the gobbledygook word-salad rhetorical style that has been Trump's hallmark.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/sheriffs-salon-owners-and-fox-news-desperate-attempt-turn-pandemic-latest
Right-wing media personalities have long struggled to find a conservative hero in their culture war, someone to serve as an ideological martyr for their cause -- and they’ve made some pretty ridiculous attempts to force it along the way.
Gun owners? Rosa Parks (https://www.mediamatters.org/ted-nugent/ted-nugent-calls-gun-owners-next-rosa-parks). A police officer who arrested a Black man for breaking into his own home? Rosa Parks with a badge (https://www.mediamatters.org/breitbart-news/wash-times-column-breitbart-declares-officer-gates-arrest-rosa-parks-rush-judgment?redirect_source=/blog/2009/07/27/in-wash-times-column-breitbart-declares-officer/152489). Rogue rancher Cliven Bundy? Rosa Parks on the open range (https://www.mediamatters.org/kevin-williamson/allies-repeatedly-compared-racist-rancher-civil-rights-figures). If only conservative media were more interested in Rosa Parks herself (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-nation/rosa-parkss-memorial-received-scant-coverage-fox-news), maybe they’d understand why those comparisons are ludicrous. But that hasn’t stopped conservative media figures from continuing to draw parallels (https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/shelley_luther_is_americas_new_rosa_parks.html) between civil rights activism and a new front in the right-wing culture war: opposition to stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic.
Weeks after the network began hyping protests against the coronavirus safety measures, Fox News has found a folk hero in Texas salon owner Shelley Luther (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/06/dallas-salon-owner-jailed-coronavirus/), who defied the state’s stay-at-home order to reopen her salon and refused to comply in a court appearance. The network — unlike conservative commentator and former Rep. Allen West (https://twitter.com/AllenWest/status/1257787179172007936) — hasn’t made explicit comparisons between Luther and Parks just yet. But Fox has used its platform to promote local sheriffs and business owners who are defying lockdown orders. And it's made Luther into the de facto face of the anti-lockdown movement against big, overreaching government, utilizing an old playbook to turn a public health emergency into a battle in the culture war.
Fox News worked to portray Luther as a martyr to stay-at-home orders.
Luther reopened her salon on April 24 in defiance of the state’s stay-at-home order. On April 28, District Judge Eric Moyé issued a temporary restraining order (https://www.dallasnews.com/news/public-health/2020/04/28/judge-orders-dallas-salon-to-close-after-owner-refused-to-follow-emergency-orders/) against Luther. On May 5, after she refused to follow that order, Moyé found Luther in contempt of court and sentenced her (https://www.texastribune.org/2020/05/05/dallas-salon-owner-jail-sentence-reopening-shelley-luther-coronavirus/) to seven days in jail, though she would be released (https://www.texastribune.org/2020/05/07/texas-dallas-salon-owner-coronavirus/) less than 48 hours later.
The order Luther violated was issued by Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and came with a maximum penalty of $1,000 in fines and 180 days in jail (https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/EO-GA-14_Statewide_Essential_Service_and_Activity_COVID-19_IMAGE_03-31-2020.pdf). Moyé offered Luther the opportunity to avoid jail time (https://texasscorecard.com/metroplex/dallas-salon-owner-shelley-luther-fined-and-jailed/) if she would acknowledge that she had broken the order and agree to shut down her salon until the stay-at-home order was lifted, but she refused. Luther claimed that she needed to keep her salon open to feed her kids, even though she had applied for and received $18,000 in financial aid (https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1259869380781002752) through the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program. And given that a GoFundMe page (https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/dallas-salon-arrest-gofundme/) had been set up for her a day before she first reopened, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a public relations stunt; thanks to Fox News, it would be a very successful one.
Abbott, along with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, criticized the judge (https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2020/05/06/straight-up-wrong-texas-conservatives-defend-dallas-salon-owner-jailed-for-keeping-open-business-amid-coronavirus/) for enforcing Abbott’s own executive order. Fox News quickly hosted Patrick multiple (https://www.foxnews.com/media/dan-patrick-defends-shelley-luther-not-what-america-is-about) times (https://www.foxnews.com/media/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-defends-jailed-salon-owner-she-should-be-home-for-mothers-day) on the network (https://video.foxnews.com/v/6155033090001#sp=show-clips), (https://www.foxnews.com/media/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-defends-jailed-salon-owner-she-should-be-home-for-mothers-day) where he advocated for Luther and accused Moyé of making “a giant overreach.” (Luther, for her part, has advocated for
(https://youtu.be/Yh17eh0kO1Q) who is up for reelection this year.)
