Attacks on Swift demonstrate a more general truth: Conservatives actually don’t admire people who succeed through talent and hard work.
I barely follow contemporary music, so I know little about Taylor Swift, beyond recognizing her picture and appreciating that she has a lot of fans. [1] During the summer, though, she was hard to ignore: Along with the Barbie movie, Swift’s Eras Tour was the big cultural event. Both were identity-affirming experiences for women that, as a man, I could only envy. [2]
Recently, though, she really caught my attention when MAGA-world decided to take on her fans, the Swifties. God knows what they were thinking. I always thought politics was about connecting with popular movements, not daring them to run over you.
The backstory is that early in her career Swift was resolutely non-partisan, to the point that many people speculated that she was a Republican. But in 2018 she decided to come out against Republican Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn. In this video (I think from a documentary about Swift) she’s telling her reluctant Dad why she needs to do this:
She votes against fair pay for women. She votes against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which is just basically protecting us from domestic abuse and stalking. [Points to herself] — stalking! She thinks that if you’re a gay couple, or even if you look like a gay couple, you should be allowed to be kicked out of a restaurant. It’s really basic human rights, and it’s right and wrong at this point. And I can’t see another commercial and see her disguising these policies behind the words “Tennessee Christian values”. Those aren’t Tennessee Christian values. I live in Tennessee. I am a Christian. That’s not what we stand for.
Her father doesn’t argue with any of those points, but he worries that violent right-wingers will target her.
On Tuesday morning, the singer posted a short message on Instagram encouraging her 272 million followers to register to vote. Afterward, the website she directed her fans to — the nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org — recorded more than 35,000 registrations, according to the organization.
Here, I’d say: Go back and read her reasons for opposing Marsha Blackburn. Rather than dumb, she sounds pretty well informed. But “dumb” wasn’t insulting enough, so American Greatness writer Roger Kimball took it a step farther.
Also, she is homely.
As if none of the rest of us have eyes, and women like Swift should care whether Kimball finds them attractive. (Did I mention she’s dating a football star?) And famous “alpha male” Nick Adams retweeted what he thought was an apt comparison. [4]
Raise your daughters to be classy like Lauren Boebert, not trashy like Taylor Swift.
This next-level success she has today she accomplished after navigating a polarized political climate. When she speaks up, people listen.
More importantly, there’s nothing the right could do that could meaningfully affect Swift. She has an incredibly devoted fanbase, a sold-out tour that lasts until November 2024, which again, is going to make her a billionaire, and maybe even has a hot new boyfriend. You can’t convince a Taylor Swift fan that she’s ugly or untalented, and these days, they seem to run the world.
And another Salon writer, Amanda Marcotte, hit back, claiming the anti-Swift venom comes from incels whose worship of established-in-court-sexual-assaulter Donald Trump has made them even less appealing to women.
GOP propagandists have learned that a great way to get their mostly male audiences fired up is to indulge their grievances about women these days. Modern chicks, the gripe goes, have been spoiled by feminism, and that’s why it’s so damn hard for a Trump voter to get a date. … Indeed, the irony of all this is that, in appealing to young men through grievance, the right is only making men’s problems worse. If you’re having trouble with the ladies, going MAGA intensifies your unlikeability. But isn’t that what cults always do? Sell their members “solutions” that actually compound their existing problems.
Those are the kinds of points that other people are much bettered positioned to make than I am. But I do have one thing to add that I don’t think is getting enough attention: American conservatives often praise capitalism as a system where anybody who has talent and works hard can rise to the top. So in theory, they should love people who make that climb. In fact, though, they hate those people, especially the ones who remember where they came from and try to help other people rise too.
The heroes of conservatism are almost invariably folks who were born rich: Donald Trump, the Koch brothers, Elon Musk.
Have you ever wondered why conservatives demonstrate such hatred for “the Hollywood elite” and athletes who get political like Colin Kaepernick? That’s because entertainment and athletics are industries where poor and working class people can hit it big if they work hard and have talent. People like Stephen King or Ben Affleck or Eminem are villains, even though they are White men who have lived genuine Horatio Alger stories. And if you’re Black like LeBron James or female like Barbra Streisand, forget about it. You’ll never have the right to an opinion of your own.
Swift is not the best example here, because she was raised in the professional class and never had to wonder if she’d be able to afford college. But her parents didn’t have yacht-and-mansion money, like she does now. She had talent and worked hard, and it paid off for her. But she doesn’t support the billionaire class politically, so she should “stay in her lane“, just like LeBron should “shut up and dribble”.
The point of the Horatio Alger myth is to keep the masses content: We may not have much now, but we could someday. We should admire the billionaires because maybe, just maybe, we’ll be one ourselves someday.
But that fantasy is never supposed to come true. Conservatism is all about keeping the rich on top, not opening their ranks to admit climbers.
[1] This isn’t unusual for me. Back in the 70s, I remember being amazed that so many songs I recognized from the radio were all by the same artist — some guy named Elton John.
[2] Male identity is a tricky thing to affirm these days, and people who try are usually more embarrassing than inspiring.
But the most prescient analysis of what has recently become more obvious came from Doug Muder back in 2014 in an article titled, “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party.”
As Ron DeSantis’ Florida continues its descent into authoritarianism, you may have missed one of the summer’s developments: In late July, Florida approved PragerU Kids videos for use in Florida public schools.
What is PragerU? You can be forgiven for not knowing what PragerU Kids is. Prager University is well known among conservatives, but nearly invisible to the rest of us (until recently). Like the fraudulent and now defunct Trump University, it is not actually a university, as its FAQ admits:
No, PragerU is not an accredited university, nor do we claim to be. We do not offer degrees. However, we are the most accessible and influential online resource for explaining the concepts that have made America great.
That right there is a clue to the Prager style: It creates misperceptions, but takes no responsibility for them: We’re not a university, we just call ourselves one. If you jumped to the conclusion that we’re a reputable academic institution, that’s on you.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Prager University Foundation (“PragerU”) offers a free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education.
It spends about $20 million a year, and its funding comes from a variety of sources, including a long list of conservative family foundations, like the Bradley Foundation ($1.6 million), Dunn Foundation ($315K), Chillemi Charitable Fund ($316K), Leven Family Foundation ($300K), Mitchell Foundation ($1.2 million), Morgan Family Foundation ($470K), Thirteen Foundation ($3.25 million), and so on. It also gets money from other conservative groups like Turning Point USA ($500K) and National Christian Foundation ($1.7 million). Several millions come via organizations supervising what are called donor-advised funds (which are basically foundations for people who can’t afford the legal overhead of foundations — I have one myself) like Fidelity Charitable Gift Funds ($4.3 million).
In short, while Prager U has some big donors, it also has a fairly wide appeal among conservatives. Its pitch is that “left-wing ideology” is so “dominant” that an alternative conservative voice is needed. It’s pro-fossil-fuel, anti-anti-racist, pro-Christian-exceptionalist, and promotes a number of myths about American history, like soft-pedaling America’s role in the history of slavery. (Soft-pedaling slavery, as we’ll see, is a persistent theme. This is probably a big reason it appeals to DeSantis’ people.)
In short, if you’re arguing the conservative side of just about any culture-war issue, you can add some intellectual trappings to your case by citing a PragerU video. Your friends and family will probably be fooled into taking the “university” thing seriously. (But that’s their fault, not Prager’s.)
PragerU Kids, as the name suggests, is the same thing aimed at children. If you’re a conservative home-schooling your kids, or an explicitly conservative private school, you probably use a lot of these videos. They’re propaganda, but like all the best propaganda, they usually don’t explicitly lie. PragerU Kids videos cherry-pick sources, conveniently overlook events that don’t fit their chosen narrative, and frame facts in deceptive ways, but they’re usually based on something. (If pressed, I suspect most PragerU folks would claim that they’re just using the same deceptive tactics liberals use.)
Just to be clear where I’m coming from, I think PragerU has every right to do what it does, and anybody who wants to view their videos (or show them to their kids) should be allowed to do so. I could even see a public-school system making some of these videos available to older children in a multi-viewpoint class that has the time and resources to provide and discuss the videos’ missing context. But for a public school teacher to show third-graders one of these videos and then send them home (as I imagine will frequently happen in Florida) is educational malpractice. It is precisely the kind of indoctrination that Governor DeSantis claims to oppose.
How does Frederick Douglass get into this? Two of PragerU Kids’ most popular characters are Leo and Layla, a brother and sister who somehow have a time-travel app on their phone. To a certain extent the app has a mind of its own, so when the kids are wondering about something in the present, they frequently get zapped back in time so that some famous historical figure can teach them the proper conservative culture-war lesson.
In one video, they are watching the news on TV, and seeing events that are clearly meant to evoke the demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis policeman. The murder, however, is one of those inconvenient details best omitted, so the kids see only TV commentators making excuses for “violence and destruction by some of our angrier activists” who want to “abolish the police” and “want the US system torn down” for no apparent reason.
Wondering what “abolish” even means, the kids go back in time to explore abolitionists, and meet Frederick Douglass in 1852.
Now, you might wonder why a conservative organization would want kids to talk to Douglass, who said some pretty radical things. For example, when asked to speak at a Fourth of July celebration in Rochester, New York in that very year of 1852, he questioned whether the holiday should mean anything at all to a Black man.
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the ‘lame man leap as an hart.’
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
The Frederick Douglass who made that speech fits right into a class Florida would ban as “critical race theory”.
But that’s not what he says to Leo and Layla. The reason 1852 matters is that Douglass split with his former mentor, White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in 1851. So in this video, Garrison (who is briefly portrayed when Douglass talks about him, but doesn’t get a speaking role) represents the violent extremists and Douglass the activists who patiently work within the system.
