Where Are We Runnin’? - American Politics Thread, May 2022

Tbh, while I am pessimistic, I’m more on crut’s side of things.

60% of people support abortion in the US
70% of people support gay marriage
94% of people support interracial marriage

The takes about this being a deeply conservative country have much basis in reality, but they overstate their case— the US is a pretty centrist to center left country being held hostage and brainwashed by a conservative, fear-mongering few who will stop at nothing to maintain their hold on power.

my point being that I don’t doubt that things will get worse, but I’m not too certain about them never getting better.

Who the fuck are the 6% who don't "support interracial marriage"?

there are more than that, they're probably just embarrassed to say it, even in anonymous polls.

in my church in the 90s, i think almost everyone opposed interracial marriage. maybe they changed their mind somewhere, but they were all adults at the time.

white evangelicals are fucking creeps, for real

Crüt otm here. There are some very specific factors that led us to this point, it was far from inevitable. Bush v Gore. Citizens United.

As to the Tweeter’s thesis, history’s baseline is harsh and violent repression. Pretty much all of it as far as I can tell.

President Joe Biden steers into midterms focused on abortion rights: “At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law." https://t.co/y3njdIotVe

— Zach C. Cohen (@Zachary_Cohen) May 3, 2022

The numbers on interracial marriage support are pretty remarkable. As recently as 2013, it was only 87%. Karl's 90s acquaintances had lots of company (~50%); it was 4% in 1958.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx

the US is a pretty centrist to center left country being held hostage and brainwashed by a conservative, fear-mongering few who will stop at nothing to maintain their hold on power

If this were true, then fear-mongering wouldn't be such a reliable, proven way to get and hold power.

in my church in the 90s, i think almost everyone opposed interracial marriage.

With biblical support, no doubt *rolls eyes*

i think part of what we're finding out is just how locked out of power most americans and american opinions are. there's a powerful, distributed apparatus that makes that so. it doesn't really hinge on people's political opinions i don't think. they play into it but the outcome is not making things more equal, it's the opposite. i also don't really think trump is some kind of hinge point here. i think the issue is our material reality depends on the kind of exploitative mindset that gop is a haven for.

i do think things could change for the better, but there's going to need to be something more vigorous and organized than what exists now, that's for sure.

President Joe Biden steers into midterms focused on abortion rights

Not trying to deflect at all but I can’t help but consider it: at any point did Biden take a stand for voting rights, even as far as he’s ‘taking a stand’ for abortion rights here?

Mindy Moderate of Maine:

“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.”

A trusted source tells me overturning Roe is unpopular by 60 to 30% in swing states and most swing districts. Let's see how the Dems can figure out how to fuck this up.

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) May 3, 2022

Look I'm practically bursting with concern I don't know what else you want from me

i also think that what's going on is less, women's rights are going a step back, or gay rights are going a step back, and more, one way to tighten the chain and eke out a few additional points of economic "growth" is to strip away more rights from powerless people.

the idea that the civil rights era is over because of a SC decision doesn't take into account that the President who got to tip of balance with 3 picks was not elected by a majority and was defeated after making the picks

the US is a pretty centrist to center left country being held hostage and brainwashed by a conservative, fear-mongering few who will stop at nothing to maintain their hold on power

If this were true, then fear-mongering wouldn't be such a reliable, proven way to get and hold power.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, May 3, 2022 8:13 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

You are missing the "being held hostage" part.

i also think that what's going on is less, women's rights are going a step back, or gay rights are going a step back, and more, one way to tighten the chain and eke out a few additional points of economic "growth" is to strip away more rights from powerless people.

― the cat needs to start paying for its own cbd (map), Tuesday, May 3, 2022 4:41 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

also it's a huge problem that most people are on the brink economically and have to work inhuman amounts in order to keep afloat. the ability to "pay attention" to rights is extremely curtailed. no civic culture can take root in that, so we end up with craven, power-hungry vultures on both sides of the aisle who simply like to grease different wheels in order to tighten the chains around our necks. and more well-off liberal people get to play self-serving outrage games about how evil wheel x is while they all look the other way or directly contribute to the faithful humming of wheel y.