On May 6 (https://www.foxnews.com/media/boyfriend-jailed-dallas-salon-owner-hannity), Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity interviewed Luther’s boyfriend, Tim Georgeff, and compared Luther’s punishment to the Mel Gibson character's execution for treason in the movie Braveheart. Prime-time host Tucker Carlson invited Luther’s attorney Warren Norred to appear on Tucker Carlson Tonight (https://www.foxnews.com/media/shelley-luther-lawyer-dallas-judge-bend-knee) the same day and said that he hopes Luther’s story “awakens people.” In the interview, Norred criticized “tiny tyrants” in government and complained that the judge treated Luther as a “heretic” and demanded that she “bend the knee.” Luther herself appeared on the May 8 (https://video.foxnews.com/v/6155128906001#sp=show-clips) edition of Hannity after she was released, and Hannity again compared her ordeal to that of William Wallace in Braveheart.
Fox News (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-covered-jailed-salon-owner-over-7-times-more-ahmaud-arbery) devoted 2 hours and 48 minutes of coverage to Luther’s story between May 5 and 2 p.m. EDT May 8. To put this in context, Fox News covered the high-profile killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man shot in Georgia while out for a jog, for only 47 minutes between May 3 and 2 p.m. EDT May 8.
Fox News is using an old playbook to turn a public health emergency into a battle in the culture war.
For years, Fox News has propped up conservative figures as heroes in a war against big government. In 2014, Fox went all-in (https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/fox-news-carnival-barkers-gin-range-war?redirect_source=/blog/2014/04/18/fox-news-carnival-barkers-gin-up-a-range-war/198946) on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy (https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/conservative-media-who-brought-you-cliven-bundy) and his protests that led to an armed standoff with the federal government. Fox did the same in 2014 as it worked to portray Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-fox-news-helped-make-duck-dynastys-phil-robertson-conservative-media-darling) as a martyr when A&E temporarily put the show on hiatus after he made anti-LGBTQ comments. Similarly, in 2015, Fox News and other right-wing media outlets rallied around Kim Davis (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-nation/conservative-pundits-invoke-civil-rights-icons-defend-anti-lgbt-county-clerk-kim-davis), the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage certificates for same-sex couples.
The strategy of portraying conservatives as the victims of liberal policies -- even when, as was the case for Luther, the policy being violated was implemented by a Republican -- makes sense as part of Fox’s political messaging, as it furthers a narrative of conservative oppression.
In addition to Luther, Fox has recently taken to elevating other anti-lockdown activists. An Arizona sheriffnamed
(https://youtu.be/XxLgH9W4OqI) appeared onTucker Carlson Tonight to discuss his decision not to enforce the state’s stay-at-home order. Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, appeared on Fox & Friends (https://www.foxnews.com/media/ca-sheriff-refuses-to-enforce-states-stay-at-home-orders). Three other sheriffs (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-cheering-rogue-sheriffs-connected-extremist-group) who’ve made recent Fox News appearances to decry stay-at-home orders have ties to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an extremist group. Business owners Eliot Rabin (https://www.foxnews.com/media/eliot-rabin-nyc-tailor-reopens-coronavirus-defiance), Juan Desmarais (https://video.foxnews.com/v/6153574855001#sp=show-clips), and Rick Savage (https://video.foxnews.com/v/6153312167001#sp=show-clips) have all appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss their decisions to defy stay-at-home orders by keeping their businesses open.
In April, Fox News helped uplift the anti-lockdown protests with an overwhelming amount of coverage. In just over one week, Fox News ran 91 segments (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/promotion-praise-and-ton-coverage-how-fox-news-embraced-protests-against-coronavirus) about those protests, amounting to roughly six hours of programming. As the pandemic stretched into May, Fox began attempting to shift focus away from the mounting death toll and the president’s lagging approval ratings on his handling of the disaster, limiting what pandemic-related stories it aired to pieces about conservatives who were supposedly harmed by stay-at-home orders. The raging pandemic is starting (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/coronavirus-death-toll-rises-fox-hosts-agree-crisis-over-even-if-they-cant-agree-why) to become an afterthought (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/month-month-fox-news-coronavirus-coverage-has-dropped-more-20) on the network, and Fox is moving on to topics like the Department of Justice’s decision to drop charges against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn (https://www.mediamatters.org/michael-flynn/fox-news-laid-groundwork-department-justices-decision-drop-charges-against-michael) and the phony “Obamagate (https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/fox-news-why-trump-thinks-he-can-get-away-nixonian-corruption-barrs-doj)” scandal. With its coverage of Luther’s case, Fox has found a way to portray conservatives as the real victims in this public health crisis.
Conservatives keep fighting their culture war amid a deadly pandemic.