So Prager-Douglass opposes slavery, but repeats the soft-pedaling line that Prager and DeSantis favor: “The sad fact is that slavery has existed everywhere in the world for thousands of years.” (In a different video, Christopher Columbus tells the kids that “Slavery is as old as time, and has taken place in every corner of the world.”) In fine PragerU fashion, Douglass says something misleading that is carefully worded enough to be arguably true: “There was no real movement anywhere in the world to abolish slavery before the American founding. Slavery was part of life all over the world.”
Of course, France would abolish slavery in 1794 and the British Empire in 1831. Mexico’s version of the Emancipation Proclamation came in 1829, and was a major reason Texans sought independence. (The Texas Revolution was a fight for slavery, not freedom.) So the video’s assertion about 1787 (when the Constitution was adopted) might pass muster, assuming that you don’t consider the English Quakers a “real” movement. But waiting until 1865 to renounce slavery put the US near the end of the abolition process, not the beginning. Brazil would be the last major country to abolish slavery in 1888.
Prager-Douglass goes on: “Our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong” and “They wanted it to end. But their first priority was getting all 13 colonies to unite as one country.” So they tolerated slavery as “a compromise to achieve something great. … Our founders created a system they thought would have slavery end gradually.” And yes, slavery still hadn’t ended by 1852, but “complicated problems take time to solve.”
And that brings us to Prager-Douglass’ disagreement with Garrison. He says that Garrison “refuses all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.” (What Garrison set on fire was a copy of the Constitution, which you can recognize in the video if you already know that story. If you jumped to the conclusion that he did actual property damage, like the violent demonstrators the kids had seen on TV, that’s on you, not Prager.) Prager-Douglass says he wants to work within the American system, but that Garrison wants to overturn it.
Layla tells Douglass that his way is definitely better, and says that in our time Douglass is an American hero “and that other guy isn’t really known”. (The picture shows Garrison’s statue in Newburyport, Massachusetts.) The kids are triumphalist about the present-day US: All Americans have equal voting rights, and a Black man was even elected president! (There is, of course, no point in mentioning that his administration was followed by a racist backlash, or that people might still be protesting about racial grievances.)
Prager-Douglass asks if we still have the same Constitution, and then says “I knew the US Constitution would survive and allow for positive change.” Prager-Douglass closes by advising the kids to seek change within the system, and to avoid “radicals” like Garrison (and presumably Black Lives Matter).
Who is this guy? You may have a hard time recognizing the PragerU cartoon character as the Frederick Douglass you know from history. After all, by late 1860, Douglass was promoting far more than just gradual change within the system. Speaking on the first anniversary of John Brown’s execution, he endorsed violence: “We need not only to appeal to the moral sense of these slaveholders; we have need, and a right, to appeal to their fears.”
I rejoice in every uprising at the South. Although the men may be shot down, they may be butchered upon the spot, the blow tells, notwithstanding, and cannot but tell. Slaveholders sleep more uneasily than they used to. They are more careful to know that the doors are locked than they formerly were. They are more careful to know that their bowie-knives are sharp; they are more careful to know that their pistols are loaded. This element will play its part in the abolition of slavery.
And his endorsement of the Union was conditional.
My opinion is that if we only had an abolition President to hold these men in the Union and execute the declared provisions of the Constitution, execute that part of the Constitution which is in favor of liberty, as well as put upon those passages which have been construed in favor of slavery, a construction different from that and more in harmony with the principles of eternal justice that lie at the foundation of the government — if we could have such a government, a government that would force the South to behave herself, under those circumstances I should be for the continuance of the Union. If, on the contrary — no if about it — we have what we have, I shall be glad of the news, come when it will, that the slave States are an independent government, and that you are no longer called upon to deliver fugitive slaves to their masters, and that you are no longer called upon to shoulder your arms and guard with your swords those States — no longer called to go into them to put down John Brown, or anybody else who may strike for liberty there.
That doesn’t sound at all like the PragerU cartoon character. So are they lying to the kids?
Not exactly. The PragerU Douglass seems to be based on a particular aspect of Douglass’ thinking during a particular point in his life. During the 1850s, Douglass and Garrison had a very public argument that centered on whether to give up on the American experiment in democracy.
Garrison saw little hope for it. Slavery, in his view, was part and parcel of the Union from Day 1. The word slave may not appear in the Constitution, but the shadow of slavery darkens many of its provisions, from the 3/5ths compromise to the requirement that states return those who were “held to Service or Labor” in another state. The Constitution, in his view, was a “covenant with death” and “an agreement with Hell”. Consequently, he refused to participate in electoral politics and wanted free states to secede. “No Union with Slaveholders” was his slogan.
I, on the other hand, deny that the Constitution guarantees the right to hold property in man, and believe that the way to abolish slavery in America is to vote such men into power as well use their powers for the abolition of slavery.
Douglass held that the Constitution had been given a pro-slavery interpretation, and the US government had implemented pro-slavery policies, but he denied that the Constitution itself was at fault. In the Scotland speech, (given in March, 1860, a mere seven months before the John Brown speech I quoted earlier), he insisted that free states should stay in the Union precisely so that they could fight against slavery.
This is why today Douglass can be turned to the service of conservatives, particularly the ones like DeSantis, who want to deny that racism played (and continues to play) a structural role in the US. By cherry-picking, Douglass’ words can be put to use in much the same way that Martin Luther King’s famous quote that people “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” is regularly trotted out in opposition to affirmative action (which King supported).
Restoring the context. The video would have you believe that history has proven Douglass right and Garrison wrong, because the Constitution and the Union have both survived, but slavery hasn’t.
However, that result didn’t happen through ordinary Constitutional processes, i.e., by convincing voters and electing abolitionist candidates, as Douglass envisioned. Instead, change came about through violence: The Southern states seceded, the North conquered them, and then in the aftermath of the war, the North imposed abolition, essentially ratifying the 13th Amendment at gunpoint.
The election of Lincoln, which precipitated the crisis, was more the result of slaveholder miscalculation than a groundswell of abolitionist feeling among American voters. As historian Douglas Egerton described the unlikely outcome of 1860 election in his book Year of Meteors, the Democratic coalition of slaveholders and Northern industrialists that had controlled the White House in 1852 and 1856 was well set up to do it again in 1860. But pro-secession Southerners revolted against nominating Northerner Stephen Douglas, split the party, and virtually guaranteed Lincoln’s victory with 40% of the popular vote in a four-candidate field.
If abolition had waited for an anti-slavery voting majority, we might still be waiting.
So history proved neither Douglass nor Garrison right, because neither of their strategies worked. In the end, the slaveholders were not outplayed by their opponents; they simply overreached and lost everything.
If you can find a Black-Lives-Matter lesson in this, you’re cleverer than I am.
Conclusion. So I, an adult with a college education and the time and interest to pursue the matter, was able to find the kernel of truth behind the PragerU Kids video and put it in some proper context. But can we really expect kids Leo’s age — the target audience of the Leo & Layla videos — to do the same?
Florida either thinks we can, or it’s content to let its children be indoctrinated.
Our story of slavery, Jim Crow, and continuing racism yields many heroes but no villains.
Wednesday, the Florida State Board of Education approved its new standards for teaching social studies, as required by last year’s Stop WOKE Act. The standards document is 216 pages, but the part that sparked immediate controversy was the African American History strand, contained in pages 3-21.
Most of the controversy centered on just two lines. “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” on page 6, and “Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre” on page 17.
Critics objected to the page 6 reference because it perpetuates a trope that goes all the way back to the slavery era itself: that slaves benefited from their enslavement. The problem with the page 17 reference is the “against and by” phrase, which frames attacks by Whites against Blacks as battles between Whites and Blacks.
Those criticisms are valid, but after reading the standards as a whole, I have larger objections.
Nonetheless, let me start by giving the Devil his due: If kids come out of Florida schools knowing everything in the standards, they’ll have had a better education on race than my generation did growing up in the 1960s and 70s. (Though that isn’t saying much. For example, I had never heard of the Harlem Renaissance or Ida B. Wells until I visited the Smithsonian’s African American History and Culture Museum a few years ago. My high school texts grudgingly noticed Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, but that was about it for Black contributions to American history and culture.) That’s due to progress generally, not just in Florida.
But having acknowledged that, here’s the central problem with the standards: Florida wants to tell a story about race in America that has heroes but no villains. This is in line with the demands of DeSantis’ Stop WOKE Act, which requires that students be indoctrinated with an upbeat narrative:
American history … shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.
To tell that story, the standards identify a lot of high-achieving Black Americans, as well as many admirable Whites who were abolitionists or allies of the civil rights movement. But slavery itself just sort of happened; it emerged out of vague historical and economic forces. Ditto for Jim Crow. So Thaddeus Stevens and Harriet Tubman get shout-outs, but John Calhoun and Nathan Bedford Forrest — particularly Calhoun’s explicit rejection of the universal principles in the Declaration of Independence — are never mentioned.
Instruction includes how whites who supported Reconstruction policies for freed blacks after the Civil War (white southerners being called scalawags and white northerners being called carpetbaggers) were targeted.
But nothing about who targeted them. Heather Cox Richardson examines the standards’ use of the passive voice in more detail, but the gist is that identified people did good things, while bad things were done. So there’s nothing about the Lost Cause mythology that venerated the Confederacy, or the Dunning historical interpretation that painted Reconstruction as a benighted period (dominated by scalawags and carpetbaggers) from which the South needed to be “redeemed” by Jim Crow.
There’s also a bizarre highlighting of relatively minor Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, who really don’t belong on a list (with several presidents and John Lewis) of “political figures who shaped the modern Civil Rights efforts”. And I think it’s fine that Clarence Thomas is listed among “African American pioneers in their field”, but where is the man he replaced on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall?
