Why the GOP Is Trying to Make America Explode in Hate, Rage, and Fear
Image Credit: Fox News
I can’t be the only one who notes the painful, scorching irony of Ron DeSantis…publishing a new book. A man who bans books…is selling a new book. Called, no less, The Courage to Be Free. LOL. The publishing industry aided and abetted this…tragicomedy. They found him a ghostwriter, they paid him a small fortune, they’re marketing it, and that, my friends, is disgusting, on levels from moral to political. Why do I bring all this up?
Welcome to the GOP’s new strategy. You can see it emerging in plain sight now. I know I’ve talked a lot about American politics this week, and we’ll switch it up shortly. But first I want to crystallize some of what I’ve been discussing.
What’s the GOP up to? Well, it’s settling on a new strategy. That strategy has three parts, and they go like this. One, attack vulnerable groups, who are perfectly innocent, peaceful people — and turn them into scary, outsized, outlandishly dangerous monsters, who are an existential threat to “real” Americans. Two, whip its base into a frenzy with these manufactured moral panics and riptides. Three, use that to create the illusion of political movement, of turning a broken country around. Four, and this is a bonus point, use the Supreme Court to legitimize all the above.
The GOP’s plan is to make American life — and politics — as ugly as possible.
Let me sum that up another way. The GOP’s strategy for the foreseeable future? The next election, the one after that? Hate.
What am I talking about? By now you can’t have failed to notice who the GOP’s latest target. They’re not exactly hiding it. The LGBTQ. All over again. And this time, in absurd, almost funny ways — only it’s not a joke. If you’ve been on Twitter, you’ve seen the tweets: more than one GOP Congressman who’s out there railing violently against…drag queens…was caught dressing up in drag. LOL.
Drag queens? Have you ever been to a gay bar? To a drag night? Drag queens are about as threatening as, I don’t know, the ghost of Karl Lagerfeld, God bless his soul. I can’t ever remember having anything but fun with drag queens, at drag shows, because, guess what, they’re not exactly out there practicing, preaching, embodying, enacting even the faintest shred of anything violent.
This is how absurd American politics have become. The GOP’s latest incarnation of an existential threat is…people who dress up for fun and listen to music and act out little skits. Think for a second how completely ludicrous that actually is. It’s like being threatened by the Muppets, but then again, Tucker Carlson’s actually guilty of that, too.
It’s funny, on one level, to be threatened by people who are doing such fundamentally peaceful things. Dressing up? Wearing…glitter? Acting and telling jokes? Or sitting there reading books to kids? These are — let me say it again — fundamentally peaceful acts. It’s the GOP that’s out there inciting, endorsing, nudging with a wink-and-a-nod actual violence. Hey, you want to carry a grenade launcher to Starbucks? You might think I’m kidding, so here’s a picture. Totally cool! Normal! Peaceful! But dressing up and acting and telling jokes and reading books to kids — now that’s dangerous.
Like I said, ludicrous. But also profoundly sinister.
It’s not just drag queens who are being targeted, systematically. It’s the trans community, too. “In Oklahoma, House Republicans also approved a bill Tuesday that would prohibit any facility that receives public funds from offering gender-affirming care for minors or adults, as well as blocking insurance coverage for it.” Think about how crazily authoritarian that really is for a second. No public funds…just because…people want medical care…that you don’t like…for your own reasons?
Let’s go back to the point about asymmetry, because that’s what really drives home how ugly all this is. You see, none of us are out there blocking their healthcare. I don’t like using “us” vs “them” terms, but in this case, I have to. Nobody’s saying to them, hey, you, you’re not allowed to get a blood transfusion because you, I don’t know, have a certain name or wear certain kinds of clothes. None of us are saying, hey, just because you send your kids to Sunday school, means they don’t get healthcare. We’re not saying just because you believe in whatever — anything at all — means you don’t get that heart medication or organ transplant.
None of us are out there getting them in any way whatsoever. None of us. In any way.
When I say “the GOP’s plan is to make American life as ugly as possible,” this asymmetry is exactly what I mean. Who’s “us”? Well, it’s anyone that’s not part of this crusade to purify society. Women, kids, men, adults, anyone and everyone. The point is to cause us moral injury. What’s moral injury? That’s a term psychologist use when you encounter ugliness. Of the spiritual kind.