While a certain intellectual gladiator of the right (https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/695638866993115136) may claim that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” Fox News knows this isn’t quite right. The network needs to downplay the pandemic to protect President Donald Trump. But you can't convince an audience that a deadly pandemic is just an acceptable fact of life with #facts and #logic; you need to sell them on it by playing to their emotions, giving them a hero to cheer for and a villain to rage against.
Taking Luther’s story as an example, a rational analysis of what happened would show her as a person who didn’t think the law the rest of us are expected to follow should apply to her, who was given an opportunity to avoid jail after violating the law and refused, who applied for and received government assistance, and who raised nearly $500,000 (https://www.gofundme.com/f/shelley-luther-fund?utm_source=widget&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet) from a GoFundMe page started before reopening the business. To convince an audience that the victim in this situation is the salon owner -- especially an audience that likes to think of itself as supporting “law and order” -- you have to appeal to their emotions to override the massive amounts of cognitive dissonance involved.
A pandemic is no time for culture war gamesmanship, but as Fox News’ latest cavalcade of conservative martyrs shows, it’s the only game the network knows how to play.
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1/20
aha_let: all these pols may not be bigots at heart, but anti-gay is culture war wedge issue, big w/ evangelicals, so mostly freebie nobrainer upside?
PLUS these hot-button issues are great to generate FEAR thus great for direct mail fundraising (also email) and mebbe GOTV
don jr calls himself the general of the meme /info wars
==
// to GND no more cheeseburgers
Fox News is now blasting the liberal ‘War on Thanksgiving’ (https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/fox-news-is-now-blasting-the-liberal-war-on-thanksgiving/)
Aldous J. Pennyfarthing (https://www.alternet.org/author/aldousjpennyfarthing/) / Daily Kos (https://www.alternet.org/author/daily-kos/)
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-and-the-culture-wars-here-are-the-divisive-themes-trump-will-focus-on-as-his-economic-policies-crumble/
no lnx
Trump and the culture wars: Here are the divisive themes the president will focus on as his economic policies crumble
Written by Alex Henderson August 19, 2019
President Donald Trump, in recent weeks, has been stressing both economic themes and culture war themes. The economic themes were evident during a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire on August 15, when Trump tried to frighten 401(k) owners into reelecting him and insisted, “You have no choice but to vote for me because your 401(k), everything is going to be down the tubes (under a Democratic president). So whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me.” But if the U.S. does go into a recession in the months ahead, Trump will have a harder time selling himself as the salvation of the American economy — in which case, he would likely become even more aggressive in pushing divisive culture war themes.
Although Trump is wildly unpopular in heavily Democratic areas of the U.S., he is still quite popular among his hardcore base — and one saw that playing out in the 2018 midterms. Democrats enjoyed a net gain of 40 seats in the House of Representatives, but Republicans slightly increased their majority in the Senate thanks, in part, to Trump’s ability to rally his base in conservative areas. And Trump’s rally-the-base approach has been painfully evident in recent weeks.
When Trump told four congresswomen of color to go back to the countries they originally came from — even though three of them (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ayanna Pressley) were born and raised in the U.S. — it was a rally-the-base move. When he tried to discredit Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings by describing Baltimore (a predominantly African-American city) as a “rat- and rodent-infested mess,” he was clearly trying to rally his base. But when he was discussing 401(k) plans in New Hampshire, Trump appeared to be trying to expand his base and convince non-culture warriors to vote for him.
The harder it becomes for Trump to campaign on the economy in the months ahead, the more important culture war issues and rally-the-base moves will become for him. It isn’t inconceivable that Trump could pull off a narrow Electoral College victory in 2020 even if the U.S. goes into a recession, but doing do would mean firing up his base as much as possible and benefitting from a low Democratic turnout — and there are many culture war and nativist themes that could become even more important to Trump if the economy declines.
Abortionis at the top of the list. When he was a Blue Dog Democrat back in the 1990s, Trump was highly critical of abortion yet reluctantly pro-choice; these days, he is vehemently anti-choice and has vowed to only nominate severe social conservatives and “pro-life” zealots to the U.S. Supreme Court. So far, he has made good on that promise with Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — and he has made it abundantly clear that if he is reelected and more seats become available on the Supreme Court, he will continue to do so and make the Court even more socially conservative.
As it stands now, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned. But that possibility will become even stronger if Trump has a chance to nominate more Supreme Court justices.
Trump, in the months ahead, is also likely to fan the flames of the Culture War by reminding the Christian right that Supreme Court justices aren’t the only people he would be nominating for the federal judiciary in 2021 and beyond. During a second term, he could nominate more far-right social conservatives to the lower federal courts as well.