Omissions are harder to catch than misplaced inclusions, and I suspect better historians than me will find some howlers. But I noticed a big one: The standards don’t mention Bacon’s Rebellion of 1677. Bacon’s Rebellion united Black slaves and White indentured servants against Virginia’s White upper class, and is often described as the motive for the Slave Codes of 1705 (also not mentioned), which solidified racial divisions in Virginia law (in hopes that the White and Black underclasses would never again find common causes).
And of course, the standards highlight any nascent abolitionism among the Founders, while turning a blind eye to their contradictory actions.
Instruction includes examples of how the members of the Continental Congress made attempts to end or limit slavery (e.g., the first draft of the Declaration of Independence that blamed King George III for sustaining the slave trade in the colonies, the calls of the Continental Congress for the end of involvement in the international slave trade, the Constitutional provision allowing for congressional action in 1808).
But no mention of why the Continental Congress’ attempts to limit slavery failed, why that first draft got edited, or who led the countervailing effort. No mention of George Washington’s slaves, or the Black descendants of Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved Sally Hemings.
In short, the Florida standards describe an America inexplicably beset by the dark impersonal forces of slavery and discrimination, against which heroic individuals of all races fought a centuries-long and ultimately successful battle.
Why tell this slanted story? Because Stop WOKE demands it:
An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.
So the State Board has rewritten American racial history to avoid all “psychological distress” (other than perhaps cognitive dissonance). Florida’s children should feel pride in their ancestors, no matter who they were, because previous generations of Americans were all heroes. There’s no need to ask Grandpa if he ever lynched anybody, or if Grandma was one of the people throwing rotten fruit at the first Black children trying to integrate a public school. Because although such things were done, nobody actually did them.
The 20th-century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called the American states “laboratories of democracy”. But recently the red states have been experimenting with something else entirely.
In his 2018 book Reconstructing the Gospel, Christian minister Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove reflected on one of the paradoxes of religious fervor.
Even as we feel guilty about doing the things we know we ought not to do, and strive to do more of the good we want to do, our very worst sins are almost always things we know to be our Christian duty.
He illustrated the point with examples: the Crusades, the high priests who condemned Jesus, and the Southern “Redeemer” movement, whose violent terrorism ended Reconstruction and inaugurated Jim Crow.
Over and over, Christians support and participate in atrocious evil, not because we choose to do wrong, but because we think we’re doing the right thing — the righteous thing, even.
Not wanting to pick on Christianity, I’ll add some secular examples: the Reign of Terror, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and the Bush administration’s torture policy. Wilson-Hartgrove is pointing to a human thing, not a uniquely Christian thing. Cruelty is often practiced by people who imagine themselves to be heroes.
Seekins-Crowe. I recalled Wilson-Hartgrove’s observation this week, when Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe‘s moving and highly emotional speech went viral.
Seekins-Crowe gave the speech in March, during the debate over Montana’s new law banning gender-affirming care for minors. (The bill passed and was signed Friday by Governor Greg Gianforte.) The main argument against the bill was that it would cost lives. (We’ll get to Rep. Zooey Zephyr’s “blood on your hands” comment later on.) Teens struggling with their gender identity have a high suicide rate; gender-affirming care is often an attempt to save their lives. So banning it may well increase teen suicides.
Seekins-Crowe did not shy away from that argument. She did not scoff at it or trivialize it, but took the bull by the horns. She explained that she had lived for three years with a suicidal daughter, and so she knows that some things are more important than saving your child’s life.
That seems like a brutal summation of her words, so I feel obligated to quote her at length and provide a video.
One of the big issues that we have heard today and we’ve talked about lately is that without surgery the risk of suicide goes way up. Well, I am one of those parents who lived with a daughter who was suicidal for three years. Someone once asked me, “Wouldn’t I just do anything to help save her?” And I really had to think. And the answer was, “No.”
I was not going to give in to her emotional manipulation, because she was incapable of making those decisions and I had to make those decisions for her. I was not going to let her tear apart my family and I was not going to let her tear apart me, because I had to be strong for her. I had to have a vision for her life when she had none, when she was incapable of having [one].
I was lost. I was scared. I spent hours on the floor in prayer. Because I didn’t know that when I woke up if my daughter was going to be alive or not. But I knew that I had to make those right decisions for her so that she would have a precious, successful adulthood.
Monstrous as it is, I can’t watch that video without feeling Seekins-Crowe’s sincerity. She believes what she is saying, and believes that letting her daughter suffer for three years was the right thing to do. (I have no idea how that story came out. After three years, did the daughter stop being suicidal, or just reach adulthood?) And now, she believes that passing this law is the right thing to do. I have little doubt that she would describe it as her Christian duty.
That speech is, I think, an almost perfect distillation of the authoritarian mindset: People who see the world differently than I do are deluded, so I have to be strong enough to make their decisions for them, even if it kills them.
There is, of course, room for debate about when parents ought to overrule their children’s desires. Nearly every parent, at some time or another, has forced a toddler to go to bed, or refused to let one eat all the candy. Those calls get harder as children grow, and I don’t know any clear rule about when someone is old enough to make their own decisions about gender-affirming medical interventions.
But now Seekins-Crowe has taken the next step, and is making “right decisions” for all the parents in Montana, particularly those who might not be “strong” enough to ignore their children’s anguish, or sure enough of their own convictions to close their ears to whatever their children might say. Those “weak” parents need a strong government, full of strong people like Seekins-Crowe herself.
Providing that strength is her Christian duty.
Watching Seekins-Crowe’s speech makes me realize that conservative leaders like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have spoiled me, because their villainy is so direct and uncomplicated. I have no doubt that Trump knows he is a grifter, and that he is consciously taking advantage of the people who support him. Likewise, DeSantis knows that critical race theory is not a thing, and that Florida’s librarians and grade school teachers are not grooming children for pedophilia.
If everyone on the other side were like that, life would be simple. But instead the world is full of Abrahams whose willingness to sacrifice Isaac makes them feel closer to their God.
What can we do with them?
I don’t have an answer for that question, so I’m just going to continue talking about the Montana legislature, and red-state governments in Texas and Florida that also gave us insight into authoritarianism this week.
Zooey Zephyr. One thing authoritarians don’t do is tolerate dissent, particularly from people they deem inferior. A few weeks ago, the Tennessee House decided not to tolerate Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, who are Black. The Justins delayed the business of the House for an hour or so by encouraging pro-gun-control demonstrators in the gallery, so they were expelled from office. But the people of their districts put them right back.
This week, the Republican supermajority in the Montana House did something similar to Zooey Zephyr, a trans woman (whose adulthood, in Seekins-Crowe’s terms, must not be “precious” or “successful”). On April 18, during debate on the bill banning gender-affirming care for minors (and several other anti-trans bills), she was blunt:
This body should be ashamed. If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.
In response, the ironically-named Freedom Caucus in the Montana House called for “his” censure because of that “threatening” comment. Majority Leader Sue Vinton responded directly (and self-righteously) to the “shame” comment:
We will not be shamed by anyone in this chamber. We are better than that.
The censure resolution was not immediately taken up, but the Speaker refused to recognize Rep. Zephyr when she rose to speak, and said that he would not do so until Zephyr apologized, which she refused to do.
Last Monday, hundreds of pro-Zephyr demonstrators came to the Capitol. When Zephyr rose and was ignored, they loudly chanted “Let her speak.” The Speaker still did not recognize Zephyr, and the House ground to a halt for half an hour until the demonstrators could be removed. On his way to jail, one demonstrator explained:
In this country you don’t get many rights but one of the things you do get is an elected representative, and 11,000 Montanans are waiting for Zooey Zephyr to speak for them, to represent the interest of trans people in the state who belong in the state as well. It’s not just … the old white men who run the show over here. It’s every single person. Montana is big enough for all of us, and I think it has space for all of us.
Republicans have since inaccurately described the demonstrations as “violent” and “an insurrection”. (I commented two weeks ago on the Right’s practice of breaking words that have been used against them. Ever since January 6 they have been trying to break insurrection through misuse. It falls flat to claim that January 6 was merely a “protest”, so they have been characterizing any liberal protest as an insurrection.)
Zephyr was blamed for this breech of “decorum” (the same offense charged against the Justins). So she was banned from the House floor for the remainder of the session (which ends May 5). The resolution banning her did not also bar her from serving on committees, but all the committees she serves on then had their remaining meetings cancelled.
Like the Justins, Zephyr returned home to a large rally of her supporters. (Remember: “Large” means something different in Montana, where each House district has only about 11,000 people.) Since the legislature only meets in odd-numbered years, her term is effectively over. But she’ll be running for reelection in 2024.
Universities. Another thing authoritarians do not tolerate is an alternative source of institutional authority. That’s why the current crop of red-state authoritarians is working so hard to bring the universities under control. Universities do not wield power directly, but they are recognized sources of authoritative opinion. So they cannot be allowed to remain independent.
A number of German words have already made it into the American vocabulary — zeitgeist, schadenfreude, realpolitik, gestalt, wanderlust. Well, it’s time to learn another one: gleichschaltung, whose root words mean “same circuit”. Originally an engineering term translated as “coordination” or “synchronization”, gleichschaltung was adapted in the 1930s to describe the process of unifying German society and culture under Nazi ideology. Simply controlling the national government wasn’t good enough; the kind of German renewal the Nazis promised could only be accomplished by a unified society whose institutions all pulled in the same direction. So local governments, corporations, unions, professional associations, universities, social clubs, and youth organizations all needed “coordination”.
This week, Texas took a step towards its own gleichschaltung when its Senate passed SB-18, which would eliminate tenure in the state’s universities.
An institution of higher education may not grant an employee of the institution tenure or any type of permanent employment status.
Current tenured faculty are grandfathered in, but no new tenured appointments would be made after September 1. The Texas Tribune claims that the bill “faces an uphill battle at the Texas House”, so perhaps Texas’ university system will be spared for another term or two.