When you meet hate, face to face. It injures you, deep down in the soul. It shakes you. People can really be like this? They can really just want to…get others…for existing? Hey, those people aren’t even doing anything to you. Disagree with them or disapprove of them all you like, your life, your choice. But trying to…annihilate them…as moral agents…as political agents…as social beings? Moral injury happens when you meet hate face to face, because its ugliness hurts. It’s like the old story of Medusa: just looking turns you into stone.
It’s sometimes said that the “point is the cruelty.” That’s almost true. The point is the hate. Hate, unfortunately, works as a political strategy. Especially in times like these — troubled ones. Take a hard look at Britain. It’s having food shortages. As in, tomatoes are so hard to get that Italian restaurants are close to, Mamma Mia, shutting down. Sorry, bad joke. It’s darkly comical on a deeply tragic level, to see a nation end up collapsing because of stupidity. Britain’s imploding because of hate. Europeans were blamed for Britain’s problems, it broke up with the EU, and the rest — hey, did you get your vegetable ration today, and that one isn’t a joke, it’s real — is history. Hate works.
The GOP’s strategy is this. Just this. Examine it carefully with me as a political organization. You’ll note something genuinely strange about it. It has no plan or vision or agenda for…anything. Not anything material, constructive, or modern, anyways. Hey, how should people get…healthcare…jobs…careers? What about the problem of multiple generations in downward mobility? What about crumbling infrastructure? I’d bring up Putin, but we all know that for the GOP, well, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Now, you might know that, but I want you to get how genuinely unique and disturbing that is. It’s almost…impossible…to find another example of a political party, anywhere in the world, that has no plan for anything. Because it’s profoundly weird not to. You have to really, really stretch to find one, and you end up drawing comparisons to places like North Korea or Afghanistan, and then get accused of “hyperbole,” but hey, who else is taking people’s rights away this fast and hard, for fascist and theocratic reasons?
The GOP has only one agenda left, and that’s hate. In America, all this is often called “culture wars.” But that’s wrong. It’s deeply, foolishly inaccurate to call what the GOP is doing a “culture war.” It’s not just about cultural preferences, in some innocuous, inconsequential way. It’s not about what movies or music you like and I don’t, or what Hollywood starlet you think deserves an award and I don’t. That’s culture, or at least America’s pop version of it. This? This is hate.
It’s crucial to note how fast and far the GOP’s focus on hate has evolved. It’s like watching a demon be grown from a bunch of microbes, in hell’s laboratory. Think about it. Not so long ago, the GOP’s scapegoats were Mexican babies. That, too was absurd — think about it, what kind of fool is threatened by a baby? I mean, yeah, being a parent is hard, but what kinds of people take other people’s kids away from them? Scapegoating kids was a clear sign that something was very, very wrong. That this was proper and serious hate, fascism style.
Now the hate is evolving, the way it always does. We all know the old poem — Neimoller’s famous one. First they came for the Jews, then they came for me. This is exactly what’s happening in America, and you can literally see this vicious cycle of hate expanding by the day. First they came for the Mexican babies…then the Latinos…then the immigrants and refugees. And now? Now it doesn’t matter if you’re a “real” American or not. If you’re gay, if you dress up in drag, if you’re a woman, if you’re a trans kid, if you’re a parent of a trans kid — they’ll hate you all the same.
And that hate isn’t about a culture war. It never was. It’s not a “culture war” when kids are out there being denied healthcare. It’s not a culture war to not call someone by their name. Not one to give women the death penalty for having abortions or ban them from using the internet freely. It’s not a “culture war” when the point is taking basic freedoms — speech, privacy, expression, association — away from entire groups of people, and it’s happening right before our eyes. And it’s not a culture war, either, when the people being targeted and attacked are just peacefully existing.
You see, when we say that this just about “culture,” we are making a big mistake, one that creates the false impression of an equivalency on both sides. It is existential, not cultural. It’s existential for a woman, maybe, to be able to get healthcare, just like it is for a kid. It’s existential for a kid to be able to read books — lord knows they saved my life and every kid like me. It’s existential, too, for gay people to have communities and love the way they like. All of this existential, not cultural.