^ ^ ^

I didn't really make clear my point above, but being "held hostage" means being kept on the brink of utter financial ruin or in bitter destitution, a state where it is much easier to blame an Other than actually think about the complexity of the systems keeping so many people in their place. It's "raising the flag while we do it to 'em again."

Good thread. I agree with a lot of the analysis so far.

xp absolutely, and one of the biggest Others out there is femininity. a big strike against that is a huge win for conservatives ideologically speaking. but again the real effect of that is to make power imbalances even more entrenched (just using a very old recipe that has been out of fashion for a while and may not have as big an effect as say trade law and military spending and a huge amount of stuff that democrats LOVE, but hey, it amps up an old violent faultline and that's always good for the gop).

The draft opinion does a lot to make explicit that reproductive rights, lgbtq rights, basically all non-white-male civil rights are very much tied together — and in opposition to the "deeply rooted" traditions of the country. It ought to be a huge rallying cry, I hope it is.

i hope it is too.

i imagine it will also be one for the GOP and those who are trying to build the white nationalist theocracy, too. they smell blood. if they're cruel and heartless enough, and they stick together, they can do it too.

"if"

Cruelty and heartlessness is a given, but don't underestimate their stupidity, greed and ability to fuck things up. I don't take any of their successes as inevitable or irreversible.

i agree that their stupidity may fuck it up for them. it's happened before. but i think lately they've learned that they can just overwhelm the people who are calling them ignorants bigots by sticking together and never, ever, admitting anything they did was wrong or could be wrong.

voters are untethered from public policy (democracy is barely holding on), the politicians are untethered from the consequences of their actions, and everyone involved has an interest in turning up the volume and the heat, from the social media networks to the non-social media networks to the primary opponents to the primary incumbents, the tens of millions of people who have had an abortion in the u.s. who are attacked as criminals by the 60 or 70 million white evangelicals. some of the people being treated as murderers are white evangelicals themselves -- they see preventing abortions now as a way to atone for the thing that the evangelists are constantly telling them is murder.

my point is, it's the wild fucking west out there right now, and as crazy as it might seem, notions of being "right" or "wrong" or "obviously way the fuck wrong", or "stupid" or "ignorant" or "soul-sucking" or anything like that, they seem to matter less and less with each passing week. i'd point to mass resistance, getting in the street and taking up space and being loud, but i hope we can do that before 2024 because i'd assume that Cotton's calls to use the military to beat back protestors of police brutality will become more popular, and even in the 2020 incarnation, the proud boys and their ilk were all over the country acting as paramilitary for the cops. anyone who participated in any of that on the ground knows that. it was creepy as fuck, and it happened across the country. that's going to get stronger if trump wins, maybe even stronger if desantis wins.

we can't think for a second that they won't slam on the gas and run you over some more, on any issue they can - LGBTQ+, CRT, anything that involves acknowledging what white people did and still do. they think the U.S. is god's chosen people, or the army for israel, or whatever, and they are big fans of the old testament. the old gods lost. the old tribes were annihilated. their cities were destroyed. they flip through church weekly glossy pages talking about the Jesus who returns with a flaming sword of vengeance. "ripped jesus". they are fucking dumb, and bigoted, and ignorant. but there's 70M of them and they'll give you creepy as fuck pentecostal fake smile as they run you over

From there, if this doctrine of no right being a right but for those explicitly defined in the Constitution, one need only look to the Christian dominionist agenda of the groups that put these justices on the bench to see where it would lead. As true as it might be to say, “if they come for Roe tonight, they’re coming for marriage equality tomorrow,” there are plenty of people they have come for already, from trans kids seeking health care to people giving birth in jails to sex workers sharing harm reduction information to criminalized survivors of intimate partner violence. If you are today feeling for this first time like the government is demanding control over your gender and sexuality and bodily autonomy, you are, sadly, in large company. But that also means that there are countless people around you who already know that freedom, certainly now and maybe always, will not come solely from what the law can recognize. Either the law must be pushed to recognize those rights, or, those rights must be won despite the law.

https://newrepublic.com/article/166286/abortion-rights-roe-wade-alito-supreme-court

It occurred to me for the first time last night - if Biden & Congress don't stop this shit there's a very real possibility his presidency doesn't even make it to 2024. Am I crazy?