The argument for the bill is primarily political, not educational.
[Lieutenant Governor Dan] Patrick’s push to end tenure in Texas started more than a year ago after some University of Texas at Austin professors passed a nonbinding resolution defending their academic freedom to teach about issues like racial justice. The resolution came as Republicans hinted that they wanted to extend restrictions on how race is discussed in K-12 classrooms, which were approved by the Texas Legislature in 2021, to the state’s public universities.
The resolution outraged Patrick, who accused university professors of “indoctrinating” students with leftist ideas and argued that the state must stop awarding tenure because faculty with the benefit don’t face any repercussions for it.
But that’s precisely the justification for tenure: It allows academics to do their jobs without worrying about offending the politicians currently in power. In a liberal democracy, universities are not supposed to be “coordinated” with the ruling party.
Florida is another state trying to synchronize its educational institutions with government ideology. Governor DeSantis’ Stop WOKE Act created a list of ideas that cannot be taught in Florida public schools, including the state universities. The part affecting the universities has been blocked by a federal judge, whose ruling says:
The First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark.
But acts of the legislature are only one path to gleichschaltung. The governor also has executive power to appoint trustees to university boards. DeSantis’ new trustees are in the process of coordinating New College in Sarasota. At a recent meeting, all five faculty members up for tenure — including three in the supposedly apolitical hard sciences — were rejected, and the faculty chair (who had been broadly criticized for being too accommodating to the new regime) quit.
Disney. I mentioned corporations in the list of things that need to be synchronized with the ruling ideology. Well, after DeSantis passed his Don’t Say Gay law, Disney had the temerity to put out a statement saying that it opposed the law and would continue to work against it through the systems our constitution provides for reversing government actions:
Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that.
All in all, it was pretty tepid stuff, but it marked Disney as a company not marching to the DeSantis drum. That led DeSantis to strike at Disney in ways that fell comically flat: A bill to dissolve the special taxing district around Disney World had to be undone when nearby counties noticed they might wind up responsible for about $1 billion in bonds the district had outstanding. Then DeSantis announced a takeover of the board that oversees the district, but was again outsmarted by an agreement Disney signed with the outgoing board.
Now DeSantis is trying to get the legislature to nullify that agreement, and Disney decided it had had enough: It filed a federal lawsuit claiming that DeSantis is illegally retaliating against Disney for speech protected by the First Amendment.
There is no room for disagreement about what happened here: Disney expressed its opinion on state legislation and was then punished by the State for doing so. … This is as clear a case of retaliation as this Court is ever likely to see. …
It is a clear violation of Disney’s federal constitutional rights—under the Contracts Clause, the Takings Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the First Amendment—for the State to inflict a concerted campaign of retaliation because the Company expressed an opinion with which the government disagreed. … In America, the government cannot punish you for speaking your mind.
The reason there’s “no room for disagreement” is that DeSantis didn’t just announce in public that he was abusing state power to punish Disney for making a political statement, he wrote about it in his book. DeSantis clearly could have benefited from the class Stringer Bell taught in The Wire:
Is you taking notes on a criminal f**king conspiracy? What the f**k is you thinking, man?
DeSantis’ defense of his actions is that Disney’s control of the special taxing district around Disney World is an inappropriate merging of state and corporate power, so he is right to take it away. And in the abstract, that may even be true. But legal and even reasonable exercises of government power become unconstitutional when they are used to punish speech protected by the First Amendment, as these actions clearly were.
If the government could deny a benefit to a person because of his constitutionally protected speech or associations, his exercise of those freedoms would in effect be penalized and inhibited. Such interference with constitutional rights is impermissible.
But in spite of the governing precedent, French is still not entirely sure how the case will come out.
At the beginning of this piece, I said that DeSantis should lose, not that he will lose. Court outcomes are never completely certain, but this much is correct: A Disney defeat would represent a dangerous reversal in First Amendment jurisprudence and cast a pall of fear over private expression.
French is afraid, in other words, that gleichschaltung may already have reached the Supreme Court.
Why aren’t rural people even crazier than they are?
Over the last month, I’ve driven nearly six thousand miles. My wife and I started in Massachusetts, where we live, and went first to central Illinois, where I grew up. From there we struck out towards Sedona, where the red rocks are, and towards the Georgia O’Keefe landscape of Santa Fe, home of one of my favorite cuisines. On the way home, we saw family in Nashville.
Between those highlights, we strung together a series of roadside attractions, like the otherwise undistinguished corner in Winslow that the Eagles sang about, or the figuratively (but not literally) tasteless Uranus Fudge Factory in Missouri. We considered stopping for many other diversions, like the Superman statue in Metropolis, Illinois, but kept driving. We passed maybe dozens of Route 66 museums, and countless Native American trading posts that seemed far too small to contain all the wonders promised by miles and miles of billboards. My best eating days being behind me, I did not try to win the free 72-ounce steak in Amarillo.
In other words, I have been seeing America, the “real America” that gets lauded at Republican rallies and NRA conventions.
A lot of it struck me as depressing. Through much of the drive, I was plagued by the thought “Why does anybody live here?” Or, more accurately, “Why will anybody live here?”
Of course I knew why people had settled the farm country where I grew up: The soil was rich, the Native Americans had vanished through some process we preferred not to think about, and the Homestead Act had divided the newly empty land into 160-acre plots that an ordinary White man could afford. Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a nation of yeoman farmers — who might never get rich, but would have the independence that comes from owning the land they tilled — was becoming real.
That agricultural land produced surplus, which needed to get to the cities somehow. So there were river ports like Cincinnati and Louisville and (eventually) St. Louis. In return, the farmers needed whatever tools and luxuries they couldn’t produce themselves, so trading posts developed into small towns, where doctors, dentists, lawyers, and accountants could hang a shingle. Eventually you had a real economy.
When industrialization happened, those small towns turned out to be ideal places to site factories. They had transportation, and surplus labor coming off the mechanizing farms. So you had John Deere in Moline, Caterpillar in Peoria, and countless lesser enterprises dotted across the landscape.
In the mid-20th century, it all made a lot of sense. But it doesn’t any more.
For decades I’ve been making the 300-mile drive from Chicago to my hometown, Quincy, Illinois. Quincy itself has been holding steady at around 40,000 people. It’s the biggest thing for 100 miles in any direction, so it has become the regional retail center. It has lost most of the factories I remember from my youth, and the ones that remain employ far fewer people, but there appear to be jobs (of a sort) at the Home Depot and the Walmart. The small hospital where I had pneumonia when I was three is now a sprawling campus that gets bigger every time I visit. Upper-middle-class people from St. Louis or Chicago can retire to Quincy and build mansions, so a number of them do.
Population-wise, it more or less balances out.
But the drive from Chicago goes through a lot of dying towns, ones that are too small or too close to something else to become regional centers. Homestead Act farms have been amalgamated into agribusinesses that support far fewer families. As the countryside depopulates, the towns lose their supermarkets and general stores, and then eventually even their gas stations. Where two or three restaurants used to compete, now there’s maybe enough traffic to support a bar. If you live there and want a gallon of milk, you need to drive a few dozen miles to a regional center like Quincy.
While the voices coming through my satellite radio debated the future impact of artificial intelligence, I was picturing electric robot combines roaming across the endless prairie, powered by automated windmills.
Why will anybody need to live here at all? And if some people want to live here, maybe because their families have lived here for generations, what will they do?
On the way from the fudge factory to Nashville, I resisted the macabre urge to see Cairo (pronounced KAY-ro). Cairo sits at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, which sounds like it ought to be the site of a great city. St. Louis, Pittsburgh — lots of cities have been founded at the confluence of rivers. The rich, fertile land surrounding Cairo is said to be the source of the region’s nickname “Little Egypt”. As Jacob’s sons made their way to Egypt to escape a Biblical famine, so did the surplus of Little Egypt feed the areas around it.
So Cairo’s original settlers must have had visions of empire. It never quite worked out that way, but the town did prosper as a minor transportation hub, growing to about 15,000 people by the 1920s. Mansions were built there in the late 1800s.
But transportation routes changed. Symbolically, Cairo used to be a stop on the City of New Orleans train made famous by Steve Goodman’s song. But although that train has still not disappeared (as Goodman mournfully envisioned) it doesn’t stop in Cairo any more. Hardly anybody does.
In addition to its economic challenges, Cairo had a history of lynching, and did a bad job managing the racial conflicts of the 1960s. And now the town is down to about 1700 people, barely a tenth of its previous size. The downtown is mostly boarded up.
I grew up picturing ghost towns as artifacts of the western deserts. Mines created boom towns, but then the mines played out and there was no reason to live there any more. As a child, I could not have imagined ghost towns in the farm country, but now I can.
The outlook gets even worse as you go west. Much of the agriculture of the Great Plains is based on pumping water out of the ground, which has gradually depleted aquifers like the Ogallala. Long term, that land won’t even support the robot combines. As far back as 1987, Deborah Epstein Popper and Frank J. Popper were envisioning letting the whole region go back to nature, restoring the “buffalo commons” that existed before the White man came.
Driving through this empty land gives you a lot of time to think, and one of the questions I considered was “What does living in a place with no future do to your outlook on life?”
Of course, the individuals who grow up in these places do have viable paths into the future. They can, for example, do what I did: Get a scholarship to a state university and earn a marketable credential they can cash in somewhere else. In this era of diminishing state education budgets and correspondingly higher student debt, that path is not as smooth as it used to be. But it is still there.
But what if you love your home in more than just a sentimental way? What if the people and the landscape and the way of life has burrowed deep into your soul? What if catching a lifeboat out seems less like an exciting adventure and more like exile?
And what if you’re older? What if you have children and grandchildren you’d dearly love to keep around you, but you know you can’t? For their own sakes, they need to go. And they need to leave you behind.
