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.
"This evening the Texas Supreme Court ruled against [Kate] Cox, saying she was not entitled to a medical exception from the state’s abortion ban.
The image of a woman forced by the state to carry a fetus with a fatal condition at the risk of her own health and future fertility until finally she has to flee her state for medical care is one that will not be erased easily."
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:
"Who is our Marjorie Taylor Greene? Who among Democrats has sat in the House chamber during a State of the Union speech by a president of the other party and shouted 'Liar! at the top of her lungs? Which Democrat put up a campaign ad featuring the candidate shooting feral hogs with an AR-15 from the open door of a helicopter."
"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."
"Everyone’s focused on Trump’s insane blathering, but we should be equally disturbed by the crowd’s raucous laughter [when Trump makes an ugly 'joke' about Nancy Pelosi's husband].
"The problem with Trump isn’t the gaffes — underneath the verbal clownishness Trump is telling us who he is and exactly what he intends to do.
He genuinely admires the brutality of the Chinese; he finds violence exciting; and he’s a sincere fanboy of the world’s fascists. And he keeps tell us what his presidency will mean if and when he regains power. There’s no subtlety here."
Some of us want to pretend we, too, are not immigrants, people descended from immigrants to the United States.*
Some of us want to pretend that, if we are descended from immigrants, our immigrant ancestors were the "good" immigrants.
Some of us want to find someone to target, blame, and hate — even as we depend on the considerable contributions immigrants make to our culture and to us.
Speaking of those not descended from native peoples.
"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."
As Audrey Dutton reports, since banning abortion, Idaho has dismantled support systems for pregnancies and births. She writes,
"Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, the state’s GOP-led Legislature has disbanded a maternal mortality committee, failed to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage and turned down federal grants for child care."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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.
"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
"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."
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.