Are you talking impeachment? That'd be a long shot.

A conviction would be a long shot. The Republicans can justify starting one on the basis that the Democrats did it to Trump.

I'm talking the Court (in tandem with other institutions that have fallen under the control of Christian fascists) engineering a coup that doesn't look like a coup - a recall election, something along those lines.

i thought it was a foregone conclusion that if the GOP takes the house in 2022, particularly with any significant numbers, they'll impeach. very well might go to pass too, but wouldn't pass the senate, i don't think

xpost oh never mind

re: the supreme court, they're not going to do a coup pre-2024. better to just let it play out as everyone knows it's going to, and then vote 5-4 that what happened was legal

link within that new republic article: https://www.mississippifreepress.org/20042/to-rule-history-with-god-the-christian-dominionist-war-on-abortion-part-i/

really good.

i realize i've posted a lot of complete dogshit over the last 18 years so grain of salt

I mean, this is one of those days where I say to myself, "Karl's chicken little stance is certainly bearing out here."

looool, ooooof. i know, i know.

i'm going to try to do something more productive with my time. i will say, in an attempt to separate myself from the bizarro right-wing mirror images of myself (doomsayers), that i very much want to be completely wrong. being completely wrong is a very satisfying outcome in my belief system

hard to be too much of an optimist about what the Dems will do but I think even they gotta know they'll get destroyed if they just sit on their hands here

It’s unsettling just how appropriate a thread title this is as the month advances.

this is your fault, raymond! ;)

US Politics, 21st century:

‘Summoned to the Bench’

Not everyone in dominionist Christianity was pleased with Trump’s choice of Kavanaugh. In a monthly prayer call led by the NAR group Intercessors For America that Right Wing Watch reported on in 2018, Philip Jauregui, an allied attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom and partner at an Alabama and Mississippi law firm, compared Kavanaugh to Absalom—the biblical son of King David who attempted to usurp his father’s throne.

Jauregui declared that God had already chosen a nominee to fill Kennedy’s seat: Amy Coney Barrett, whom he referred to as “the anointed one” and “the one that God loves.”

“Lord, we ask you in the name of Jesus, would you please let us see President Trump and Amy Coney Barrett Monday night, glorifying you?” prayed the ADF-allied attorney, who is also president of the Judicial Action Group, an Alabama-based judiciary-focused lobbying group.

Barrett is a Catholic member of the ecumenical religious community known as People of Praise. Its founder, Kevin Ranaghan, is a Catholic deacon and a leader of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, a Pentecostal sect of Catholicism that believes in and practices spiritual gifts. The Catholic sect, which dates back to the 1970s, has deep connections with NAR figures such as Engle, who often shares stages with like-minded Catholic clergy and teaches that God wants a reconciled Christianity to join forces and build his kingdom.

During the 2018 prayer call, Right Wing Watch reported, Jauregui “asked God to do whatever it takes—including waking up Trump, Melania, and Mike and Karen Pence in the middle of the night and sending angels their way—to keep them from settling on the wrong nominee.”

“And so we say, Absalom, you cannot have it, in the name of Jesus. And you should better leave right now. The longer you stick around, you endanger yourself by opposing God Almighty,” Jauregui cried. “And I’m speaking to the spirit … that would try to usurp and steal the throne from the anointed one. You can’t have it. We bind you, spirit of Absalom, in the name of Jesus, and we tell you, get out now or you will be destroyed.”