What does that do to your outlook on the world? Maybe in that situation, you wouldn’t like thinking of yourself as the victim of History’s impersonal forces. Maybe you’d prefer to imagine conspiracies that have stolen your future from you. Maybe those conspiracies would center on your children, on pulling them away from you or turning them against you or making them unrecognizable. Somebody — let’s call them “liberals” (or maybe “Jews”) — wants to make them “woke”, or turn them gay or trans, or replace them with dark-skinned immigrants.
Imagining such things may not give you hope, but at least it gives you someone to blame. Maybe that helps.
Last week I was writing (yet again) about fascism. I observed that the Trumpist brand of fascism isn’t even pretending to offer solutions to its rural supporters. Rather than a new deal, Trump promises vengeance. “I am your retribution,” he has been telling his rallies.
Maybe that’s what passes for “telling it like it is” in certain circles. Once you see that the future is hopeless, then it’s the people making plans and promises who sound like grifters. The “straight talkers” just promise to make other people suffer, which you are confident they can do.
How do we deal with this? I keep coming back to that Obama “Hope” poster. Somehow, we have to address the widespread sense of hopelessness in America without sounding like bigger grifters than Trump is. In a contest of solutions, liberals have it all over conservatives. But if there are no solutions, why not just lash out against the people you hate?
So anyway, I have been to the wilderness and seen a vision. Now I’m trying to get it out of my head so I can get on with life. If I’ve transferred that vision into your head, I apologize.
Would you mind defining “woke”? Because it’s come up a couple of times and I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.
As Gray emphasized later, this was not intended as a gotcha.
I wanted to be able to figure out whether I agreed with her on certain points, as I had done earlier in the interview. Alternatively, I want to be able to articulate why we differed on other aspects of her argument without devolving into the typical shouting matches.
Mandel, who claims she spent an entire chapter of her new book Stolen Youth: How radicals are erasing innocence and indoctrinating a generation defining “woke”, floundered. Her humiliation quickly spread across liberal social media, because it appears to illustrate something many of us have been claiming for some while: Woke is the latest in a long series of right-wing pejorative terms like cancel culture and political correctness. Their purpose is not to point to any real ideas, but to identify someone as an enemy. The MAGA base has been trained like Pavlov’s dogs to react to these terms without thinking, so calling something “woke” is just a way to say “sic ’em”.
The inability to define “woke” is a feature, not a bug. “Woke” is very much meant to be a word that cannot be pinned to a definition. Its emptiness is what gives it so much power as a propaganda term. “Woke” is both everything and nothing. It can mean whatever you need it to mean, and you can deny that it means what it obviously means. The ephemerality of “woke” is what makes it so valuable. “Woke” morphs into being when a right-winger needs to feel outrage and evaporates into thin air should anyone try to ask a rational question about it.
It’s the vagueness of woke that allows it to be used more or less whenever Mr. Burns wants to release the hounds. Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, for example, because it was “woke”. So there’s no need to talk about deregulation or interest rates or risk management or any other headache-producing idea. Instead, we can cut off discussion by invoking unthinking hostility. Woke: bad.
And I’m still trying to figure out why Tucker Carlson thinks M&Ms are woke.
But not all liberals gloried in Mandel’s failure. Center-left commentator Jonathan Chait was more generous.
She may be wrong, but she’s not an idiot. She just froze up on TV. It happens.
Freezing up does happen, particularly to people who are used to writing rather than responding in real time. But the incident also points to something significant: Mandel clearly did not prepare for this question. She anticipated being able to throw the word around without being asked what it means. For comparison, before I started referring to Trump as a fascist, I wrote an article explaining what I mean by that term. I don’t carry all my writings in my head, though, so if you stopped me on the sidewalk and asked for a concise definition of fascist, I might flounder too. But if I were planning to use such an emotive word in an interview, I would anticipate being challenged to define it and would prepare an answer.
Mandel clearly didn’t think that was necessary. That strikes me as telling.
She’s not the first anti-woke warrior to be put on the spot like this. When he was asked in court what woke means, Ron DeSantis’ General Counsel Ryan Newman defined it as: “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them”. That’s a perfectly fine definition a lot of liberals would agree with. The problem for Newman (and DeSantis) is that it doesn’t justify a Pavlovian negative response: Does the DeSantis administration really want to claim that there are no systemic injustices in America, or that (if there are) nothing should be done about them? Is that what all the shouting is about?
The next line of conservative defense is to put aside the gotcha moment — which the viral clip became, whether Gray intended that to happen or not — and get the discussion back on track by producing the answer Mandel should have given. Mandel herself later offered this definition:
A radical belief system suggesting that our institutions are built around discrimination, and claiming that all disparity is a result of that discrimination. It seeks a radical redefinition of society in which equality of group result is the endpoint, enforced by an angry mob.
She avoids Newman’s what’s-so-bad-about-that problem by inserting a bunch of pejorative judgments into her definition. I mean, why not just tell us what wokeness is, and let us judge for ourselves whether it’s radical, angry, or mob-oriented? If you take out the judgments and just include the definitional parts, you wind up with “The belief that group inequality is caused by discrimination that is built into our institutions, and that a fundamental reorganization of society is necessary to correct this problem.” When you think about it, that’s not far from “systemic injustices and the need to address them”. And like Newman’s definition, it also doesn’t capture what the shouting is about.
So we start to see the Scylla and Charybdis a good conservative definition of woke has to navigate between:
The definition should mean something.
What it means should justify how conservatives have been using the term.
I’ve been looking around, but I haven’t seen one that does both jobs.
Ross Douthat more-or-less gives up on the idea of a concise definition, but instead describes a worldview and a narrative (which he says he doesn’t believe). It starts like this:
What is America all about, at its best? Equality and liberty. What is the left all about, at its best? Transforming those ideals into lived realities.
But this project keeps running into limits, disappointments and defeats. Everywhere you look, terrible disparities persist. And that persistence should force us to look deeper, beyond attempts to win legal rights or redistribute wealth, to the cultural and psychological structures that perpetuate oppression before law and policy begins to play a part. This is what the terminology of the academy has long been trying to describe — the way that generations of racist, homophobic, sexist, and heteronormative power have inscribed themselves, not just on our laws but our very psyches.
And once you see these forces in operation, you can’t unsee them — you are, well, “awake” — and you can’t accept any analysis that doesn’t acknowledge how they permeate our lives.
Up to there, I give him points for accuracy: Yes, those are all things I believe. From there his narrative gets a little more suspect, but what’s really disappointing is his column’s ending: It’s all about feelings.
If you find a lot of this narrative persuasive, even filtered through my conservative mind, then whatever “woke” describes, it probably describes you.
If you recoil from it, welcome to the ranks of the unwoke.
He doesn’t cite any reason to reject the narrative he describes, he just observes that people like him “recoil from it”. Again, this emotional “recoil” doesn’t explain why books have to be banned and drag shows have to be outlawed, or why the state has to intervene to prevent parents, children, and their doctors from assessing their own problems and choosing courses of action. Why can’t Douthat “recoil” over in the corner and leave the rest of us alone?
Douthat at least seems to be writing in good faith. So does Thomas Chatterton Williams, who expresses sympathy for some of what conservatives are trying to capture with wokeness, but eventually reaches a conclusion I can agree with:
But perhaps we can all agree, at bare minimum, to set ourselves the task of limiting our reliance on in-group shorthand, and embracing clear, honest, precise, and original thought and communication. If we want to persuade anyone not already convinced of what we believe, we are going to have to figure out how to say what we really mean.
I am pessimistic that this view will catch on, though, because I don’t think people like Ron DeSantis are interested in “clear, honest, precise, and original thought and communication”. I think they find it far more useful to wield a meaningless term that evokes a Pavlovian response.
In red states, a barrage of new laws are diminishing freedom, violating parents’ rights, and mandating that schools teach conservative dogma. It’s not clear what real problems these laws are attempting to solve, but it is clear who’s being hurt.
This week, Tennessee passed a law banning drag shows in public spaces, or anywhere else they might be seen by children, and NBC reports that 15 states are considering similar laws. The state also passed a law banning gender-affirming medical care for minors, and permitting minors to sue their parents if the parents authorized such treatment. The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law says 15 states have either already passed similar laws or are considering them.
One proposed Florida bill goes even further: It legalizes a parent kidnapping a child from another state and bringing the child to Florida in order to “protect” the child from gender-affirming care, and orders Florida courts to ignore any other state’s child-custody rulings in such cases. [1]
A court may not treat a parent′s removal of a child from another parent or from another state as unjustifiable conduct or child abuse if the removal was for the purpose of protecting the child from one or more of the prescriptions or procedures referenced in paragraph (a) and if there is reason to believe that the child was at risk of or was being subjected to the provision of such prescriptions or procedures. … A court of this state has jurisdiction to vacate, stay, or modify a child custody determination of a court of another state to protect the child from the risk of being subjected to the provision of sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures as defined in s. 456.001. The court must vacate, stay, or modify the child custody determination to the extent necessary to protect the child from the provision of such prescriptions or procedures.
Last year, Florida’s legislature began an effort to turn its schools into indoctrination centers with the Parental Rights in Educationt Act (a.k.a. Don’t Say Gay) and STOP WOKE Act that banned the teaching of specific lists of ideas and caused entire counties to remove books from their classrooms. [2] Several states have passed similar laws, and a national Don’t Say Gay bill (the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act) has been introduced in the House. A new bill in Florida would expand the restrictions of Don’t Say Gay from third grade to eighth grade. [3] Another new bill would expand Governor DeSantis’ power to give ideological marching orders to the state universities.
In an administrative move, Alaska’s State Commission for Human Rights has downgraded “sexual identity and gender orientation” from the list of always-illegal bases for discrimination to the list of discrimination that is illegal “in some instances”. According to Pro Publica and The Anchorage Daily News
it began refusing to investigate complaints. Only employment-related complaints would now be accepted, and investigators dropped any non-employment LGBTQ civil rights cases they had been working on.
