Welcome to Litsy!

By inoculating a belief that liberals are out to destroy America, conservatives have actually set into motion a series of events that could destroy it. Even prior to Trump, Republican officials were swiftly moving to undermine our democratic systems, passing laws designed to make it harder to vote, especially for young people and people of color, and gerrymandering districts to make already undervalued Democratic votes count for even less

Polarization has concentrated Democratic voters into urban areas, while Republicans dominate the suburban and rural areas that tend, due to the way the American electoral system is designed, to have representational power disproportionate to actual population.

We ALL have the right to vote.

There‘s a sick genius to floating theory that the media simply invents fake stories to discredit Trump. Every unflattering or politically inconvenient story that comes out just gets slotted into the existing “fake news” conspiracy theory. Once one accepts the premise that the media lies about Trump regularly, then nothing journalists say need be accepted.

The media is the “enemy,” and so denying what it says is paramount, no matter how true it is. And the more that the media covers a true story, the more fiercely it‘s denied. It‘s not just that Trump supporters are rejecting individual stories they dislike, but they‘ve rejected the entire idea that the press tells the truth, embracing a belief that the media literally makes stuff up on a daily basis in order to turn the public against Trump.

When it comes to his supporters, Trump doesn‘t even really need to silence the free press. Instead, he‘s managed to poison the well against the press so thoroughly that his supporters flatly reject true news and embrace propaganda. Even when facing seemingly undeniable facts that Trump doesn‘t like, Trump fans will choose loyalty to their leader over objective reality.

Claiming Obama was born in Kenya isn‘t experienced by a lot of conservatives as a direct statement of belief about the material facts. It‘s that espousing birtherism satisfies the emotional desire to undermine a Black man‘s legitimate claim to the Oval Office, without having to come out and plainly state that the birther doesn‘t believe Black people should be eligible to hold office.

To call something “fake news” isn‘t to say that it‘s real or not real, but a way of indicating that truth itself doesn‘t matter—that the only thing that matters is loyalty to Trump.

Calling obviously true news “fake news” is gaslighting, a form of manipulation where the manipulator tells blatant lies to the victim and, when called out, stands by the lies, often blaming the target‘s supposed mental damage if the target insists that the truth is true. Gaslighting people, especially women, by calling them “crazy” for rejecting his lies is a favorite practice of Trump‘s.

By inventing a pedophilia ring, the right wing was able to to accomplish two goals: make Trump‘s real life transgressions seem mild by comparison—what‘s a little pussy-grabbing, compared to running a child sex ring? Two, disinformation campaigns work by devaluing the truth. Flooding with fake stories about sexual abuse teaches people to treat stories about sexual abuse with heightened levels of skepticism.

Greg Gianforte gave a speech in 2015 in which he denounced, of all things, letting elderly people retire. “There‘s nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement.” Noting that Noah was supposedly 600 when he built the ark and not “cashing Social Security checks,” he argued that the folks at the retirement home have an obligation to work.”

Can‘t you see how much they care about ‘life‘???

Greg Gianforte was a politician in the Trump mold. He has a history of ties to white supremacists, starting with Doug Wilson, an Idaho pastor who wrote a 1996 pamphlet titled “Southern Slavery, As It Was.” He argues that slavery was a “life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care” and “one could argue that the Black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery.”

Trump has figured one thing out: the quickest way to reaffirm his connection to his base voters and maintain their loyalty is to attack people of color.

Even after witnessing hundreds of years of violence over the question of whether or not all people will be treated equally, many still act like “racism” is some minor bad habit of a few marginal people, instead of one of the defining struggles of American history.

People rally around statues of men who literally started a war to defend slavery and claim that can‘t be racist, because of “heritage.” A heritage of white supremacy defended by violence.

The one thing that remains true in American political life is that no one wants to be *called* a racist. Even white supremacists, before pulling on their Klan hoods or donning their Nazi gear, will whine that they‘re not racist, they‘re just for “white power” or against “white genocide” or think “white lives matter.”

Many Breitbart headlines—about immigration, crime, nationalism—were direct echoes of headlines published in KKK papers in the 1920s.