In Engle’s July 2, 2018, newsletter days before news of Trump’s pick broke, though, the NAR leader’s ministry had already made room for the possibility that Trump might choose someone other than Barrett to replace Kennedy.

“There is a mystery of course, that comes with the prophetic, but this much is for sure: The Ekklesia of God is being summoned to the bench! Let us not miss our day of visitation,” the newsletter said. “It’s time to wage war in the heavenly realms according to the revelation we’ve been given. … It’s time to partner with the cloud of witnesses and the angelic armies unto a Third Great Awakening and the shifting of our courts.”

from part 2 of the misssippifreepress thing i linked to earlier.

this sounds dumb, but in order to understand their belief, you have to suspend your disbelief. you have to be able to hear the words "the Ekklesia of God" and not flinch. your eyes cannot flinch at that. you have to maintain a certain facial expression and take that seriously

have any of you ever attended a school where they invited a hypnotist for "fun"? it's clear how it works - anyone who isn't willing to play along is kicked out at the beginning. the hypnotist's first task is to figure out who is playing the game

I misread that at first as "Summoned to the Beach."

I’m doing my best now to not make a dumb joke at Wavves’ expense

JD Vance won the primary

him vs Tim Ryan.

oh gee, what will the good people of Ohio decide to do?!?!!

well let's see, let's start off with who is who is the most racist. then we're going to check off the "cruelty" column. of course, both of these now fall under the heading "white ohio christians". you also get a +25 if you're a reaaaaaaaaaaaal piece of shit

damn, jd vance checks ALL of these boxes!!!!!!

A hard read but an important one.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-leaders-children-uvalde-shooting/?fbclid=IwAR1JEcVZw_hF9ACRKjlp4iPGFdios6VwozJkqWMkUPELecFGk3U8_i22JYQ

sometimes i get caught in thinking about how we digest major news before it happens. you may have occasionally seen the first few run-on sentences of posts on the subject that usually end, several posts later, with me declaring that i'm going to get off the computer today and get to work on something more worthwhile.

just curious, though. when this SC roe v wade overturning comes out this summer (in late June, i expect?), does anyone think the decision's "rollout" and the public response to it will be any different than if it hadn't leaked in full months earlier? will the public response to the official decision be less passionate and raw because we've all been coping and adjusting and preparing for this new world for months now? will it be more passionate and raw because we all know what complete bullshit this is, that it goes against what most people in this country except for white christians want, and because there has been time to prepare a response to the decision that everyone knows is coming? or it will be about the same?

(please don't get hung up on adjectives like "passionate" and "raw", please don't let semantics get in the way of what i think i'm clearly trying to get at, please substitute other words or ideas so that the question makes any kind of sense)

I think it'll be plenty passionate and raw or whatever adjectives you prefer. Not least because in a lot of states — depending on how exactly the opinion is worded — it's going to set in motion the enactment of automatic abortion bans. So you'll have both the big-picture raw passion over the core issues, but also a whole lot of fervor in individual states as various kinds of restrictions are put in place and abortion clinics are forced to cease operating.

If anything, I think the leak has better primed everyone on all sides for all of those fights.

yep, that's how I see things over here

NEW: K-pop group BTS will join press sec. Karine Jean-Pierre at 2:30 p.m. ET for today's briefing, "where the Grammy-nominated musical group will deliver brief remarks," according to a White House official. https://t.co/ydQFimPtiX

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 31, 2022

Calling out the BTS Stan Army is honestly not a bad midterm strategy.

K-Corn Pop

The House January 6 Committee admitted temporary defeat, of a sort, to a panel of three Trump-appointed DC circuit court judges, who have temporarily blocked their efforts to obtain the Republican Party’s email-marketing data from the company Salesforce. Their intervention will make it impossible for the committee to obtain proprietary information—about how (and how well) the RNC used lies about the 2020 election to raise money and mobilize would-be insurrectionists—ahead of scheduled public hearings in June

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/29/politics/january-6-committee-rnc-data/index.html

Someone else start the June thread

The Fall of Roe v Wade: US Politics, June 2022