- Why Republicans can no longer be called the party of “family values”
- How Republicans are obsessed by the woke mind virus
- More reasons why the US needs more immigrants, not fewer
- Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Tucker Carlson
- Jerry Coyne on another wokeism issue, and his take on sex and gender
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 3 May 2023: How to weaponize Republicans’ words, subtitled “It’s far past time to stop calling the GOP the party of ‘family values'”
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” This is one of the primary rules of a successful propaganda operation. Today’s Republican Party and “conservative” movement and their propagandists across the right-wing echo chamber use that principle to great effect. To wit: the Republican Party is not in fact “the party of family values.” In reality, today’s Republican Party and “conservative” movement are the enemies of the American family and children.
With a look at the potential damage, including programs that supports families and children, that would be caused the manufactured debt ceiling “crisis.” Also:
Republicans and the other neofascists and larger white right are also committing intellectual violence against children and other young people by enacting an Orwellian thought crime regime across the country that involves censorship and banning books, and harassing teachers, librarians, and other educators for not being sufficiently “patriotic” (i.e. “Christian” and “pro-white”) because they dare to teach the real history and real facts and real truth(s) about America’s complex past and present.
And attacks against adoptive parents, how one state representative would rather her child commit suicide than become transgender, the family separation policies of the Trump regime, and some detailed comments by George Lakoff on how conservatives carry this kind of thinking off.
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NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 2 May 2023: The ‘Woke Mind Virus’ Is Eating Away at Republicans’ Brains
How one of Biden’s advantages in the 2024 election is how weird Republicans have gotten, compared to how ‘normal’ Biden is. With an example of a DeSantis word salad.
DeSantis is a regular offender when it comes to speaking in the jargon of culture war-obsessed conservatives, but he’s not the only one. And it’s not just a problem of jargon. Republican politicians — from presidential contenders to anonymous state legislators — are monomaniacally focused on banning books, fighting “wokeness” and harassing transgender people. Some Republicans are even still denying the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, doubling down on the election-related conspiracies that hobbled many Republican candidates in the midterms.
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Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 2 May 2023: Earth to politicians: The U.S. has too few immigrants — not too many
Once again, this message. The writer explains how more immigration would help inflation, help execute the Chips act, and address long-term fiscal challenges.
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The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, 30 Apr 2023: Tucker Carlson and the Right, subtitled “The big question for the G.O.P. during the Biden era is whether the legacy of Carlson’s culture wars adds up to a viable platform for a major political party.”
Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth and now a writer for NYT on environmental issues, is branching out. This piece ends echoing the previous item.
Still, if culture-war maximalism is Carlson’s political legacy, its future isn’t looking too bright at the moment. It did not produce a red wave in last year’s midterm elections. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and ensuing attempts by extreme conservatives to ban abortion are serving to further isolate Republicans on social issues. DeSantis has lost polling ground to Trump, and his own donors have been complaining about him to reporters. The conservative movement will be less interesting without Carlson in its most prominent media seat, but in the end he didn’t shift the movement very far. Conservatism for now comes in just two slightly different variations. There is Trumpism with Trump, and there is Trumpism without him.
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Jerry Coyne has another piece worth noting, from a few days ago, about the notion that the left’s version of ‘wokeism,’ as in yesterday’s piece about its conflict with science, is also an assault on the Enlightenment.
Jerry Coyne, 1 May 2023: What is wokeism? And a conversation with McWhorter, Loury, and Goldblatt gets banned from YouTube
The topic is a ten-minute video discussion between John McWhorter, an academic linguist and commentator on political affairs, and the author of the book pictured above, Mark Goldblatt. Coyne comments:
I listened to most but not all of the hourlong video, and it’s perfectly clear that it was banned from YouTube because Goldblatt makes statements like “a transgender man is a woman, simply as a matter of. . .if language can convey truth, a trandgender man is a woman.” Speech like that is considered “hate speech”, although it’s a perfectly reasonable point of view if by “woman” you mean “biological woman” (this is the way I take it). Yet a sentence like “a transgender woman is a biological man who identifies as a biological woman” is considered hate speech.
Coyne takes a fundamentalist biological take on the issue of sex, as opposed to gender, as mentioned in today’s post:
I continue to be amazed at how much dust is stirred up by simply asserting the biological observation that, in animals and vacular plants, there are but two sexes, and those sexes are defined by the reproductive equipment they have. Males are “designed” (I’m speaking teleologically: “evolved” is what I mean) to make small, mobile gametes, and females to make big immobile ones. For decades this has been uncontroversial: A truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase Jane Austen.
Though that’s not my point in posting this wokeism post; perhaps worth a separate item and discussion, though I hesitate to veer into issues of transgenderism.
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And from a while further back.
NY Times, David French opinion, 23 Apr 2023: Gun Idolatry Is Destroying the Case for Guns
The writers describes threats against him and his family ever since his 2018 opposition to Trump and Trumpism.
Alt-right trolls had photoshopped images of my daughter into gas chambers and of her face onto old pictures of slaves. They had placed images of dead and mutilated Black Americans in the comments section of my wife’s blog. The threats had not stopped after Trump won. If anything, by 2018 they had escalated once again. So the Klan hoods sent to my son — which would have been chilling under any circumstances — were particularly ominous. What happened next was worse.
Within moments, my son received another message, a picture of a road several miles from our house. Then another picture arrived. A road sign. This one was closer. Someone seemed to be coming to our home.
The writer grew up in the South and is familiar with guns, has supported gun rights, and owns guns. Still.
But the gun rights movement is changing. In many quarters of America, respect for firearms has turned into a form of reverence. As I wrote in 2022, there is now widespread gun idolatry. “Guns” have joined “God” and “Trump” in the hierarchy of right-wing values. At the edges, gun owners have gone from defending the rights of people to own semiautomatic rifles like AR-15s to openly brandishing them in protests, even to the point of, for example, staging an armed occupation of parts of the Michigan Capitol during anti-lockdown protests.
But we’re now facing something worse than gun idolatry. Too many armed citizens are jittery at best, spoiling for a fight at worst. In recent days we’ve seen a rash of terrible shootings by nervous, fearful or angry citizens. A young kid rings the bell on the wrong door and is shot. A young woman drives into the wrong driveway and is shot. A cheerleader accidentally tries to get in the wrong car and is pursued and shot, along with her friend. A basketball rolls into a man’s yard, and a neighboring 6-year-old girl and her father are shot.
And Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry and yet more “stand your ground” laws of self-defense. The bottom line:
Gun rights carry with them grave responsibilities. They do not liberate you to intimidate. They must not empower your hate. They are certainly not objects of love or reverence. Every hair-trigger use, every angry or fearful or foolish decision, is likely to spill innocent blood.
Moreover, every one of these acts increases public revulsion over gun ownership generally. The cry for legal and moral reform will sweep the land. America will change and gun rights will diminish. And the gun owners and advocates who fail to grasp the moral weight of their responsibility will be to blame.
Let me emphasize that:
Moreover, every one of these acts increases public revulsion over gun ownership generally. The cry for legal and moral reform will sweep the land. America will change and gun rights will diminish. And the gun owners and advocates who fail to grasp the moral weight of their responsibility will be to blame.