In case you didn‘t know, Breitbart is a propaganda website...stay away from it. Far away.

His reckless persona wasn‘t just a clown act, but is in fact his actual personality.

Trump‘s One rule is that whatever Obama did is illegitimate and needs undoing. It‘s about Obama and Trump‘s deeply racist urge to wipe all evidence of the map that Obama ever mattered.

I mean really. Trump is obsessed.

Sarah Palin led chants of “drill, baby, drill” during the 2016 election. She‘s Swift to invoke the natural beauty of Alaska when speaking of why she lives where she does. But apparently the urge to irritate liberals matters more to her than the rivers and mountains she otherwise claims to love. Those delicate environments are exactly what‘s threatened when you drill baby drill.

Roy Moore argues, “God is the only source of our law, Liberty and government.” Twice he was removed from his position on the Alabama Supreme Court, because he argued that his interpretation of the Bible should trump the actual law of the land.

There‘s a whole lot more nasty to this guy that I don‘t have space for here. What a piece of shit.

“The long term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise...those who refuse to submit publicly“ should be denied the right to citizenship. Gary North said this in 1989.

He can fuck right off.

Rush Limbaugh turned his audiences against a federal rule requiring insurance companies to cover contraception by attacking Sandra Fluke, who testified at a congressional hearing in favor of the policy. He suggested she was a prostitute and called her a slut for her belief that contraception is a normal part of women‘s healthcare.

🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🤬No viagra for you, asshole.

Trump‘s personal misogyny is backed up by sexist policy. Policies that are anti-sex; polices on abortion, contraception and sex education are based on the notion that women should only have sex for the purposes of procreation—and that women who have sex for pleasure are dirty sluts who should be punished.

🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻I enjoy sex and breeding is not my purpose. 🙂

During the Bush years, the anti-feminist right‘s strategy was to portray feminism as some kind of well-intended mistake that had done more harm than good, and to argue that women had to be rescued from having rights for their own sake. Mostly, the right focused on women‘s sexual autonomy. The war on abortion rights expanded to become a war on contraception.

Women‘s gains in the ‘40s were notoriously met with a huge backlash in the ‘50s, when so many women were shoved back into the home after working in paid jobs during the war. It happened again in the ‘80s, when the gains of the ‘70s ended in the Reagan Revolution. The ‘90s had a feminist movement, set aflame in the 2000s of religious right misogyny, epitomized by Bush and his admin‘s abstinence only agenda.

In city after city, the police have overreacted to Black Lives Matter protestors, often gassing crowds or meeting unarmed protestors with a militarized police force. The police don‘t like what Black Lives Matter protestors are saying, so seek any excuse they can to use government power to shut it down.

When conservatives say things that hurt the feelings of liberals, it‘s free discourse of the sort that our Founding Fathers enshrined in the constitution. When liberals hurt the feelings of conservatives, however, by calling out racism or sexism? Political correctness, to be silenced. Charlottesville reminds that the debate over free-speech is often a Figleaf for a demand on the right to forward white supremacist ideas without public pushback.

“Free speech” and “political correctness” create excellent distractions to avoid talking about the actual content of the speech in question.

Europeans do a fine job of remembering the history of WWII without littering the landscape with statues portraying Hitler as a noble Christian warrior. As long as they‘re forcing an argument about speech and memory and censorship, the alt-right doesn‘t have to defend what it is about slavery and white supremacy they find so honorable.

It‘s quite clear that the reason that the alt-right feels protective of these statues is they continue to admire and honor the values these statues stand for, which are white supremacy and the terrorizing of Black people. But those are hard values to defend publicly, so instead, the right tries to make the discussion one of censorship and free speech, by accusing progressives of trying to hide history.

Most Confederate statues were built during times of heightened racial tensions—usually when Black Americans were pushing for more rights or gaining economically, and getting lynched or terrorized in return. Most were built when the KKK was reforming and lynchings were on the rise, and there was another spate of statue-building in response to the civil-rights movement.

...the rise of Trump...foretold a country where the American right has devolved into a nihilistic movement, prepared to tear down the country rather than share it fairly with women, LGBTQ people and people of color.