"There’s only thing you need to know about GOP South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem bragging about personally shooting to death her 14 month-old puppy named 'Cricket' for being 'untrainable' and 'worthless.' She believes telling MAGA voters that she’s willing to cruelly shoot a dog to death will make them support her more. And the most alarming part is that she’s right."
"If you don't like what's going on in your state, move."
That's not so easy when you're poor.
Laws like this trap poor young people usually in communities where there is little opportunities, but that's part of the idea isn't it?
More slave workers, less relocating out of smaller communities.
There's a nasty conservative think tank behind all of this. #CrueltyIsThePoint https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/arizona-supreme-court-ruling-abortion-ban-rcna146915
"One of the ugliest features of MAGA politics is the eagerness to seize on large scale accidents, disasters, and pandemics to spread conspiracy theories, invent new culture-war obsessions, and pit one region of the country against another. ...
It is not a new thing for Republicans to treat disasters in blue areas as less deserving of our collective attention than disasters in red areas."
"But Trump supercharged these tendencies. Brian Beutler urges us to remember that during Covid, Trump didn’t merely neglect blue areas of the country; he used the pandemic to actively threaten retribution against parts of the country that didn’t support him.
This kind of thing has become a feature of MAGA politics, as opposed to an incidental by-product of a particular governing vision."
"Trump flaunted his treatment of blue America as a zone of disease and debauchery that all but deserved to be abandoned to a fate of mass death and suffering by dint of its moral inferiority to MAGA America. Make no mistake: His very public relishing in his power to do this was central to this performance and, one imagines, to its appeal to the MAGA masses."
"Since America has begun to dip a toe into the dangerous waters of white Christian Nationalism, I see people differently now. The surge of propaganda over the last several years has been highly effective with people I have cared about. And that really breaks my heart. ...
Today, our morals, values, and integrity as a people are on full view."
Dan Rather notes that in Georgia Saturday, Trump mocked Biden's stutter, and the crowd roared with delight. He quotes John Hendrickson, a reporter who stutters:
“More than Trump’s ugly taunt, one thing stands out to me about these moments: the sound of Trump’s supporters laughing right along with him. This is a building block of Trumpism. The man at the top gives his followers permission to be the worst version of themselves."
And then there's this, a reminder that the problem is not just Trump: the problem is many of us in the US who revel in rage and cruelty and love being told by Trump and many of our churches that the rage and cruelty are righteous and justified. Let this mentality capture more sectors of a society, and it will have a very bleak future, indeed.
"Fascism is on the ballot. And I think that was clear in New Hampshire. …
We need to see how the movement is growing, how the movement is mutating, how it’s taking the original fear of Islam that it began with and adding more and more fears, and then combining them so that they’re indistinguishable in the mind of the Trump voter."
"The Republican base actively embraces Trump’s grievances; it emulates his pettiness; it supports his childlike inability to accept responsibility. These voters are not sighing in resignation and voting for the lesser of two or three or four evils. They are getting what they want—because they, too, are set on revenge."
"These voters are not settling a political score. Rather, they want to get even with other Americans, their own neighbors, for a simmering (and likely unexpected) humiliation that many of them seem to have felt ever since swearing loyalty to Trump.
A lot of people, especially in the media, have a hard time accepting this simple truth."
"Millions of Americans, stung by the electoral rebukes of their fellow citizens, have become so resentful and detached from reality that they have plunged into a moral void, a vortex that disintegrates questions of politics or policies and replaces them with heroic fantasies of redeeming a supposedly fallen nation."
The electoral rebuke that stung them bitterly was Obama's election.
These voters want chaos. They want cruelty. They want vengeance. They want power-grabs. More than anything, they want a sense that people like them are in control — and people who are not like them are being put back in their place.
"We now have a Republican Party where power, divorced of any cogent, animating policy aims, is king. Spectacle, muscle flexing, reflexive opposition and, most importantly, owning the libs, is the currency of the realm. That dynamic not only allows for no compromise, but makes compromise with Democrats a capital crime —" (continued in /2)
"even when that posture consistently leads to outcomes farther from this hard-right group’s stated goals, since they completely remove themselves from the negotiating table. …
For a party so lacking a coherent worldview, where doling out losses and humiliations and bending the knee to Trump are the only guiding stars, it’s no wonder that basic governing has become impossible."
"To understand this position [of the 5th Circuit], you need to understand one thing: At the heart of the 'pro-life' movement is the idea that women are put on this earth for subservience. This is a religious idea (in the US, rooted in Christianity) that women are obedient helpmeets for male heads of household, and all-giving caretakers of children."
"Texas doesn’t care if pregnant women die. That comes as no surprise in the post-Dobbs abortion landscape. But it’s worth noting when the state’s unceasing cruelty is aided and abetted by federal judges."
"Roe’s demise has transformed the judiciary into a kind of death panel that holds the power to elevate the potential life of a fetus over the actual life of a patient."
Joyce Vance reprises things Republicans said this year, and sums them up:
"A lot of what we heard from the Republican party this year was just plain stupid. And mean."
She adds,
"There’s the persistent hate of those who are different, the need to make life even more difficult for those who are already struggling enough as it is without being denied health care."
"The ACLU says 2023 saw a bumper crop of anti-LGBTQ legislation from the right, including 508 bills introduced and at least 84 passed, nationwide. North Dakota, Tennessee, and Florida ended up with the worst records."
They think they are "winning" only when they are hurting someone, making some targeted and vulnerable minority community suffer. Their ego is constructed around the sense of superiority to cruelty to targeted others gives them.
Oliver Willis on how many of us need to wake up and stop pretending that those who are sticking with Trump through thick or thin are being "duped" by him or taken for a ride by Fox News.
They are, Willis thinks, truly malicious people who are energized by the cruelty and hatred of minorities:
"On Monday evening, the Texas Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision allowing Kate Cox—a woman carrying a nonviable fetus in a life-threatening pregnancy—to seek an abortion. The ruling makes it clear that Texas’ anti-abortion legislation is working as intended, and that no court can provide relief from the inherent cruelty and dehumanization of the Texas law."
"That a woman should be required to risk her life and her family’s future in carrying to term a child that cannot survive and will live any brief life in abject misery is just what Republicans intended. This is Texas law working as designed. This is what 'pro-life' activists celebrated when Roe v. Wade was overturned. This is just what they wanted."