The Christian right, as journalist Chris Hedges has often stressed, is not only a fundamentalist religious movement — it is also a movement with severe nativist and white nationalist tendencies. And Trump can rally his Christian Right supporters not only with abortion or school prayer, but also, with nativism and anti-immigrant rhetoric. The worse the U.S. economy becomes for Trump, the more important issues like immigration and building a U.S./Mexico border wall become to his 2020 campaign.
The Department of Labor, under Trump, has proposed rolling back Obama-era protections against anti-gay discrimination in the workplace and allowing companies with government contracts to discriminate against those who offend a contractor’s religious views. Christian Right groups like the Family Research Council and Liberty Counsel are applauding the move, which gives Trump yet another thing to campaign on when he is pursuing Culture War votes in 2020.
Anti-Islam extremism is another issue Trump will likely pander to in 2020. Even President George W. Bush was careful to draw a distinction between radical jihadist Islam and non-radical Islam; Trump’s Christian Right and anti-Islam supporters draw no such distinction.
Christian fundamentalist support for Israel is another Culture War issue for Trump to campaign on. Bizarrely, the Christian Right believes that Jews are doomed to hell unless they convert to fundamentalist Christianity, yet consider themselves stridently pro-Israel — and claiming that Democrats could never love Israel as much as he does is a way for Trump to rally his far-right base.
If the U.S. economy goes south, that doesn’t make Trump any less dangerous; if anything, it makes him even more dangerous and more desperate to fire up extremists in his base. And whether he is ranting about abortion, illegal immigration, a U.S./Mexico border wall, Islam, or countries with predominantly non-white populations, Trump will have many ways to pander to his supporters’ worst instincts in the 2020 election.
==
If you had told me last week that the conservative movement would soon be outraged about a shoe that never went on the market, I might have thought you were joking. But it’s not a joke, and the dustup reveals a depressing truth about the conservative movement.
Many prominent conservative thinkers, writers, and politicians have expressed their outrage this week about Nike’s decision not to sell a shoe it had originally designed with an image of the so-called “Betsy Ross flag,” an older version of the American flag with 13 stars arranged in a circle, representing the original 13 colonies. What made this decision particularly explosive, it seems, is that Nike made this decision after hearing from NFL star and activist Colin Kaepernick. He partnered with the company after sparking controversy for refusing to kneel during the national anthem at football games in protest of racism, and the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that he told Nike “it shouldn’t sell a shoe with a symbol that he and others consider offensive.”
Cue the overwrought fulmination from the right wing.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey started early by injecting his absurdly excessive reactions, saying, “Words cannot express my disappointment at this terrible decision. I am embarrassed for Nike.” And Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), chimed in as well, saying the “decision to cancel Betsy Ross shoe is ridiculous.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) made a comment that I still haven’t entirely deciphered yet:
It’s a good thing @Nike only wants to sell sneakers to people who hate the American flag.... @NFL #HappyFourth https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1145838971731226624 …
The Wall Street Journal
Nike is yanking a sneaker featuring the "Betsy Ross flag" after Colin Kaepernick said he and others consider the symbol to be offensive https://on.wsj.com/2Nr3xJB
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Naturally, a boycott was triggered by conservatives now calling on people not to buy Nike shoes because Nike decided not to sell a particular kind of shoe. No word yet on whether boycotts are coming for every other company not selling items with the Betsy Ross flag on them.
And it wasn’t just politicians looking to pander to right-wing outrage. Fox News, Breitbart, Twitchy, and other conservative outlets got in on the controversy.When presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke made a mild comment about having “respect” for Nike’s decision, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapirosaid, “I hope every Democrat candidate jumps on this idiotic bandwagon,” suggesting that this controversy might have an impact on the 2020 election. (It won’t.)
My intention isn’t to defend Nike’s decision. I don’t really have much to say about a shoemakers’ decision not to sell a shoe. While symbols are important and matter in society, the more interesting fact about the whole affair is that the right wing ate the story up.
Conservative writer Bret Stephens at the New York Times placed the incident in a list of other bizarre controversies that soaked up far more oxygen than they ever deserved, saying that it showed a capitulation to “Woke culture.” He argued that such incidents somehow show a troubling trend in American society. “The story has resonated widely not because it’s outrageous, but because it’s predictable,” he said.
In other words, it played into the pre-existing narrative that conservatives have cooked up to inflame the masses.
Meanwhile, if you look at the issue that has outraged Democratic leaders and voters in recent weeks, you’d find that they’re focused on the abuse and treatment of immigrants held in abusive conditions by the Trump administration. Of course, the right wing thinks these complaints are overblown or misplaced, but they are about actual human being suffering at the hands of the administration. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has even found that Custom and Border Patrol’s treatment of migrants actually violates its own standards and policies.