It’s only cultural for the other side. For them, it’s not existential. They just pretend like it is. But the drag queens aren’t the ones carrying AK-47s to Walmart. They’re not the ones shooting up gay clubs and massacring women — that’d be incels and Trumpists and Incel Trumpists. Nobody on earth’s existence is threatened in any way whatsoever by any of the following things: another person being a woman, being gay, reading a book. Nobody on earth’s existence is threatened in the tiniest shred of a way whatsoever by any of the following: calling someone by their name, other people dancing and singing and acting, teaching kids that people living their lives peacefully is perfectly OK. Nobody’s on earth’s existence is threatened by somebody else just living their life peacefully, in the way they see fit, that’s true for them.
Nobody.
And by the way, whether or not you “like” or “dislike” things like drag performances are besides the point. I’m not here to interfere with your taste or life, and that’s very much the point. Go, don’t go, doesn’t matter, even something as seemingly inconsequential as drag is free speech, expression, association. None of us should object in any way to people peacefully just expressing themselves, even if we — as we often do — don’t want to share in those particular expressions.
We don’t have to like or even believe in a thing to understand that it’s perfectly acceptable for people to do it, speak it, express it, enact it, and if the only things that are allowed for everybody — or else you’re a criminal — are those we ourselves like or believe in, then, well, that’s authoritarianism, fascism, and theocracy, in one fell swoop. In this case, in a democracy, we don’t ban people singing and dancing and acting, even if we ourselves are or aren’t fans, because, well, some pretty fundamental freedoms are at risk if you go down that road to fascism.
I really, really want you to see this asymmetry. It’s existential for us. But it’s not for them. For them, It’s…what? Maybe cultural. Maybe. Barely even that. Just because there’s a drag club in a city it doesn’t mean that your entire way of life right down to the Led Zeppelin is threatened. And what the hell do you think Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were wearing, anyways?
The other side pretends like it’s existentially threatened. And media, credulously, gullibly, buys that. But it’s not threatened existentially in any way. Nobody is coming for any of the following things: Sunday school, those weird movies on Amazon that say the world’s a giant Satanist conspiracy run by the UN and the liberals, your right to teach your kids that whatever holy book you believe in is holy, your family, your name, your relationships.
We’re not out there trying to ban Ron DeSantis’s book. But he’s banning ours. LOL. See the difference?
It’s crucial to get this point, because, like I said, in America, the media portrays all this exactly the wrong war. It calls it a “culture war,” even while buying the myth that the fascist side really is somehow existentially threatened by…drag queens…kids reading books…women using the internet…calling someone by their name. You can see that going on and on, most recently in the New York Times being dragged over its coverage of trans people. The media does a poor job explaining, even acknowledging this basic fact: no, nobody’s existentially threatening the fascist side.
Hell, it won’t even note the irony of a guy who bans books publishing his own, precisely because the rest of us don’t want to ban any books. It’s vivid proof that we’re peaceful, and nobody’s threatening them existentially. Not even remotely, not in any way, shape or form. But they are existentially threatening the rest of us.
In real ways, not philosophical ones. They’re taking rights away at light speed now. There’s a new scapegoat every few months, and we all know what direction that cycle takes. First they come for the most vulnerable, then go right up the ladder, until at last, society’s remolded in their image.
They’re threatening the rest of us existentially because that’s what hate does. That’s what hate is. They’re spreading a new Big Lie, or a very old one, take your pick. Not just “the election was stolen!!” Old news. Done. Over. The new Big Lie? The one that’s going to define this election cycle? “Those people are coming for you. Your kids, your wives, your freedom. You’d better take theirs away first.”
