April 12, 2023

Why I Keep My Eyes -- and My Mind -- on the South

Great piece
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/opinion/columnists/tennessee-house-nashville-shooting.html

I also keep my eyes on the South because the Republican strategy of disenfranchisement is a state-by-state strategy. It looks like judicial rule where they cannot win. Where they cannot win by judicial rule, they will rule by procedural theft. Where they cannot persuade voters to vote for them, they will persuade the candidate they voted for to become one of them. This Republican strategy of winning by losing can work in any state, but it is most brutally efficient in states where we consider nonwhite voters — especially Black voters — inherently illegitimate.

The South is not exceptionally racist. The South is quintessentially American in its racism. The distinction is clear in how, of the three representatives in question, Tennessee expelled the two Black men but the third, a white woman, held on to her seat. The strategies of disenfranchisement are clearest where the racial animus is strongest.

And so I watch the South to keep my eyes on the central casting of the American democratic imagination and to know where the script our country is writing is going. We are obsessed with the protagonist Trump. If he can overcome his legal troubles. If he can maintain his hold on the G.O.P.

I believe he will. I believe that he can. The only thing that can derail Trump is Trump. The story of avarice consuming a bottomless ego is almost biblical. But it’s not the story that we will look back on as the one that shaped our lives. That story is about historical forces, not character actors.

It discusses the Nashville shooting and the expulsions of the Justins. Also mentions Tricia Cotham switching parties in North Carolina, giving the GOP super majority control of the leg. Just disgraceful.

April 8, 2023

The end goal of the right is fetal personhood and the abolition of legal abortion in the U.S.

"The first footnote in the Kacsmaryk opinion staying the FDA's approval of mifepristone.

If you think the Dobbs "state-by-state" settlement is a lasting one, you're delusional. The endgoal is--and always has been--fetal personhood and the abolition of legal abortion in the U.S."

https://twitter.com/ProfMMurray/status/1644706213475614722?s=20

April 4, 2023

Hal Sparks takes on the rightwing freakout to the trump indictment

great stuff as usual

https://twitter.com/halsparks/status/1643014425048403968