But the right wing is concerned with shoes that were never even sold in the first place.
It’s not that every issue that grips the public and the commentariat’s attention has to be the most pressing issue of the day. But it should be at least about something. And yet the Betsy Ross flag isn’t being banned, and nobody is being punished for wearing it or displaying it. No one is even burning it(!). A company simply made a decision that, on reflection, it wanted to avoid sending a message that it worried might be misinterpreted. Cautious companies make these decisions all the time.
Seeing this as a threat to American patriotism, or perhaps more accurately, to conservative identity, is just absurd. It’s reminiscent of the entirely incomprehensible debates about Starbucks holiday cups, which some see as part of the imaginary “War on Christmas.”
But prominent figures on the right love to stir up these controversies over non-events because they know their base and viewers are so easily riled. They display the traits they say they most despise among liberals and Democrats: oversensitivity, excessive attention to trivia, overblown outrage. They were the “snowflakes” all along.
And yet while the controversy itself doesn’t matter, it’s grip over the conservative mind does. It reveals how the movement’s ideology distracts from issues that matter — inequality, poverty, racism, environmental degradation, corruption — and encourages its followers to waste their energies on irrelevancies. It convinces right-wing voters that their identity is under attack by liberals, the elite, the media (but not conservative media), so that they don’t care when these groups expose and draw attention to the actual dangers of unregulated industry or the abuses of immigrants at the border. The migrants, after all, aren’t the real victims; the real victims are the people who don’t get to wear Betsy Ross flag shoes.
==
aha: eternal question of why (poor white? ) ppl vote against their own interest: they get distracted by wedge:
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/they-cannot-get-votes-their-actual-policies-noam-chomsky-explains-how-republican
"They Cannot Get Votes on Their Actual Policies': Noam Chomsky Explains How the Republican Party Is Rotten to the Core
"It’s an intriguing spectacle, and not a little worrisome."
By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet July 6, 2018, 7:04 AM GMT
In a recent interview with Truthout, renowned MIT professor Noam Chomsky gave an incisive explanation of the current state of American politics, touching on the failures of President Barack Obama and the rise of President Donald Trump.
Chomsky argued that contrary to many narratives, Trump was a natural outgrowth of a rightward shift in political currents.
TheGOP's "dedication to wealth and corporate power is so extreme that they cannot get votes on their actual policies — which are now being revealed to us daily — and so have had to mobilize a voting base on issues unrelated to their service to their actual constituency," he explained. "These includereligious fundamentalism — a major phenomenon in the US unlike other developed societies —white supremacy, xenophobiaand other latent anti-social attitudes that tend to break through to the surface during periods of disillusionment and distress. This is partly a matter of 'search for scapegoats,' the actual sources concealed in the usual manner of propaganda; thus, the public vastly exaggerates the number of immigrants, even more than in Europe.
Disaffection began with Obama's insufficient response to the 2008 financial crisis, he said, and racial animus to his presidency also boosted the Republican Party.
==
wow, hard to beleive this was a wedge!
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trump/
no lnx
How southern white women drove the GOP to Donald Trump
written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon July 1, 2019
“The Long Southern Strategy,” a new book by political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, first caught my eye because there’s a long history of denialism surrounding the “Southern strategy.” People sometimes claim that it’s a liberal myth or that it’s ancient history, or that wasn’t the real reason for the Southern realignment in American politics. That denialism has only intensified and grown more significant since the election of Donald Trump.
But Maxwell and Shields’ book turns out to be more than just well-timed, as its subtitle suggests: “How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.” Rather than simply showing that the Southern strategy was a long-term phenomenon, the book shows that it was a continuously reshaped and evolving strategy, that it was multifaceted — involving gender and religion as crucially as race — and that in remaking the Republican Party and the South, it remade American politics as well. “The Long Southern Strategy” explains this reshaping process remaking better than anything else I’ve read, and does so via a compelling multi-disciplinary combination of history, cultural criticism and social science.
In “The Reactionary Mind” (Salon review here), political theorist Corey Robin argued that conservative politics “speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.” Conservatives may have balked at Robin’s argument, but “The Long Southern Strategy” convincingly describes the specific combination of such losses on which Republicans have played, and the specific form of conservatism that resulted.
The building blocks aren’t old-fashioned racism, sexism and religious fundamentalism — all have been reshaped into new forms, making new arguments for halting progress and turning back the clock, which is also a part of the book’s story. For example, as co-author Angie Maxwell told me, “Modern sexism describes feelings of resentment and distrust towards feminists and working women. Rather than believing that a woman cannot do a particular job, folks who express Modern sexism resents a woman for wanting to do that job.”