This is what the GOP’s strategy is. And that’s all the GOP’s strategy is. We are beginning to really live it now. And it’s different from before. There are no real grand political aspirations anymore. Even Trump had a few, like breaking things off with China, or what have you. Even if those were foolish, those are gone. The GOP has nothing left — but hate. The universe moves in circles, my friends, and the hardest thing of all? Breaking one that old, that poisonous, that deluded.
umair haque
March 2, 2023
I can’t be the only one who notes the painful, scorching irony of Ron DeSantis…publishing a new book. A man who bans books…is selling a new book. Called, no less, The Courage to Be Free. LOL. The publishing industry aided and abetted this…tragicomedy. They found him a ghostwriter, they paid him a small fortune, they’re marketing it, and that, my friends, is disgusting, on levels from moral to political. Why do I bring all this up?
Welcome to the GOP’s new strategy. You can see it emerging in plain sight now. I know I’ve talked a lot about American politics this week, and we’ll switch it up shortly. But first I want to crystallize some of what I’ve been discussing.
What’s the GOP up to? Well, it’s settling on a new strategy. That strategy has three parts, and they go like this. One, attack vulnerable groups, who are perfectly innocent, peaceful people — and turn them into scary, outsized, outlandishly dangerous monsters, who are an existential threat to “real” Americans. Two, whip its base into a frenzy with these manufactured moral panics and riptides. Three, use that to create the illusion of political movement, of turning a broken country around. Four, and this is a bonus point, use the Supreme Court to legitimize all the above.
The GOP’s plan is to make American life — and politics — as ugly as possible.
Let me sum that up another way. The GOP’s strategy for the foreseeable future? The next election, the one after that? Hate.
What am I talking about? By now you can’t have failed to notice who the GOP’s latest target. They’re not exactly hiding it. The LGBTQ. All over again. And this time, in absurd, almost funny ways — only it’s not a joke. If you’ve been on Twitter, you’ve seen the tweets: more than one GOP Congressman who’s out there railing violently against…drag queens…was caught dressing up in drag. LOL.
Drag queens? Have you ever been to a gay bar? To a drag night? Drag queens are about as threatening as, I don’t know, the ghost of Karl Lagerfeld, God bless his soul. I can’t ever remember having anything but fun with drag queens, at drag shows, because, guess what, they’re not exactly out there practicing, preaching, embodying, enacting even the faintest shred of anything violent.
This is how absurd American politics have become. The GOP’s latest incarnation of an existential threat is…people who dress up for fun and listen to music and act out little skits. Think for a second how completely ludicrous that actually is. It’s like being threatened by the Muppets, but then again, Tucker Carlson’s actually guilty of that, too.
It’s funny, on one level, to be threatened by people who are doing such fundamentally peaceful things. Dressing up? Wearing…glitter? Acting and telling jokes? Or sitting there reading books to kids? These are — let me say it again — fundamentally peaceful acts. It’s the GOP that’s out there inciting, endorsing, nudging with a wink-and-a-nod actual violence. Hey, you want to carry a grenade launcher to Starbucks? You might think I’m kidding, so here’s a picture. Totally cool! Normal! Peaceful! But dressing up and acting and telling jokes and reading books to kids — now that’s dangerous.
Like I said, ludicrous. But also profoundly sinister.
It’s not just drag queens who are being targeted, systematically. It’s the trans community, too. “In Oklahoma, House Republicans also approved a bill Tuesday that would prohibit any facility that receives public funds from offering gender-affirming care for minors or adults, as well as blocking insurance coverage for it.” Think about how crazily authoritarian that really is for a second. No public funds…just because…people want medical care…that you don’t like…for your own reasons?
Let’s go back to the point about asymmetry, because that’s what really drives home how ugly all this is. You see, none of us are out there blocking their healthcare. I don’t like using “us” vs “them” terms, but in this case, I have to. Nobody’s saying to them, hey, you, you’re not allowed to get a blood transfusion because you, I don’t know, have a certain name or wear certain kinds of clothes. None of us are saying, hey, just because you send your kids to Sunday school, means they don’t get healthcare. We’re not saying just because you believe in whatever — anything at all — means you don’t get that heart medication or organ transplant.
None of us are out there getting them in any way whatsoever. None of us. In any way.
When I say “the GOP’s plan is to make American life as ugly as possible,” this asymmetry is exactly what I mean. Who’s “us”? Well, it’s anyone that’s not part of this crusade to purify society. Women, kids, men, adults, anyone and everyone. The point is to cause us moral injury. What’s moral injury? That’s a term psychologist use when you encounter ugliness. Of the spiritual kind.
