Thread by @mcjulie

I would say a lot of "red states" are already there and what they're doing now is
1. getting even worse
2. trying to drag the rest of us into hell with them

https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1467501799166955528

After reading the article, I have a couple thoughts -- every "gut punch" he identifies -- a moment where he was viscerally struck by the gap between the crappiness of the America we actually live in compared to the America we pretend to be -- was a gut punch for me as well.

You know, Ronald Reagan, the 2000 election, the Iraq war, Donald Trump -- and then just punch after punch after punch.

But he misses something. He misses MY first gut punch: the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment.

And I think it's an important clue about why & how we ended up here. The fact that the ERA was defeated, and also, the fact that nobody at the time treated it like a major crisis in democracy.

Because it was defeated by the forces that are still with us: a crucial voting & activist bloc of conservative patriarchal Christians who believe America ought to be a white nationalist theocracy with their coalition in charge.

The ERA was defeated by the same coalition that eventually rigged the Supreme Court to be 2/3 religious fanatics straight from their think tanks.

The ERA was defeated by the same coalition that is dead set on creating the right wing hellscape he talks about -- "anti-science, anti-history, anti-woman, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-federal government theocracies, minority-ruled faux-democracies"

But when the ERA was defeated, at the time, apparently it didn't seem like a big deal to him, because it's not part of his narrative now.

But it was a SIGNIFICANT reversal on the 60s-70s trend toward expanding democracy. And we've been backsliding ever since.

We talk about the US "becoming" a Republic of Gilead-style patriarchal dystopia, but I will assert we've been there the whole time, it's just unequally distributed, like dystopias always are.

And one of the reasons we're facing this huge crisis NOW is that the modern fascist/neo-confederate/white nationalist Christian movement chose well, by attacking our biggest area of national weakness: deep-seated misogyny.

Because attacks on the personhood & basic human rights of women somehow don't *register* as attacks on democracy & human rights. Because it's just women, right?

And that's why I'm always going back not just to Donald Trump, but specifically to his electoral victory in context with the Access Hollywood tape, and what that showed me about America.

Even though the Access Hollywood tape was a pretty big scandal for, I dunno, a couple of weeks? It got memory-holed SO quickly, and after that it was like -- "oh, what's wrong, ladies, are you still mad about that?"

That was the blueprint. That's the strategy the extreme far right white nationalist Christian coalition has been using for the last forty years.

They learned they could attack racial equality, civil rights, democracy itself, but as long as they acted like they were "only" attacking women's rights, they could get away with it.

More evidence. Reproductive rights are perpetually treated as "other" even in mainstream media.

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1467545579320446978?s=20

It's a weird trick, I think a lot of women, especially white/cis/otherwise privileged women, end up semi-voluntarily otherizing themselves -- like, if you actually pay attention & get mad about this stuff you'll never stop being mad -- so they end up going along with it.

Humans are REALLY shaped by our social environment, it's impossible to overstate that. There can be a LOT of stress caused by not fitting well into your social environment -- as ex-evangelicals know quite well.

One of the reasons white Christian women vote against their own reproductive rights is that they imagine themselves immune from its effects -- because of course they are good Christian ladies who will never-ever-ever find themselves pregnant without wanting to be.

And the propaganda of the anti-abortion right is very dedicated and effective at getting them to picture abortion bans all wrong, as something that will only ever be a problem for sluts & heathens anyway.