“The Long Southern Strategy” also explains why Donald Trump is not such an anomaly after all, but rather the culmination of where the GOP has been headed for the past 50-plus years. “I gave a series of lectures the year before the election, called ‘The Inevitability of Donald Trump,'” Maxwell told me — but even she thought Trump would make it no further than the Republican nomination. She was concerned, however, about how close the election was going to be, because she had applied “modern sexism measures” to national polling in 2012, and found alarmingly high numbers. “I was worried we were not accounting for that effect,” she said. Perhaps not.
So I thought Maxwell would be a perfect interview subject as the 2020 campaign begins in earnest. It’s an invaluable guide for making sense of what’s about to unfold, as well as how we got here. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
First I want to ask about the need to understand the Southern strategy as something long-term and continuing or evolving, not just a one-time event.
In short, with the Southern strategy, the story we tell is that after the Civil Rights Act, first Barry Goldwater and then Richard Nixon really played to white racial angst, and the South flipped to red. But when you start looking at not just the electoral map, but voting trends, the South goes pretty heavily back to Jimmy Carter in 1976. And most Southern politicians don’t change their party IDs during that period of time. You see from archival work and other scholarship how worried the GOP was post-Watergate that the inroads they made in the South they were going to lose. And sure enough, they do.
Now, if they were so adamant on a backlash to civil rights, then why pick Carter? But there this notion that Carter’s one of them — he shares their Southern identity, they understand him, he’s a born-again Christian. So the South kind of goes back [to the Democrats]. Then the Reagan folks in 1980 dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from their platform. This to me is the bridge. In 1980, the Republicans are trying again to win those Southern voters back, because they’ve really based their electoral map on that. They took that fork in the road in the late ’60s, and it’s kind of hard, once you set your strategy, to say, “Oh, let’s just pick a new one.” So they dropped the ERA.
This was a radical thing to do because the Equal Rights Amendment — and second-wave feminism in general — was a completely bipartisan effort. There were legions of Republican women feminists. In fact, they were some of the leaders in the movement. At the 1977 National Women’s Convention, the only national women’s convention we’ve ever had, every living first lady of both parties was there.. All the major congresswomen from both parties were there. What happened then was Phyllis Schlafly’s effort — she had written the book [A Choice, Not An Echo] that kind of inspired Goldwater to run years before — she started an anti-feminism counter rally, also in Houston, and had massive attendance at that, and their slogan was “family values.”
The GOP took notice. Schlafly was hoping it would get her a cabinet position, which it didn’t. But then the Reagan administration polls 40,000 women, an effort headed up by Richard Wirthlin, with Elizabeth Dole, and they classified American women into 64 types. They called them Nancys, Bettys — they give them names —and they realized that there were a whole lot more antifeminists out there than they realized, people who really wanted these traditional gender roles. I call them “antifeminist” because that is what they were calling themselves, a lot of times. Particularly in the South, among white women. And so that move [dropping the ERA] helped Reagan to secure a lot of those Southern white women. And that’s when you actually see people start changing their voter ID....
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/noam-chomsky-democrats-may-have-handed-trump-the-2020-election/
As Attorney General William Barr releases Robert Mueller’s long-anticipated report into Russian interference in the 2016 election, we speak with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky about what he sees as the political perils of “Russiagate.”
AMY GOODMAN: Can you share your analysis of President Trump? You have lived through so many presidents. Explain President Trump to us and assess the massive response to him.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, Trump is—you know, I think there are a number of illusions about Trump. If you take a look at the Trump phenomenon, it’s not very surprising. Think back for the last 10 or 15 years over Republican Party primaries, and remember what happened during the primaries. Each primary, when some candidate rose from the base, they were so outlandish that the Republican establishment tried to crush them and succeeded in doing it—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum. Anyone who was coming out of the base was totally unacceptable to the establishment. The change in 2016 is they couldn’t crush him.
But the interesting question is: Why was this happening?Why, in election after election, was the voting base producing a candidate utterly intolerable to the establishment? And the answer to that is—if you think about that, the answer is not very hard to discover. During the—since the 1970s, during this neoliberal period, both of the political parties have shifted to the right. The Democrats, by the 1970s, had pretty much abandoned the working class. I mean, the last gasp of more or less progressive Democratic Party legislative proposals was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth, just became voluntary. But the Democrats had pretty much abandoned the working class.They became pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. Meanwhile, the Republicans shifted so far to the right that they went completely off the spectrum. Two of the leading political analysts of the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein, about five or 10 years ago, described the Republican Party as what they called a “radical insurgency” that has abandoned parliamentary politics.