When you meet hate, face to face. It injures you, deep down in the soul. It shakes you. People can really be like this? They can really just want to…get others…for existing? Hey, those people aren’t even doing anything to you. Disagree with them or disapprove of them all you like, your life, your choice. But trying to…annihilate them…as moral agents…as political agents…as social beings? Moral injury happens when you meet hate face to face, because its ugliness hurts. It’s like the old story of Medusa: just looking turns you into stone.
It’s sometimes said that the “point is the cruelty.” That’s almost true. The point is the hate. Hate, unfortunately, works as a political strategy. Especially in times like these — troubled ones. Take a hard look at Britain. It’s having food shortages. As in, tomatoes are so hard to get that Italian restaurants are close to, Mamma Mia, shutting down. Sorry, bad joke. It’s darkly comical on a deeply tragic level, to see a nation end up collapsing because of stupidity. Britain’s imploding because of hate. Europeans were blamed for Britain’s problems, it broke up with the EU, and the rest — hey, did you get your vegetable ration today, and that one isn’t a joke, it’s real — is history. Hate works.
The GOP’s strategy is this. Just this. Examine it carefully with me as a political organization. You’ll note something genuinely strange about it. It has no plan or vision or agenda for…anything. Not anything material, constructive, or modern, anyways. Hey, how should people get…healthcare…jobs…careers? What about the problem of multiple generations in downward mobility? What about crumbling infrastructure? I’d bring up Putin, but we all know that for the GOP, well, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Now, you might know that, but I want you to get how genuinely unique and disturbing that is. It’s almost…impossible…to find another example of a political party, anywhere in the world, that has no plan for anything. Because it’s profoundly weird not to. You have to really, really stretch to find one, and you end up drawing comparisons to places like North Korea or Afghanistan, and then get accused of “hyperbole,” but hey, who else is taking people’s rights away this fast and hard, for fascist and theocratic reasons?
The GOP has only one agenda left, and that’s hate. In America, all this is often called “culture wars.” But that’s wrong. It’s deeply, foolishly inaccurate to call what the GOP is doing a “culture war.” It’s not just about cultural preferences, in some innocuous, inconsequential way. It’s not about what movies or music you like and I don’t, or what Hollywood starlet you think deserves an award and I don’t. That’s culture, or at least America’s pop version of it. This? This is hate.
It’s crucial to note how fast and far the GOP’s focus on hate has evolved. It’s like watching a demon be grown from a bunch of microbes, in hell’s laboratory. Think about it. Not so long ago, the GOP’s scapegoats were Mexican babies. That, too was absurd — think about it, what kind of fool is threatened by a baby? I mean, yeah, being a parent is hard, but what kinds of people take other people’s kids away from them? Scapegoating kids was a clear sign that something was very, very wrong. That this was proper and serious hate, fascism style.
Now the hate is evolving, the way it always does. We all know the old poem — Neimoller’s famous one. First they came for the Jews, then they came for me. This is exactly what’s happening in America, and you can literally see this vicious cycle of hate expanding by the day. First they came for the Mexican babies…then the Latinos…then the immigrants and refugees. And now? Now it doesn’t matter if you’re a “real” American or not. If you’re gay, if you dress up in drag, if you’re a woman, if you’re a trans kid, if you’re a parent of a trans kid — they’ll hate you all the same.
And that hate isn’t about a culture war. It never was. It’s not a “culture war” when kids are out there being denied healthcare. It’s not a culture war to not call someone by their name. Not one to give women the death penalty for having abortions or ban them from using the internet freely. It’s not a “culture war” when the point is taking basic freedoms — speech, privacy, expression, association — away from entire groups of people, and it’s happening right before our eyes. And it’s not a culture war, either, when the people being targeted and attacked are just peacefully existing.
You see, when we say that this just about “culture,” we are making a big mistake, one that creates the false impression of an equivalency on both sides. It is existential, not cultural. It’s existential for a woman, maybe, to be able to get healthcare, just like it is for a kid. It’s existential for a kid to be able to read books — lord knows they saved my life and every kid like me. It’s existential, too, for gay people to have communities and love the way they like. All of this existential, not cultural.