The onslaught of such legislation is so intense that I’m sure I’ve missed something important. But let’s take a closer look at a couple of these bills.
Controlling Florida’s universities. This year the top-down effort to control what is discussed in Florida’s K-12 classrooms is being extended into the state universities. (To a certain extent it was already there in STOP WOKE.) Governor DeSantis has used his administrative power to appoint a new board to govern New College in Sarasota, with the expressed goal of turning it into an academic center of right-wing ideology similar to Hillsdale College in Michigan, which is privately funded and explicitly Christian. [4]
A bill currently in the legislature would impose similar controls on the state university system as a whole: It adds a new mission to the university system “the education for citizenship of the constitutional republic”. [5] It instructs each “constituent university to examine its programs for the inclusion of any specified major or minor in critical race theory, gender studies, or intersectionality or any derivative major of these belief systems, that is, any major that engenders beliefs in those concepts defined in [STOP WOKE]” and to submit documentation of “the university’s process to remove from its course catalogues any specified major or minor” in the same subjects.
Each university’s board is empowered to review the tenure of any faculty member at any time, and power to appoint new faculty members is centered in the board, which is explicitly “not bound by recommendations or opinions of faculty or other individuals or groups”. No money — not even private donations — can be used for any programs that “that espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric”.
Previously established programs at University of Florida and Florida State are now expanded into “colleges” that can hire faculty and enroll students. These colleges appear to have a Hillsdale-like purpose resembling the ideological mission DeSantis has given New College.
This bill so far has just been filed and the legislature has taken no action, but it looks serious. Similar bills are filed in both the House and Senate, and it seems like a fulfillment of DeSantis’ previous statements. Inside Higher Education says:
The bill mirrors much of the governor’s recent rhetoric and revisits draft legislation from DeSantis that never made it into the 2022 legislative session.
Tennessee’s anti-drag law. This one leaves me (and, I suspect, a lot of other people) shaking my head. Men dressing as women is a comic trope that goes back more-or-less forever. Shakespeare is full of gender-switching roles, and if you go back far enough, every female role was played in drag, as putting women on the stage was considered inappropriate.
But if that’s true, his critics argue, then why is a new law necessary? Tennessee already has laws against obscenity and public indecency. So what is it about cross-dressing that should bring additional rules into play? If an act is too pornographic for male or female impersonators to perform in front of children, does it become OK if the performers wear gender-appropriate costumes instead? Conversely, if a dance routine is acceptable for, say, the Tennessee Titan cheerleaders (who I assume are women) would it suddenly become obscene if it were performed by a man wearing the same outfit?
Like the Florida education laws, the anti-drag law takes advantage of vagueness. In the key phrase “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest”, the term “prurient interest” is never defined, and is largely in the eye of the beholder. (Do the Titan cheerleaders “appeal to a prurient interest”? Sometimes, I guess, maybe. I’m not sure.) The upshot of that vagueness is that promoters will be afraid to schedule drag shows, no matter how benign their content might be. Similarly, Florida teachers and professors are afraid to say anything about race or gender. Nobody wants to be sued, even if they believe they would ultimately win.
Conversely, vagueness gives conservatives cover: Ron DeSantis can deny that he told any teacher or librarian to ban any particular book. All he did was sign a law that might get them fired or sued if they leave the wrong books on the shelf.
The issue of “obscene, sexualized” drag shows also demonstrates a common propaganda technique: Something widely considered unsavory or disreputable becomes a special problem requiring special action when an out-of-favor group does it. The classic example is how the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter focused on the issue of “Jewish crime”. Jews are people and people commit crimes, so the VB didn’t have to invent Jewish crimes (though it probably exaggerated a few). The propaganda element was the implication that “Jewish crime” was a special problem that needed a special solution, as opposed to just better law enforcement generally.
In the 1980s, there was a national panic about gay high-school teachers seducing their students, as if this problem had nothing to do with straight high-school teachers seducing their students. More recently, the Trump administration ran the Nazi play almost move-for-move when it established the Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement Office (VOICE), as if the victims of crimes by undocumented immigrants were somehow different from other crime victims.
This shouldn’t need to be said, but clearly it does: It is not a crime for a man to cross-dress. And an otherwise legal action should not become a crime if a cross-dressing man does it. So there is no need for a special law.
Why now? To my knowledge, there has been no drag-queen crime wave. So why do legislators in 15 states find it necessary to pass anti-drag laws their states never needed before? The answer has more to do with changes in Republican politics than changes in American society.
The elections that have followed Donald Trump’s yuge 2020 defeat [6] have given Republicans a lot to think about, both positive and negative.
Negatively, they have learned that a pure backward-looking Trumpism weighs down their candidates; it only works in places where a more traditional Republican would win easily. In New Hampshire, for example, a Reagan/Bush Republican like Chris Sununu won the governor’s race by over 15%, while MAGA Republican Don Bolduc lost the Senate race by over 9%. Arizona’s 2022 Republican candidates were all-in on election denial, and got swept by the Democrats. Candidates closely identified with Trump lost winnable Senate races in Pennsylvania (Dr. Oz) and Georgia (Herschel Walker). And while J. D. Vance did win in Ohio, he ran well behind the far less Trumpy Republican Governor Mike DeWine, who cruised with a 25% victory margin.
More positively, in 2022 crime and inflation were issues Republicans could win congressional races on. But that’s a lesson with a limited shelf life, given that Republicans have no policies to address either one, and inflation is likely to fade on its own by 2024.
But Republican wins in two governors’ elections stand out as possibly repeatable examples: Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 victory in Virginia and Ron DeSantis’ 2022 Florida landslide. Both largely ignored typical kitchen-table issues like jobs or health care to focus on a much vaguer anxiety about our changing society. Both talked a lot about education, but not in the usual sense of raising test scores or creating opportunity. The next generation needs protection, they claim, but not against observable threats like mass shootings or scientifically predictable threats like the looming catastrophes of climate change. Instead, the villains of this narrative are undefinable boogeymen like “critical race theory” and “wokeism”.
In essence, CRT and Wokeism, like “cancel culture” and “political correctness” before them, are Rorschach tests: If you are afraid of some societal trend, you see it those shapeless blobs.
And if you poke at any of that too hard, you have to invent conspiracy theories with improbable villains: Teachers are conspiring to turn your kids gay or make them hate America. Parents are pushing gender changes onto their children, who go along because everybody else is doing it. Rich Jews are convincing Guatemalans to leave perfectly fine lives so that they can steal jobs from all the good Americans who want to clean our toilets and pick our tomatoes.
Why drag queens? Back in 2015, when famous Olympic champion Bruce Jenner came out as trans and announced a new name, Caitlyn, I introspected and got philosophical about my own discomfort. (In hindsight, that article is clumsy in a lot of ways, because I still had a lot to learn. But I stand by the flow of ideas.) In essence, I decided, I was responding to my own insecurity and denial. The human mind can’t handle the task of conceiving the Universe as it is, so we collect real objects into categories and treat similarly categorized objects as if they had a unity they don’t actually have. Hence man/woman, Christian/Muslim/Jew, gay/straight, rich/poor, Black/White/Asian/Hispanic and so on. But all those categories are just arbitrary markings on a continuum. Deep down we know we’re telling ourselves a story, and that knowledge makes us anxious.
If you think seriously about how flawed the fundamental building blocks of our thinking are, it’s scary. At any moment, some part of the Universe you’ve been assuming away could come back to bite you. That’s the human condition.
That’s why we get such an oogy feeling whenever we see an example of something we were raised to think didn’t exist: an effeminate man, two women kissing, a child with dark brown skin and frizzy red hair. It’s a reminder that we don’t really grasp the Universe; we just apply kludgy notions that more-or-less work most of the time.
… At its root, social conservatism is a way to deny that fear and transmute it into anger. Conservatism reassures us that the categories in our heads are real. We didn’t make them up; God created them. They’re natural.
Drag is specifically designed to get into the boundarylands where our usual categories fail. The illusion is designed to be imperfect. A man who managed to be indistinguishable from Liza Minnelli might as well be Liza Minnelli; he wouldn’t be doing drag any more.
That lingering in the boundrylands is precisely what many people find scary about drag: It points out that while your sexual organs are real, your gender is a performance that could fall anywhere on a continuum from he-man to girly-girl. The people you meet are not necessarily one thing or the other. The world is more complicated than you usually allow yourself to realize.
But that boundaryland experience is also why some parents want to take their children to drag shows. (And why it’s a violation of freedom for Tennessee to tell them they can’t.) Some children may want to be told what their roles in society are, so that they can get on with learning to play them. But others experience the most common roles as oppressive. Seeing someone smash through those roles demonstrates that life holds more possibilities than just the obvious ones. It’s liberating.
[1] I often warn people not to get upset about bills that have no chance to become law. This bill might be in that category, but I can’t tell yet: It has only one sponsor, who introduced it this week. No committee has heard it or voted on it. Even if the bill passes, I suspect there are constitutional issues here having to do with the Full Faith and Credit Clause.
[3] Think about what that means. By eighth grade, students often know (or at least strongly suspect) who in their class is gay or trans or contemplating a gender transition, and bullying is already well underway. Under the proposed bill, it would be illegal for teachers or administrators to recognize potential problems or take steps to deal with them through classroom instruction. Any effort to teach 14-year-olds to accept or tolerate one another’s gender identities or sexual preferences would be illegal.
The same bill would also declare — as a matter of state law — that “it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex” which is “an immutable biological trait”.
We will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically-captured academic departments and hiring new faculty. The student body will be recomposed over time: some current students will self-select out, others will graduate; we’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.