Well, why did that happen? It happened because the Republicans face a difficult problem. They have a primary constituency, a real constituency: extreme wealth and corporate power. That’s who they have to serve. That’s their constituency. You can’t get votes that way, so you have to do something else to get votes. What do you do to get votes? This was begun by Richard Nixon with the Southern strategy: try to pick up racists in the South. The mid-1970s, Paul Weyrich, one of the Republican strategists, hit on a brilliant idea. Northern Catholics voted Democratic, tended to vote Democratic, a lot of them working-class. The Republicans could pick up that vote by pretending—crucially, “pretending”—to be opposed to abortion. By the same pretense, they could pick up the evangelical vote. Those are big votes—evangelicals, northern Catholics. Notice the word “pretense.” It’s crucial. You go back to the 1960s, every leading Republican figure was strongly, what we call now, pro-choice. The Republican Party position was—that’s Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, all the leadership—their position was: Abortion is not the government’s business; it’s private business—government has nothing to say about it. They turned almost on a dime in order to try to pick up a voting base on what are called cultural issues. Same with gun rights. Gun rights become a matter of holy writ because you can pick up part of the population that way. In fact, what they’ve done is put together a coalition of voters based on issues that are basically, you know, tolerable to the establishment, but they don’t like it. OK? And they’ve got to hold that, those two constituencies, together. The real constituency of wealth and corporate power, they’re taken care of by the actual legislation.
So, if you look at the legislation under Trump, it’s just lavish gifts to the wealth and the corporate sector—the tax bill, the deregulation, you know, every case in point. That’s kind of the job of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, those guys. They serve the real constituency.Meanwhile, Trump has to maintain the voting constituency, with one outrageous position after another that appeals to some sector of the voting base. And he’s doing it very skillfully. As just as a political manipulation, it’s skillful. Work for the rich and the powerful, shaft everybody else, but get their votes—that’s not an easy trick. And he’s carrying it off.
...
==
A wedge issue is a political or social issue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_issue), often of a controversial or divisive nature, which splits apart a demographic or population group. Wedge issues can be advertised or publicly aired in an attempt to weaken the unity of a population, with the goal of enticing polarized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization) individuals to give support to an opponent or to withdraw their support entirely out of disillusionment. The use of wedge issues gives rise to wedge politics. Wedge issues are also known as hot button (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicized_issue) or third rail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail_of_politics) issues.
Political campaigns use wedge issues to exploit tension within a targeted population. A wedge issue may often be a point of internal dissent within an opposing party, which that party attempts to suppress or ignore discussing because it divides "the base". Typically, wedge issues have a cultural or populist theme, relating to matters such as crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime), national security (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security), sexuality (e.g. gay marriage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_marriage)), or race (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%29). A party may introduce a wedge issue to an opposing population, while aligning itself with the dissenting faction of the opposition. A wedge issue, when introduced, is intended to bring about such things as:
A debate, often vitriolic, within the opposing party, giving the public a perception of disarray.
The defection of supporters of the opposing party's minority faction to the other party (or independent parties) if they lose the debate.
The legitimising of sentiment which, while perhaps popularly held, is usually considered inappropriate or politically incorrect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness); criticisms from the opposition then make it appear beholden to special interests or fringe ideology.
In an extreme case, a wedge issue might contribute to the actual fracture of the opposing party as another party spins off, taking voters with it.
To prevent these consequences from occurring, the opposing party may attempt to take a "pragmatic" stand and officially endorse the views of its minority faction. However, this can lead to the defection of supporters of the opposing party's majority faction to a third party, should they lose the debate.
1Examples (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue#Examples)
1.1Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue#Australia)
1.2United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue#United_States)
2See also (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue#See_also)
3References (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue#References)
Examples
Australia
See also: Tampa affair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_affair)
In Australia, "wedge politics" may sometimes be known as dog whistle politics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics), due to the practice of selective targeting so that only certain people will hear the message being pitched.[citation needed]
A case study of the use of wedge issues in practice comes from the 2001 federal election campaign in Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia). In early and mid-2001, a great deal of public attention was focused on boat people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat_people) (asylum seekers arriving on unauthorised vessels), there having been several widely publicised landings of hundreds of people. On August 24, 2001, a ship illegally bearing 460 such people became distressed, and its passengers were picked up by the Norwegian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway) cargo vessel MV Tampa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Tampa).
The governing Liberal Party of Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Australia) took the opportunity to appear tough on asylum seekers. The opposition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_%28Australia%29) Australian Labor Party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party) (ALP) had a slight majority of people strongly favouring more sympathetic treatment, and was hence perceived as internally split. This provoked a fierce debate within the ALP on the relative merits of siding with national opinion (in favour of the Government's actions) or standing on party principle (opposing). But with over 90% of some television polls supporting the government's stance, the leader of the ALP Kim Beazley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Beazley) chose to silence the majority and agree to the tougher policy—though it ended up opposing certain elements of proposed legislation, which the Liberal Party blasted as "weak on border security".
