Well, at least they’re finally telling the truth. And why shouldn’t they? Their big plans for America are no mystery.
The contemporary Republican Party has become the world’s largest white supremacist organization, and now also explicitly supports the use of political violence and terrorism to advance the goal of ending multiracial democracy. Donald Trump’s coup attempt, culminating in the Capitol attack of Jan. 6, 2021, was the literal embodiment of those values, beliefs and goals.
The foundational premise of the Trump coup attempt and the Big Lie about the 2020 election that fueled it was that the votes of Black and brown people essentially do not count, or at least should not have equal weight with votes of white people, especially white “conservatives” in the former slave-owning Confederacy and other parts of “red state” America.
“The world imagined by today’s Republican Party and the larger neofascist movement is a world of rules and hierarchies. White people rule over Black and brown people. Right-wing Christians will rule over other religious groups and non-believers. Men will rule over women. The rich and moneyed classes will have total power over the poor, the working class and the middle class, most likely all of those outside the top 5 percent. Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and trans people will be virtually erased from American society, and perhaps literally disappeared. Other marginalized groups, including people with disabilities and undocumented immigrants, will face similar fates. The “rights” of property, corporations and guns will fully supersede those of human beings, the natural world and the commons. “Democracy” will exist in name only, and in practice will be what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism” or perhaps even an outright authoritarian state adapted to fit the mold of American exceptionalism.”
Do not call this band of reckless revisionists on the court conservatives, by the way. Nothing about what they are doing is “conservative,” nor should you call them “strict constructionalists” or “originalists,” as their decisions disregard legal precedent, the spirit of the Constitution, and often craft citations for their decisions from whole cloth.
. . . .recently, thanks to a concerted campaign by America’s right wing, . … . we have watched as a long list of the signature milestones of American social advancement in the post WWII era have been reversed, undone or blunted. The Supreme Court, now one of the most active, pernicious agents of this period of anti-progress, demonstrated this again on Friday by, for the first time in history, stripping away a right that had been granted to the people, the right of a woman to control her own body. In so doing, they imposed a new burden, one that by and large American women had been freed from for half a century—that of forced birth.
They even framed this giant step backwards in language that made clear that all their clocks stopped in the 17th, 18th or early 19th centuries, that they saw their twisted memories of that time as the only legitimate parameters for establishing our social standards. In the majority decision handed down on Friday for example, citations were made referencing abortion cases as far back as the 13th Century and relying on legal sources like 17th-century judge Sir Matthew Hale, a man who once presided over a witchcraft trial and who asserted a woman could never be raped by her husband because she had transferred control of her body to him.
The need to protect “white life” is a key element of the “great replacement” theory, in which white women have a sacred duty to protect the race in its existential struggle.
The link between WRT (White Replacement Theory) and fascism is not accidental. WRT is a relatively recent label for old fascism. In terms of propaganda, it is a rebranding of the same thing, namely long-standing fascist paranoias and lies about invasion and racial and political replacement. WRT’s logic justifies mass violence. When it is normalized, it poses an existential threat to democracy and its ideals. It targets the very idea of common humanity that underlies them.
Source: Salon and The Daily Beast (background) and LA Times (background)