I went to a state university (Michigan State) in the 1970s. Michigan had a Republican governor at that time, but I don’t recall ever having to worry that I might not be “aligned” with his “mission” for the university, or that any member of the university’s governing board was hoping I might “self-select out” because of my political views. This kind of ideological repression is new in America.
[5] That mission may sound benign until you realize how it’s going to be defined and interpreted. “Performance metrics and standards” for achieving such goals are to be part of a strategic plan the law instructs the DeSantis-appointed Board of Governors to write. Previously, the missions of the university system were apolitical ones, like “the academic success of its students”.
[6] Even reality-respecting Republicans who don’t claim massive fraud in 2020 often falsely portray the 2020 election as close. But it wasn’t. In terms of raw vote totals, Trump came within 500 votes of breaking Herbert Hoover’s record for the biggest loss ever by an incumbent president. Trump was 7,059,526 votes behind Joe Biden, while Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 by 7,060,023 votes.
Not so long ago, Democrats got big majorities in the cities, which Republicans balanced by carrying the suburbs, small towns, and rural areas by narrower margins. More recently, Democrats have continued dominating the cities, but MAGA policies and incivility have made the suburbs more competitive (especially by alienating educated women). Now Republicans make up the gap with big majorities in rural areas and small towns.
The anger and resentment felt by rural voters toward the Democratic Party are driving a regional realignment similar to the upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Edsall presents Wisconsin as a prime example. Senator Ron Johnson is pro-insurrection, believes climate change is “bullshit”, and wants to make cutting Social Security and Medicare easier by shifting those programs from “mandatory” to “discretionary” spending. If you’re an urban or suburban voter, you might think those positions would make him an easy target. But in fact he narrowly won reelection in 2022 by running up huge margins in rural counties. Clearly, people think differently there.
Edsall cites the book The Politics of Resentment by University of Wisconsin Professor Katherine Cramer, who attributes the rural conservative surge to three factors.
(1) a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers, (2) a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources and (3) a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.
So a straightforward approach to winning rural areas back would be for Democrats to stop doing those things. But Paul Krugman points out a serious problem with that strategy: Strictly speaking, none of those three beliefs are true. There are many government policies (farm subsidies, special programs to support rural housing, rural utilities, etc.) that focus on rural areas; the federal government spends far more on rural areas than it gets back in taxes; and the respect gap runs mostly in the other direction: Democratic politicians hardly ever denigrate small towns or denounce rural values the way that Republicans target New York City or San Francisco.
It’s a problem that Democrats face across the board: How do you convince people that you’ve stopped doing things you’ve never actually done? How do you respond to parents upset about public schools teaching critical race theory or grooming children to be gay or trans, when public schools don’t actually do those things? How do you stop discrimination against Christians when in fact there is no discrimination against Christians? (Examples to the contrary are nearly always cases where Christians are not getting the special rights they feel entitled to.)
Given that level of misperception, it’s hard to even approach the problem without thinking in a paternalistic way that any Democratic constituency would resent: Consider about how justifiably upset the Black or Hispanic communities get when White “experts” ignore their policy preferences and instead tell them what they “should” want.
I come from the kind of community Edsall and Krugman are talking about: Illinois’ Adams County voted for Trump nearly 3-to-1 in both 2016 and 2020. It’s in the IL-15 congressional district, where a MAGA congressional candidate tallied 71% last fall.
And in some sense I represent the root problem: I grew up there, got an education, saw no attractive opportunities, and moved away to have a successful career in the suburbs of Boston. At my high-school reunions, the primary divide is between those who left and those who stayed. (It’s no wonder being “left behind” plays such a large role the Evangelical mythology popular in rural areas. The fantasy of being raptured to Heaven while unbelievers suffer the tribulations must be a very satisfying turnabout.)
The problems of rural America are very real and deserve national attention, so it’s completely understandable that rural Americans would channel their discontent into a political party. Sadly, though, they’ve united around a party that wants to feed them myths and flatter them rather than do anything that might help.
I know I overuse Weimar analogies (which come easily to mind as I’ve been binging Babylon Berlin and reading Philip Kerr novels) but it’s hard to ignore the parallels: Germany really had lost a war, its economy suffered badly in the dislocations of the 1920s, and what opportunities still existed were centered in the cosmopolitan cities rather than the nativist countryside. But the defeat-excusing stab-in-the-back myth was not true, Jews and libertine urban culture weren’t the real problems, and fascism was not the answer.
Likewise today, fascism won’t provide an answer to the real challenges rural and small-town America faces. But I’m not sure how to help rural and small-town voters figure that out.
Don’t worry about your Social Security, medical care, or bodily autonomy. Instead, focus your attention on gas stoves, light bulbs, X-boxes, M&Ms, and the Democrats’ quest to achieve “Soviet America”.
After narrowly winning a House majority by running against inflation and crime (and paying the price whenever they ran a candidate focused on election denial and other MAGA issues), the GOP has begun laying out its agenda for the 118th Congress: not inflation and crime. Instead, it’s gearing up to force a debt-ceiling crisis in order to extort long-term cuts in Social Security and Medicare out of President Biden and Senate Democrats. In addition, it’s getting revenge on Democrats and on government officials who investigated the crimes of President Trump.
When a party defies public opinion like this, they need to wave around a lot of shiny objects to keep their voters distracted.
Gas stoves do cause some problems. They’ve been linked to increased incidence of asthma, especially in children. (This conclusion is debatable, but I believe it because I started noticing some mild bronchial irritation after I moved to an apartment with a gas stove — which I otherwise like. So for the last few months I’ve been wearing a mask when I cook, running the exhaust fan at higher levels, and making smaller dishes in the electric toaster oven. It seems to help.)
And then there’s climate change. Long term, the best plan for minimizing carbon emissions is to electrify everything and then generate as much electricity as possible without burning fossil fuels. Fortunately, new induction cooktops and ranges have a lot of advantages, so switching from gas to electric doesn’t have to be a hardship. (That said, while I might try out a portable induction burner, I’m not buying new stove any time soon. The path of least resistance is to make do with what’s already here.)
In short, there are good long-term reasons for America as a whole to shift away from gas stoves. But are the Kitchen Police coming to rip your (or my) gas stove out of the wall? No. No one has even been proposing that they should.
What really happened. January 9, in an interview with Bloomberg News (behind a paywall), Richard Trumka Jr, who is one of the commissioners on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, noted the hazards associated with gas stoves and suggested strengthening safety regulations on new stoves.
This is not a new or strange idea. In December, a letter 20 Democratic members of Congress wrote to the CPSC suggested several such regulations, such as mandating range hoods with exhaust fans, and tightening standards on methane leakage when the stove is off. Notably, they did not suggest a ban.
In his Bloomberg interview, Trumka considered the possibility that if yet-to-be-done research proves that yet-to-be-written safety regulations are insufficient, new gas stoves could be taken off the market: “Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” In a responsible article, a statement like would be qualified by noting where the CPSC is in its process. Back in December Trumka said CPSC was about to start looking at gas-stove regulations.
Richard Trumka Jr., a commissioner on the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), said during a virtual webinar on Wednesday that the commission will put out a formal request by March for information on hazards associated with gas stoves and possible solutions.
“This public request for information is the first step in what could be a long journey toward regulating gas stoves,” he said.
News that the Biden administration may soon ban gas stoves set off Twitter on Monday.
Manufacturing outrage. Republican politicians were quick to jump into the telephone game. Remember: These aren’t just random internet trolls. These are public officials with staff that could fact-check things if their bosses wanted them to.
“Don’t tread on Florida, and don’t mess with gas stoves!” tweeted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last week in response to comments from a member of the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) that a ban might one day be possible given health concerns about the stoves.“God. Guns. Gas stoves,” tweeted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) listed banning gas stoves as being among policies that he described as “Democrat authoritarian impulses.”
I’ll NEVER give up my gas stove. If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!
And because its viewers presumably weren’t steamed enough yet, Fox informed them that stoves are just the beginning.
“There’s bad news for almost every room in the house,” Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News Digital in an interview. … “If advanced appliances make sense for consumers, they would sell themselves without mandates,” Lieberman told Fox News Digital. “I think that’s a good rule of thumb with very, very few exceptions.
That’s because the broader interests of society never conflict with motives on the individual level, at least in the conservative fantasyland.
Then someone found a 2020 photo of Jill Biden sauteing spinach over a gas stove. Hypocrisy! (Because the Bidens should have remodeled their kitchen in anticipation of CPSC starting to look into regulating new gas stoves 2 1/2 years later.)
The Washington Free Beacon then found eight additional Democrats who have “used a kitchen appliance they want to ban you from owning”. (When they get to John Fetterman, they note that “Exposure to carbon monoxide can put otherwise healthy adults at an increased risk of stroke”. So, you know, he had it coming.)
“Rules for me but not for thee,” Ted Cruz tweeted. He probably cribbed that line from Ron DeSantis’ communications aide Christina Pushaw, who had tweeted the same photo a few hours earlier:
Biden will ban gas stoves for normal people. Not for elites. This is Soviet America: Rules for thee, not for me.
So this is how far ahead of the facts Republicans got: Still unformulated safety regulations for new gas stoves became a looming ban on all gas stoves (plus other appliances), which will be implemented unfairly. Because — you know — Democrats are like that.
Setting the record straight is “caving”. Biden administration officials (including Biden himself) then clarified: There isn’t (and never was) a proposal to ban gas stoves. The CSPC chair issued a statement denying a ban was in the works and reiterating the timetable for starting the regulatory process:
Research indicates that emissions from gas stoves can be hazardous, and the CPSC is looking for ways to reduce related indoor air quality hazards. But to be clear, I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so. … [L]ater this spring, we will be asking the public to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks.