The damage was done, with the party appearing inconsistent and divided. The Liberal Party campaigned largely on a platform of border security and increased its support at the federal election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_federal_election,_2001) that November despite being the incumbent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incumbent). Some who would typically vote Labor voted instead for the Greens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Greens) and the Democrats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Democrats) in protest against what they saw as the ALP's complicity.
It was later claimed that the controversial campaign strategists Lynton Crosby (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynton_Crosby) and Mark Textor (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Textor&action=edit&redlink=1) had an active role in making the Tampa incident a wedge issue for Howard to exploit.[1]
United States
For example, some Republican strategists have hoped that African Americans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans), a traditionally Democratic voting bloc, yet also one that possesses some of the most conservative views on matters of homosexuality, may be more inclined to vote for the Republican Party because of their opposition to gay marriage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_the_Republican_Party#LGBT_issues). In 2012, internal National Organization for Marriage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Organization_for_Marriage) memos dating to 2009 were released that stated that they sought "to drive a wedge between gays and blacks" by promoting "African American spokespeople for marriage", thus provoking same-sex marriage supporters into "denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots", and to "interrupt" the "assimilation" of Latinos into "dominant Anglo culture" by making the stance against same-sex marriage "a key badge of Latino identity".[2][3]
Likewise, Democratic strategists have hoped that the issue of stem cell research could be used as a wedge issue against the right, since some Republicans support the research while others are morally opposed to the use of embryonic cells in research. The well known mantra "God, guns and gays" typifies Republican wedge strategy crafted along other famous wedge issues beginning in the Nixon era which aided winning the South from the Democrats.
Reform of the laws regarding illegal immigration to the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States) operated as a wedge issue in 2007. Some Republican legislators, with the backing of President George W. Bush, sought to address the dual issues of ongoing illegal immigration to the United States and the illegal status of an estimated 12 million people currently living in America. Other Republicans bitterly opposed any "amnesty" for illegal immigrants, out of fear that their constituents were unsupportive of immigration reform. Some Democrats pitched in to keep the issue alive as they recognized the issue was deeply dividing the Republican party between advocates of reform and advocates of the status quo. The result was a bitter division in Republican ranks and a stalled bill in Congress; columnist Peggy Noonan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_Noonan) wrote in January 2008 that President Bush had "destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other", by pushing immigration reform, as well as other wedge issues for the Republicans.
See also
Attack ad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_ad)
Divide and rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule)
Dog-whistle politics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics)
Negative campaigning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_campaigning)
Push poll (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll)
References
- Jump up^ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue#cite_ref-NZ_Herald_10519252_1-0) "National silent on strategists, claims Clark" (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10519252). The New Zealand Herald (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Zealand_Herald). NZPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZPA). July 1, 2008. Retrieved December 2, 2011.
- Jump up^ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue#cite_ref-ibtimes_2-0) Portero, Ashley (March 27, 2012). "National Organization For Marriage Memos Reveal Plan to Drive 'Wedge' Between Black, Gay Communities" (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/320313/20120327/national-organization-marriage-exposed-wedge-black-gay.htm). International Business Times. Retrieved March 28, 2012.
- Jump up^ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue#cite_ref-DailyNewswedge_3-0) Crary, David (March 27, 2012). "Gay-Marriage Foes Sought to Split Gays and Blacks" (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/gay-marriage-foes-sought-split-gays-blacks-article-1.1051913). New York Daily News. Associated Press. Retrieved March 28, 2012.
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Media manipulation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_manipulation)
Categories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category):
Political terminology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Political_terminology)
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An important moment in the life of millennials (https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/millennials-fleeing-organized-religion-christian-hypocrisy-becomes-impossible-ignore/) came during the 2004 election, when Karl Rove and the right-wing collaborated to put nearly a dozen initiatives (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/6383353/ns/politics/t/voters-pass-all-bans-gay-marriage/#.WyXkHRJKjXE) on the ballot to outlaw same-sex marriage during the 2004 election. It mobilized 10 million evangelicals to the polls and ushered in a wave of Republicans (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/politics/campaign/samesex-marriage-issue-key-to-some-gop-races.html). Churches across the country railed against the immorality of homosexuality, bumping up against pop-culture icons coming out of the closet and anti-bullying campaigns aimed at teens.
White evangelicals have coopted mainstream Christianity, and an entire generation has never lived in an world without hypocritical pastors worshiping the almighty dollar and begging the poor to send Jesus their retirement funds.
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