Today’s topics:
- Conservative outrage (so easily triggered) against Bud Light;
- Anti-democratic shenanigans in Tennessee, and the backlash; and how Tennessee places last among all states on democracy, and crushes dissent;
- About Republican indoctrination;
- MAGA’s worst week ever;
- How Medicare expenditures are running below projections, because so many people died of Covid in red states;
- How the fight against ‘woke’ is conservative gaslighting with a long history of same using other terms;
- How a secretive Christian religious group, “The Family,” who runs the National Prayer Breakfast, is behind the “kill the gays” legislation in Uganda;
- And music by Helen Jane Long.
Salon, Ashlie D. Stevens, 7 Apr 2023: “The groomer of beers”: Conservatives vow to boycott Bud Light over partnership with trans activist, subtitled “Clad in a MAGA hat, Kid Rock went so far as to shoot cases of the light beer. He had tears in his eyes”
Conservatives are so easily outraged, by anything. Snowflakes — what they accuse liberals of being. There is a large amount of projection among conservatives, especially among their politicians, who accuse liberals of cheating, because that’s what conservatives do, and so assume everyone else is doing it to.
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Vox, Li Zhou, 6 Apr 2023: The Tennessee legislature’s expulsion of two Black Democrats is unprecedented and undemocratic, subtitled “Republicans voted to remove Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, two Black men, but declined to expel Rep. Gloria Johnson, a white woman.”
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Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 7 Apr 2023: Republicans caught off guard by the left’s ferocious backlash, subtitled “The GOP is an authoritarian, extremist political party that is out of the mainstream of American life”
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Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 7 Apr 2023: A study confirms it: Tennessee’s democracy really is as bad as the expulsions made you think, subtitled “Research assessed democracy in every state. Tennessee came in last place.”
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Vox, Li Zhou, 6 Apr 2023: The Tennessee legislature’s expulsion of two Black Democrats is unprecedented and undemocratic, subtitled “Republicans voted to remove Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, two Black men, but declined to expel Rep. Gloria Johnson, a white woman.”
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NY Times, Margaret Renkl, 5 Apr 2023: As Young People March for Their Lives, Tennessee Crushes Dissent and Overrides Democracy
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Again, projections. The opposite is true.
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AlterNet, Maya Boddie, 7 Apr 2023: ‘Incapable of understanding the reality’: Scott Walker’s meltdown about Gen Z voters blows up in his face
With a comment by Heather Cox Richardson:
Heather Cox Richardson: “Did it ever occur to you that your people are the ones who have been indoctrinated with a false and radical worldview by right-wing media, while younger Americans are seeing the world for what it really is?”
No, Republicans do not.
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Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 6 Apr 2023: Not just Trump’s indictment: The MAGA movement is having its worst week ever, subtitled “MAGA is having a no-good, very bad week, as Marjorie Taylor Greene learned when her NYC ‘protest’ collapsed”
Of the many ways Donald Trump has degraded American politics, one of the more underrated shifts is how he’s created permission for Republican politicians to act like childish brats. They used to feel obliged to fake maturity in public appearances, but now the typical Republican leader displays the emotional regulation of the drunkest person left at the bar at 3AM.
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NY Times, Paul Krugman, 3 Apr 2023: Understanding the Red State Death Trip
Medicare expenditures are running below projections. Why?
Covid killed a substantial number of Medicare beneficiaries. And the victims were disproportionately seniors already suffering from severe — and expensive — health problems. “As a result, the surviving population had spending that was lower than average.”
Now, Covid killed a lot of people around the world, so wasn’t this just an act of God? Not exactly. You see, America experienced a bigger decline in life expectancy when Covid struck than any other wealthy country. Furthermore, while life expectancy recovered in many countries in 2021, here it continued to fall.
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Washington Post, Eugene Robinson, 3 Apr 2023: Opinion | Fox is not a news network but a propaganda outlet
Well, of course.
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CNN, Clay Cane, 5 Apr 2023: Opinion: The fight against ‘woke’ is really conservative gaslighting
This piece has some nice historical perspective.
I must give credit to the Silent Majority, the Moral Majority, MAGA, Q-Anon and all the other iterations of conservatism that Republicans have transmogrified into over the past five decades: They are masterminds at coming up with messaging that scares the Jim Crow hell out of their base. “Woke” is their latest stunt.
In the 1960s, it was “Black Power,” a term about empowerment and self-reliance popularized by Kwame Ture, also known as Stokely Carmichael. Conservatives rebranded the term, which became a catch-all phrase to scare White voters that “Negroes” were taking over. Those two words would then be twisted by “White Power” adherents who, according to the ADL, deliberately mimicked the term “Black Power.”
Some years later, former California governor and later President Ronald Reagan famously deployed the “welfare queen” narrative, framing public assistance as a Black issue, even though more White people than Black have been helped over the years by those federal aid programs.
After Reagan, George H. W. Bush invoked the name of Willie Horton, a convicted Black man on weekend release from prison to rile up his base, during the 1988 presidential campaign. The Bush team made Horton a symbol of allegedly lenient prison furlough programs that were supposedly sending murderers and rapists into the suburbs.
Bush rocketed in the polls, framing his opponent, Democrat Michael Dukakis, as weak on crime. Bush won the presidential election and the Willie Horton television commercial — an ad General Colin Powell described as being “racist… cold political calculation” — was a turning point in the campaign. Yet again, Republicans had found a potent symbol of how to effectively manipulate voters’ fears.
It goes on.
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Slate, Dahlia Lithwick, 6 Apr 2023: Blue America Finally Caught Donald Trump, subtitled “The problem is, the former president lives in Red America now.”
That there has been a Red America and a Blue America has been blindingly true for a long time. Also clear is that on the other side of his presidency, Donald Trump has become less and less comfortable moving through Blue America. When he departed the White House, he fled New York City and Washington, D.C., for the smallholding of Mar-a-Lago, nestled in the fiefdom of Florida, which is currently vying with Texas to be the capital of Red America. Indeed, it’s a place where children may not read about the history of Blue America, for fear that it will make them feel funny inside.
These days, the former president can travel safely from Waco, Texas, where the very absence of government is a way of life, back to Mar-a-Lago, where the streets are paved with MAGA hats. He moves comfortably through a world that he has built in his own image: A place where he is a professional wrestler/messianic figure/entrepreneurial genius and sex-god, all in one package. It’s working for him, and the polls seem to show that this is not abating, at least in Red America.
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And of course this is no surprise.
Salon, Jonathan Larsen, 7 Apr 2023: Secretive religious group “The Family” tied to anti-LGBTQ+ death penalty bill — again, subtitled “Christian group formally known as the Fellowship Foundation linked to anti-gay legislation in Uganda”
Christians! The same group is behind the annual National Prayer Breakfast.
When Pres. Joe Biden greeted his virtual guests at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast – and told them, “I’m grateful you’re able to be joining us in prayer this morning and lift up one another” – the people he was welcoming included government officials from a country now poised to enact the death penalty for some LGBTQ people.
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Today’s music.