In typical fashion, Fox News could not possibly admit that it had gotten its viewers outraged about nothing, so instead it framed the clarification by saying that the Biden administration had “reversed course” and “caved” to public outrage.
It’s kind of like when dogs bark at passing cars, and then feel good about themselves for chasing the cars away.
Subsequent outrages. You know what else conservatives are upset about? X-boxes. Microsoft is making them “the first carbon-aware consoles“, via software updates that would allow users to schedule future updates at times when the most sustainable electricity is available, or to change settings to use less energy in general. Fox News Radio host Jimmy Failla explained Microsoft’s sinister motive:
We understand what this is. It’s not that it’s actually going to offset emissions, okay—the level of reduction is infinitesimal. But they’re trying to recruit your kids into climate politics at an earlier age; make them climate conscious now.
And Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt agreed. “You’re right. They’re going after the children.”
But it isn’t all outrage at Fox. There is at least some cause for celebration: Tucker Carlson has won his war against the M&M spokescandies. The Mars Wrigley Corporation announced its surrender last Monday.
The freedom narrative. The Hill explains the larger Republican strategy:
“It’s your stove, it’s your lightbulb, and those are consumer issues and economic issues, they’re also culture war issues,” said Republican strategist Doug Heye, referring to another flashpoint in incandescent versus LED bulbs.
“It’s part of how Republicans feel that Democrats are targeting parts of Americans’ everyday lives,” Heye added. …
[Republican strategist Keith Naughton] said he doesn’t think any individual issue is “Earth-shaking,” but pieced together they can form a larger narrative, namely that Democrats are “never going to stop until there’s somebody in your home monitoring everything you do.”
But Amanda Marcotte points out that the freedom/control narrative may work better if you reverse the parties.
Republicans do face a real conundrum. On one hand, conservatism is fundamentally a puritanical ideology. On the other hand, being a bunch of joy-killers tends to be unpopular. So they’re always looking for chances to flip the script, to pretend that it’s the left that is out to destroy your good time. So we get these fake culture war controversies in which the right pretends to be under assault by a “nanny state.”
Of course, when you look past all the hand-waving about “freedom,” it becomes clear that very little of what they wish to protect is actually fun at all. Indoor smoking, being a Nazi on Twitter, and dying of COVID-19 because you wouldn’t get vaccinated are all technically freedoms, but only in the most pathetic sense. They don’t resemble the actual freedoms most people want, such as the right to read what you want or have sex the way you like, which are under assault from Republicans.
So if you want your child to get advanced-placement credit in African-American studies, too bad for you: The content of the course violates the official ideology of Commissar DeSantis, so the “Free State of Florida” won’t allow it. Ditto for wanting to encourage your kid to read: In order to comply with new state laws, Manatee County has ordered teachers to remove all books from their classrooms until they can be “vetted” for compliance. (Compliance doesn’t sound like a freedom-word to me.) Because, as we all know, unvetted books are dangerous. Better ten children should grow up illiterate than one child read about the existence of gay people, or that Black people have not always been treated well in America. And if you’re a corporation or baseball team that wants to take a position contrary to the DeSantis regime, well, you better watch out.
In another free state, Oklahoma, you are free to run over protesters with your car, but if you want to be free to protest without getting run over, that’s dicier. (The law says nobody can run over you intentionally, but in practice intent is hard to prove.)
The Thomas More Society, a conservative legal organization, is drafting model legislation for state lawmakers that would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a resident of a state that has banned abortion from terminating a pregnancy outside of that state. The draft language will borrow from the novel legal strategy behind a Texas abortion ban enacted last year in which private citizens were empowered to enforce the law through civil litigation.
In short, which party represents “freedom” to you very much depends on the kinds of things you want to do.
The debunking dilemma. When the point of raising an issue is distraction, it’s hard to know how to respond. If you take time to debunk the nonsense (as I just did and tempted you into spending time on), aren’t you just taking the bait?
It’s a conundrum. President Trump may have been a dim bulb in a lot of ways, but he was brilliant at manipulating public attention. One of his favorite tricks, whenever the news cycle was turning against him, was to pick a fight with some Black celebrity like LeBron James. (Legendary NBA coach Gregg Popovich was actually a much more outspoken Trump critic. But he’s White, so arguing with him wouldn’t serve Trump’s purposes.) The more outrageous and/or racist he got, the better at seizing attention and directing it back to the Trump-against-uppity-Black-people frame that plays well to his base.
Ron DeSantis’s AP African American Studies ban is basically the same trick. It puts him back in the headlines and fills the airwaves with Black people criticizing him. In some sense it barely matters that he deserves the criticism: Arguing with Black (or gay or trans) people is a good look for him as he seeks the Republican nomination in 2024.
So how do you cover that? Call attention to it, which DeSantis wants, or ignore it and let an injustice pass without comment?
My compromise, as you can deduce from this post, is to dip into these dark wells occasionally without letting them dominate my attention. And when I do, I try not to lose sight of what I’m being distracted from.
It seems weird to say that one mass shooting is more disturbing than another. Whatever the details, people are dead for reasons that have little to do with the lives they thought they were leading. They didn’t do anything wrong or take foolish risks. They just happened to be in the way when someone started shooting.
Instinctively, we want to draw lessons from other people’s misfortunes, hoping to find some rule to protect us from similar harm. But mass shootings defy that impulse, because (on a personal level) there’s little to learn from them short of “Stay home and barricade the door.”
The six victims who died in the Chesapeake shooting Tuesday were just people who showed up for work. The three University of Virginia football players killed two weeks ago were on a class bus trip coming back from a play, and one of them was asleep. The five killed in Colorado Springs nine days ago were out at a club. There’s no cautionary tale to tell about them. Their deaths just remind us that we could die too, suddenly, without any prior awareness that we were walking into that kind of story.
So how could one such event be any more disturbing than another (in any way other than quantitatively — more dead, more wounded)? When I mentioned Club Q last week, one commenter wasn’t interested in whether or not it was a hate crime, because that distinction could hardly make it worse. Mass shootings are “wrong on so many levels, finding out why the perpetrator thought they needed to do this heinous thing is at the absolute bottom of my list of questions.”
I get that. And yet, I find myself ruminating over the Club Q shooting more than the others. This shooting seems different to me, because it looks so repeatable.
But even that observation doesn’t quite capture it, because in a sense every mass shootings is a repeat of all the previous ones. The stories have different details, but only a handful of plots: Someone feels insignificant, and believes that killing others will make him consequential. Or feels insulted or threatened or picked on, and wants to act out revenge on the largest possible scale. Or becomes convinced that some grievous wrong is happening in the world, one that they must fix themselves through violence. Or something similar.
Our country is awash in weapons of war. Our culture glorifies violence. We are constantly exposed to conspiracy theories that claim to expose great wrongs and the villains who perpetrate them. So we seldom go more than a week or two without a mass shooting, and sometimes they cluster, so that a new one happens before the news cycle of the previous one has played out.
We know the pattern is going to repeat. Next week, two weeks from now, there will be another shooting, another shooter, another list of dead people, another town that is probably not your town, but probably not so different.
But the Club Q shooting is repeatable in a much more specific way. Conspiracy theories about LGBTQ people, especially trans people, are circulating widely and are no longer just on the fringe: They’re being pushed by leaders in conservative media and politics. Among the theories regularly touted on the right, you will find:
Violence is often suggested as a proper response to these “assaults” on children. In April, Tucker Carlson said:
I don’t understand where the men are. Like where are the dads? You know, some teacher’s pushing sex values on your third grader. Why don’t you go in and thrash the teacher?
And then there’s Club Q: Someone kills five and wounds 19 others at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs on the eve of the Transgender Day of Remembrance, when an all-ages drag show was scheduled.
No doubt the shooter has some unique story, but this was not in any sense a lone-wolf attack. An entire political movement has been plowing the ground and planting the seeds for something like this to happen. And they’re not stopping. On only his second show after the Club Q shooting, Tucker Carlson repeated the tropes I listed above, and interviewed anti-trans activist Jaimee Michell, who said:
Saying that “groomer” is an anti-LGBTQ slur, that is doing irreparable damage to us as a whole, and it’s putting a really large target on our backs. And unfortunately, you know, the tragedy that happened in Colorado Springs the other night, it was expected and predictable. Sadly I don’t think it’s going to stop until we end this evil agenda that is attacking children.
I don’t know how to interpret that in any other way than “They had it coming.”
Usually, opinion leaders who campaign against a group are at least momentarily silenced when that group is violently attacked. They may not take any responsibility or make any long-term change in their rhetoric, but they do at least go silent for a while. When the El Paso shooter targeted Hispanics in a WalMart, for example, President Trump did not immediately double down on the “invasion” frame that the shooter had taken literally. He came back to it later, but not right away.
But this time is different. People like Carlson and Michell did double down. They may not have explicitly called for more violence, but they repeated the distorted chain of logic that led to that violence.
The way to start a pogrom against a group of people has been understood for centuries: You tell such a vicious lie about them that, to those who believe your lie, anything done in response seems fair. Anti-Jewish pogroms were started by the blood libel: Jews needed the blood of a Christian child to consecrate their matzohs for Passover. So any child who went missing at the wrong time of year might have been murdered by Jews. “When will these outrages stop?” Christians asked each other, and before long a mob would be in the Jewish quarter bashing heads and burning homes.
That looks to be what’s going on here. In actual fact,
Trans people and drag queens pose no threats to your children.
No men-claiming-to-be-women are waiting in public bathrooms to attack your daughters.
No teachers, counselors, therapists, or doctors are plotting to convince your children to change their genders.
Seeing a same-sex couple, either in person or on TV, is no more “sexual” than seeing an opposite-sex couple.
Diversity curricula in schools are not grooming your children for pedophiles.
Those are all blood libels. Their purpose is to start a pogrom. And it might be working.
The Weekly Sift 