Democrats Need To Fight Back With Moral Righteousness Against The MAGA/QAnon Politics Of Hate (Updated)

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Two state representatives, one from Missouri and one from Michigan, demonstrated this week how Democrats must fight back with moral righteousness against the hateful white Christian Nationalism of MAGA/QAnon Republicans and their campaign to “cancel” Americans who are the object of their hatred.

As Paul Krugman explains, Republicans Say, ‘Let Them Eat Hate’ (excerpt):

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I’d say that G.O.P. campaigning in 2022 is all culture war, all the time, except that this would be giving Republicans too much credit. They aren’t fighting a real culture war, a conflict between rival views of what our society should look like; they’re riling up the base against phantasms, threats that don’t even exist.

This isn’t hyperbole. I’m not just talking about things like the panic over critical race theory, although this has come to mean just about any mention of the role that slavery and discrimination have played in U.S. history. Florida is even rejecting many math textbooks, claiming that they include prohibited topics.

That’s bad. But we’re seeing a growing focus on even more bizarre conspiracy theories, with frantic attacks on woke Disney, etc. And roughly half of self-identified Republicans believe that “top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”

[B]ut look, none of this is a mystery. Republicans are following an old playbook, one that would have been completely familiar to, say, czarist-era instigators of pogroms. When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate.

And history tells us that this tactic often works.

[W]hat I do know is that the G.O.P. as a whole has turned to hate-based politics. And if you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention.

Gay Missouri Lawmaker Tears Down Colleague Over Anti-Trans Amendment:

A lawmaker in Missouri delivered a powerful condemnation of one of his Republican colleagues Thursday over an effort to keep transgender athletes out of youth sports.

State Rep. Ian Mackey (D), who is gay, issued the emotionally charged message to state Rep. Chuck Basye (R) during a hearing about an amendment Basye proposed that would allow school districts to vote on transgender athletes bans.

Mackey urged Basye to reflect on his relationship with his own brother, who is also gay.
“Your brother wanted to tell you that he was gay, didn’t he?” Mackey pressed Basye, who replied that yes, his brother “thought that we would hold that against him and not let my children be around him” ― though that was not the case, Basye said.

“Can I tell you, if I were your brother, I would have been afraid to tell you, too?” Mackey responded. “I would have been afraid to tell you, too, because of stuff like this, because this is what you’re focused on. This is the legislation you want to put forward. This is what consumes your time. I would have been afraid to tell you, too. I was afraid of people like you growing up.”

Mackey said that the school district where he grew up, in Missouri’s Hickory County, would “vote tomorrow” to implement such a ban. The state lawmaker represents parts of St. Louis County.

“Thank God I made it out,” he said. “I think every day of the kids who are still there who haven’t made it out, who haven’t escaped from this kind of bigotry.”
Footage of his remarks racked up hundreds of thousands of views on social media in the past day.

“Gentlemen, I’m not afraid of you anymore, because you’re going to lose,” Mackey told his colleagues who support the amendment, raising his voice. “You may win this today, but you’re going to lose.”

The sponsor of the bill whom he was addressing, Rep. Chuck Basye (R), was unmoved.

Basye called Mackey a “loudmouth crybaby” and said the exchange “didn’t [faze] me at all” in an email to HuffPost:

Representative Mackey is a loudmouth crybaby. He was campaigning on the floor of the Missouri House of Representatives. He is worried about his re-election and his rhetoric during the debate has absolutely nothing to do with the amendment I offered to House Bill 2140. During the 3 hour debate the radical democrats attacked my character and made many slanderous accusations! It didn’t phase me at all, I went home afterwards, enjoyed a delicious glass of Maker’s 46 Bourbon then laid down and slept like a baby!!

Basye’s amendment was ultimately approved, 89-40, following nearly three hours of debate.

Michigan State Senator Delivers Fiery Rebuke After Colleague Accuses Her Of ‘Grooming’ Kids:

A Democratic Michigan state senator delivered an impassioned response after a Republican colleague accused her of supporting pedophilia, reiterating a common right-wing [QAnon] talking point.

State Sen. Lana Theis, a Republican, made the troubling claims against state Sen. Mallory McMorrow in a fundraising email sent to her constituents on Monday. In the email, Theis branded her Democratic colleague a “social media troll” and a “snowflake” who was “outraged” at not being able to “groom and sexualize kindergarteners.”

McMorrow struck back at the the smear, which she called a “hollow, hateful scheme,” while speaking on the Michigan Senate floor early Tuesday.

“You can’t claim that you’re targeting marginalized kids in the name of ‘parental rights’ if another parent is standing up and saying no,” she said. “So you dehumanize and marginalize me. You say I’m one of them. You say: She’s a groomer, she supports pedophilia, she wants children to believe they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re white.”

Later in the speech, McMorrow evoked her own upbringing, saying she’d been taught from an early age to recognize her privilege and understand that working in public service meant being empathetic to “people who were marginalized, targeted [and] who had less, often unfairly.”

“I want my daughter to know that she is loved, supported and seen for whoever she becomes,” she added. “I want every child to feel seen, heard and supported, not marginalized and targeted if they are not straight, white and Christian. … Call me whatever you want. I know who I am. I know what faith and service mean, and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win.”

HuffPost reached out to Theis’ office for comment but did not immediately hear back. As of Tuesday afternoon, footage of McMorrow’s speech had been viewed more than 1.6 million times after being posted on Twitter.

McMorrow made local headlines last week after she and two colleagues walked out of the state Senate during an invocation by Theis. In the speech, Theis defended the GOP’s controversial efforts to block teachings that address LGBTQ issues as well as America’s history of racism.

“Dear Lord, across the country we’re seeing in the news that our children are under attack,” Theis said in her invocation, according to the Michigan Advance,“that there are forces that desire things for them other than what their parents would have them see and hear and know. Dear Lord, I pray for your guidance in this chamber to protect the most vulnerable among us.”

Theis later tweeted the Michigan Advance’s article and noted: “Our children are in danger from progressive indoctrination, putting the rights of the education bureaucracy ahead of the rights of parents. Unfortunately, Lansing Democrats are more concerned with virtue signaling than protecting our kids.”

This is classic projection. White Christian Nationalists  seek to impose their bizarre politico-religious views on everyone else in society by controlling government and other public institutions like education. It is they who want to “indoctrinate” children with their White Christian Nationalist orthodoxy, declare America a theocratic nation founded by white European Chiristians for white Chrisitians, and to “cancel” everyone else in the American story whom they see as a threat to their white Christian supremacy. All “others” are viewed with hatred, suspicion and contempt as their mortal enemy.

UPDATE: Charles Blow of the New York Times has some more good advice for Democrats.

UPDATE: Matthew Dowd has some important advice for Democratic strategists: you cannot ignore the fascist “culture wars” launched by the GQP against the country by talking about infrastructure projects, you have to fully engage this fight, defend the targets of their oppression, and present the arguments on the opposite side of the culture war to win the day. I fully agree with this analysis. Seize the moral high ground, because the GQP is amoral and dangerous.

This is what this MAGA/QAnon “pedophilia panic,” an updated version of the “blood libel” used by the Nazis against European Jews, is all about. It is the politics of hatred.

It is anti-democratic and un-American.





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