It’s only cultural for the other side. For them, it’s not existential. They just pretend like it is. But the drag queens aren’t the ones carrying AK-47s to Walmart. They’re not the ones shooting up gay clubs and massacring women — that’d be incels and Trumpists and Incel Trumpists. Nobody on earth’s existence is threatened in any way whatsoever by any of the following things: another person being a woman, being gay, reading a book. Nobody on earth’s existence is threatened in the tiniest shred of a way whatsoever by any of the following: calling someone by their name, other people dancing and singing and acting, teaching kids that people living their lives peacefully is perfectly OK. Nobody’s on earth’s existence is threatened by somebody else just living their life peacefully, in the way they see fit, that’s true for them.
Nobody.
And by the way, whether or not you “like” or “dislike” things like drag performances are besides the point. I’m not here to interfere with your taste or life, and that’s very much the point. Go, don’t go, doesn’t matter, even something as seemingly inconsequential as drag is free speech, expression, association. None of us should object in any way to people peacefully just expressing themselves, even if we — as we often do — don’t want to share in those particular expressions.
We don’t have to like or even believe in a thing to understand that it’s perfectly acceptable for people to do it, speak it, express it, enact it, and if the only things that are allowed for everybody — or else you’re a criminal — are those we ourselves like or believe in, then, well, that’s authoritarianism, fascism, and theocracy, in one fell swoop. In this case, in a democracy, we don’t ban people singing and dancing and acting, even if we ourselves are or aren’t fans, because, well, some pretty fundamental freedoms are at risk if you go down that road to fascism.
I really, really want you to see this asymmetry. It’s existential for us. But it’s not for them. For them, It’s…what? Maybe cultural. Maybe. Barely even that. Just because there’s a drag club in a city it doesn’t mean that your entire way of life right down to the Led Zeppelin is threatened. And what the hell do you think Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were wearing, anyways?
The other side pretends like it’s existentially threatened. And media, credulously, gullibly, buys that. But it’s not threatened existentially in any way. Nobody is coming for any of the following things: Sunday school, those weird movies on Amazon that say the world’s a giant Satanist conspiracy run by the UN and the liberals, your right to teach your kids that whatever holy book you believe in is holy, your family, your name, your relationships.
We’re not out there trying to ban Ron DeSantis’s book. But he’s banning ours. LOL. See the difference?
It’s crucial to get this point, because, like I said, in America, the media portrays all this exactly the wrong war. It calls it a “culture war,” even while buying the myth that the fascist side really is somehow existentially threatened by…drag queens…kids reading books…women using the internet…calling someone by their name. You can see that going on and on, most recently in the New York Times being dragged over its coverage of trans people. The media does a poor job explaining, even acknowledging this basic fact: no, nobody’s existentially threatening the fascist side.
Hell, it won’t even note the irony of a guy who bans books publishing his own, precisely because the rest of us don’t want to ban any books. It’s vivid proof that we’re peaceful, and nobody’s threatening them existentially. Not even remotely, not in any way, shape or form. But they are existentially threatening the rest of us.
In real ways, not philosophical ones. They’re taking rights away at light speed now. There’s a new scapegoat every few months, and we all know what direction that cycle takes. First they come for the most vulnerable, then go right up the ladder, until at last, society’s remolded in their image.
They’re threatening the rest of us existentially because that’s what hate does. That’s what hate is. They’re spreading a new Big Lie, or a very old one, take your pick. Not just “the election was stolen!!” Old news. Done. Over. The new Big Lie? The one that’s going to define this election cycle? “Those people are coming for you. Your kids, your wives, your freedom. You’d better take theirs away first.”
This is what the GOP’s strategy is. And that’s all the GOP’s strategy is. We are beginning to really live it now. And it’s different from before. There are no real grand political aspirations anymore. Even Trump had a few, like breaking things off with China, or what have you. Even if those were foolish, those are gone. The GOP has nothing left — but hate. The universe moves in circles, my friends, and the hardest thing of all? Breaking one that old, that poisonous, that deluded.
umair haque
March 2, 2023
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