Democrats giving credence to the Right Wing Misinformation Machine...

[Humanist_Activist]

This is something I see time and time again, mainstream Democrats accepting, at face value, the framing and sometimes even the claims of the right wing, especially when it comes to the so called culture war.

One thing to make clear, for the past 40 years, the Republican party has had, more or less, one goal, to destroy every level of governments ability to regulate the market and destroy what little we have left of the welfare state. In the past 20 years, they have added destroying Representative Democratic government to the list. They have been partially successful. Everything else is technically negotiable, but, and this is important, even the dumbest whining they go through can have adverse effects on the lives and livelihoods of the people affected, while having nearly no consequences for themselves whether they succeed or fail.

The Right Wing in this country is overwhelmingly white, largely male and largely straight and perversely proud of all that. It doesn't cost them anything to outright lie and/or exaggerate on whatever their chosen culture war issue is, it doesn't cost them votes and when they succeed in passing some egregious violation of someone's civil rights, that's a win in their book.

The culture war is both a distraction from consequential issues, and the very distraction can have drastic consequences itself. Look at the latest, I just googled it, on "Birthing Person Day" as a replacement for "Mother's Day". Has any Democratic leader even talked about doing this? No of course not, but that doesn't stop some of the top newspapers in the country publishing whining pieces on the "horrible liberals" who want to replace Mother's Day with Birthing Person Day.

So what's the source of this "controversy", Cori Bush, testifying to congress about medical inequities related to race, she was talking about how doctors and nurses ignore and neglect the needs of black people going through pain and complications related to pregnancy, using her own pregnancies as a reference point. This is a real issue, Black people and Native Americans are 2-3 times more likely to die during childbirth than white people.

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p0905-racial-ethnic-disparities-pregnancy-deaths.html

So what does the right wing and mainstream media latch onto? The fact that she uses inclusive language to describe people that can give birth because trans-men and non-binary people are also capable of doing so. The use of said language is literally inconsequential to everyone except the transgender and NB people who don't feel excluded by these comments. Its ironic that mothers dying during childbirth is less important than a made up culture war issue.

But the fact that they latch onto this is also consequential, for it indicates that they are trying to ride a wave of transphobia and exaggerated bullshit to create FUD going into the 2022 election, and are attempting to outright criminalize transgender people and their families in the process.

Of course, this goes far beyond just transphobia, for Republicans are still fighting culture war issues going back before Brown v. Board of Education. They have multiple "controversies" that they are trying to elevate right now. Everything from attacking "Wokeness" to trying to outlaw the teaching of Critical Race Theory without even knowing what the fuck any of that is. In fact, a lot of this is based on willful ignorance and lies on the part of right wing leaders and spokespeople and just plain ignorance for everyone else. They will just make shit up, remember the controversy about Biden banning burgers? Completely made up.

But what is especially galling is when this shit spills over to the so called mainstream and you have ostensibly "reasonable" people just accept this bullshit at face value as if the right wing isn't anything other than bad faith actors. Democrats can't really stop the lies and exaggerations, because, of course, the standards are far different. You can have Rick Santorum advocate that Native Americans contributed nothing to American culture in a white supremacy rant, and CNN still hasn't fired his racist ass. And let's not get started on Tucker Carlson, who literally advocates for Neo-Nazi theories like white replacement and fucking Cultural Marxism on Fox News.

Those who even ancillary consider themselves even remotely progressive, left or liberal need to call out bullshit for what it is, bullshit, and please, for the love of all that is holy, don't assume that some controversy is even real, do your research first.

[Humanist_Activist]

1. Kicking this cause it's needed. NT

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. K&R