Heather Cox Richardson comments on how Republicans exploit the cowboy myth to attack the notion of strong federal governance. As she says,
"The cowboy myth originated during the Reconstruction era as a response to the idea that a government that defended Black rights was 'socialist' and that the tax dollars required to pay bureaucrats and army officers would break hardworking white men."
There's an upswell of loud: #MaleEntitlement as dozens of women have been punched in NYC -at least 3 arrests.
Women report being assaulted by men of diff. races & ages -alleged victims are mostly young & pretty, & most -minding their own business when attacked -often manifests with men who're infuriated at women for looking at their phones -eyes of a woman are directed at someone/something -not him *indignant over it.
"What’s happening here is a sacralized attack on human flourishing and a demonstration of how authoritarian pastors wield modern worship and aesthetics as the drugs to help their misogyny go down. …
Because conservative complementarian pastors interpret the universe as a perfectly designed hierarchy of authority and submission revealed in a perfectly inerrant Bible, the notion of biblical authority becomes code for their authority."
"In today’s America, the right wing seems to be echoing its antebellum predecessors. It is attacking women’s rights; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; immigration; LGBTQ+ rights and so on. At the same time, it continues to push an economic system that has moved as much as $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 10% since 1981 while exploding the annual budget deficit and the national debt."
Brad Onishi and Dan Miller look at the Society for American Renewal, “an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the US government with an authoritarian “aligned regime." IIt includes Harvard grads, millionaire industrialists, the president of the Claremont Institute, financiers, and other upper-crust right-wing men (and they are all men).
Amelia Mavis Christnot explains how men like Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and Brock Turner are made — and why they're allowed for so long by so many people to evade responsibility for their actions.
Heterosexual white male entitlement combined with overweening privilege due to wealth and social status: a formula for imagining that the world is there for your taking — as well as the women you assault.
“'This is the blue-collar realignment of the Republican Party, and what I can tell you is for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement,' [Florida Rep. Matt] Gaetz told Newsmax.
“White evangelicals heartily endorse a crook and a rapist apparently because they expect that he will put in place the world they envision, one controlled by white, patriarchal evangelical Christians.”
"Worldwide, conservatism is increasingly about rightwing governments, parties and movements trying to leverage limited support – often drawn from a shrinking part of the population that is elderly, white and male – to impose traditionalist ideas on a diversifying wider society that sees those ideas as repellent or just unsuited to modern life."
You know how among primitive humans men did the hunting and women did what women are supposed to do — stayed "home" taking care of the children and the home front while their brave men brought home the bacon? We all know this is how things worked back then.
But it appears what we have "known" doesn't fit the facts. As Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy report,
"Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons. This advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted."
"The first thing to say about the New Right is that it can get weird. Its ranks are composed almost entirely of men. They inhabit a social-media cocoon where they talk a lot about manhood, and strength, and manliness, and push-ups, and masculinity, and virility, and weight-lifting, and testosterone."
Tori Otten reports on a new poll conducted by ChangeResearch which finds that, in the 18–34 in age group, 64% of women are politically left of center, as are 86% of trans and nonbinary people. Just 39% of men identify as liberal or progressive.
Want to know who's driving the Republican-Trumpian attempt to break democracy as it appears democracy no longer serves Those Who Count?
Kate Manne on Luis Rubiales, president of the Spanish Football Federation, grabbing Jenni Hermoso's head so that she could not move and planting a non-consensual kiss on her lips (he's her boss, effectively):
"The case is also a powerful illustration of an even wider social phenomenon: men’s sense of entitlement with respect to women’s bodies. The kiss was a crude and brazen expression of male dominance."
"Trump has transformed his multiple indictments – particularly from Black prosecutors he has repeatedly called 'racist' – into just the latest proof point for the widespread belief within the GOP base that the biggest victims of discrimination are the groups most of them belong to: Christians, men and Whites."
As Nick El Hajj reports, Kuwait and Lebanon have moved to ban "Barbie" because, as the Lebanese Culture Minister states, the film has been found to was found to 'contradict values of faith and morality' and to 'promote homosexuality and sexual transformation.'
We men claim ownership of so much — of about everything — without ever giving a thought to the absurdity of the claim.
We take our entitlement for granted, then invent ideologies and a "god" made in our own image to bolster that entitlement.
This became very apparent to me this week when I posted critical commentary by a trans woman about how Target and Bud Light capitulated without a farethewell to homophobic haters, throwing their LGBTQ customers under the bus.
Man after man responded to that trans woman's critique with indignation, with the endless lessons some men love to issue to others on social media, with mockery of the claim that corporations can make a difference by standing up for minority communities.
The ire was directed against what the trans woman said about Bud Light.
Markets will only grow more diverse in the world now coming into being.
And those — looking at you, straight men — who think they are the pick of the litter and own everything and are super-entitled may find themselves left behind in a world of increasing diversity, which they reject and combat because they want to cling to their unmeried privilege.