The transformation of the GOP over the past two weeks has moved at remarkable speed.
President Trump went from declaring Christine Blasey Ford a “very fine woman” and “certainly a very credible witness” after she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her allegation of sexual assault, to just days later using her as a prop at one of his Nuremberg campaign rallies, lying about her testimony and playing the privileged white male as victim card, to chants of “lock her up” from his personality cult of Trump. Trump mocks Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, tells people to ‘think of your son’.
Trump and his enablers in the GOP then moved on to saying those who made ‘false statements’ about Kavanaugh ‘should be held liable’ and Saying Brett Kavanaugh Was ‘Caught Up In A Hoax’ And ‘Did Nothing Wrong’, to falsely saying Kavanaugh was ‘proven innocent’ at his swearing-in ceremony. The coup de grâce came when Trump apologized ‘on behalf of the nation’ to Kavanaugh “for the terrible pain and suffering” that he and his family endured during his confirmation process.
Not in my name!
In just two weeks, Brett Kavanaugh went from being credibly accused of sexual assault to the privileged white male victim of a hoax who should be able to exact retribution against his female accusers, according to the pussy-grabber-in-chief.
The privileged white male patriarchy of the Sausage Party has now declared war on the female survivors of sexual assault and rape. Rep. Kevin Cramer, who is running for the senate in North Dakota against Senator Heidi Heitkamp, ripped into the #MeToo movement. #MeToo Is a ‘Movement Toward Victimization,’ G.O.P. Senate Candidate Says:
“That you’re just supposed to believe somebody because they said it happened,” Mr. Cramer said, alluding to Christine Blasey Ford — who has accused Justice Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers — and, more broadly, women who have come forward to claim that they were sexually abused or assaulted.
Invoking his wife, daughters, mother and mother-in-law, Mr. Cramer said: “They cannot understand this movement toward victimization. They are pioneers of the prairie. These are tough people whose grandparents were tough and great-grandparents were tough.”
Suggesting that the #MeToo movement had created a backlash as the left tried to torpedo Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination, Mr. Cramer added, “The world got to see close up how ugly it can be when you go too far.”
Yes, you have “gone too far” when you challenge the privileged white male patriarchy of the GOP.
The privileged white male patriarchy of the Sausage Party has now settled on attacking women as a hysterical “angry mob” as their closing argument in the 2018 midterm election. ‘An angry mob’: Republicans work to recast Democratic protests as out-of-control anarchy:
Weeks ahead of the midterm elections, Republicans have cast the Trump resistance movement as “an angry mob,” a term used by many of them to describe a faceless amalgamation of forces that they say threaten the country’s order and, they hope, energize their voters.
Excuse me? Has everyone forgotten the angry mobs of white racist Teabaggers who participated in the Tea Party “rebellion” funded by the “Kochtopus” organizations in response to the first black man in the White House beginning in 2009? How Southern racism found a home in the Tea Party
The GOP wants to talk about “angry mobs” after the Tea Party? That’s rich. They are the mob of conservative white nationalist populism behind the personality cult of Donald Trump. Remember the angry mob in Charlottesville that President Trump praised as “fine people”? These are his people.
This is what the GOP hath wrought with its embrace of white nationalism and racism.
The Post continues:
The turn toward a culture war is also a tacit admission that many of the issues that Republicans had sought to run on, from tax cuts to the upbeat state of the economy, have not been enough to fan GOP voters’ enthusiasm and counter an electrified Democratic electorate.
“It’s aimed at firing up Fox viewers and the more strident elements of Trump’s base; it’s fearmongering,” said John Weaver, a longtime Republican strategist who is a frequent Trump critic. “I’m sure there is some little old lady in Iowa who now keeps her doors locked because she thinks there’s going to be some anarchist mob coming through Davenport.”
Weaver noted that many of the marches that have cropped up since Trump’s inauguration have been led by suburban women or young Americans focused on issues important to voters, such as gun safety or science.
“They want to take the freedom to assemble and turn it into a negative,” Weaver said. “ ‘The mob’ is trying to dehumanize and belittle and dismiss the current activism that we’re seeing around the country.”
What this is is a despotic authoritarian Party of Trump that wants to silence dissent and opposition to its authoritarian abuses of power. The First Amendment is the first thing to go if this tyrant is successful.
The Washington Post adds, Trump uses Kavanaugh to embrace another culture war: The backlash to #MeToo and changing gender norms:
In his book “Fear,” Bob Woodward wrote about the president’s strategy to deal with allegations of sexual assault. Trump reportedly told a friend facing assault allegations: “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.”
On Saturday, Trump attacked the protesters who were out in force as Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court moved toward confirmation. Many of the protesters were women, and many of them alleged they were victims of assault. While the growing consensus among many on the left is that these women’s voices deserve to be heard, the president called them an “angry” mob.
That’s right women who are survivors of sexual assault and rape, the pussy-grabber-in-chief says you are “arsonists” who want to burn down the privileged white male patriarchy. You must be punished and silenced for your sin. You must obey!
The key to breaking this centuries old stranglehold of privileged white male patriarchy is white women, the 53% who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and gave him his narrow margin of victory in key states. But therein lies the problem: white women benefit from their whiteness as well, and will sell out their own gender.
Alexis Grinnel writes at the New York Times, White Women, Come Get Your People:
With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.
These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out.
They’re more sympathetic to Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who actually shooed away a crowd of women and told them to “grow up.” Or Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whose response to a woman telling him she was raped was: “I’m sorry. Call the cops.”
These are the kind of women who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped. The kind of women who agree with President Trump that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America,” which he said during a news conference on Tuesday.
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We’re talking about white women. The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades. Since 1952, white women have broken for Democratic presidential candidates only twice: in the 1964 and 1996 elections, according to an analysis by Jane Junn, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.
Women of color, and specifically black women, make the margin of difference for Democrats. The voting patterns of white women and white men mirror each other much more closely, and they tend to cast their ballots for Republicans. The gender gap in politics is really a color line.
That’s because white women benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain. In return they’re placed on a pedestal to be “cherished and revered,” as Speaker Paul D. Ryan has said about women, but all the while denied basic rights.
This elevated position over women of color comes at a cost, though. Consider what Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to the president, said at a dinner last year for New York’s Conservative Party. She suggested that higher birthrates are “how I think we fight these demographic wars moving forward.” The war, of course, is with non-white people. So it seems that white women are expected to support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies.
Ms. Conway knows that a woman who steps out of line may be ridiculed by the president himself. President Trump mocked Dr. Blasey in front of a cheering crowd on Tuesday evening. Betray the patriarchy and your whiteness won’t save you.
The pedestal is a superior, if precarious, place. For white women, it’s apparently better than being “stronger together,” with the 94 percent of black women and 86 percent of Latinas who voted for Hillary Clinton.
During the 2016 presidential election, did white women really vote with their whiteness in mind? Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., recently measured the effect of racial identity on white women’s willingness to support Trump in 2016 and found a positive and statistically significant relationship. So white women who voted for him did so to prop up their whiteness.
In the study, white women who agreed that “many women interpret innocent remarks or acts as sexist” were 17 percent more likely to vote for a Republican candidate. They were also likely to agree that “blacks should work their way up without special favors.” To be sure, women of color aren’t inherently less sexist or even without their own racial biases. But unlike white women, they can’t use race privilege to their advantage.
This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”
I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.
As conservative Jennifer Rubin observes, The corruption of the GOP is complete:
[The Republican Party] has become the caricature of the left from days gone by — all power, no principle, dismissive of courtesy and reasoned persuasion. Anger, not ideas, is its animating force. We have a nativist party that views America not as a creedal nation, but as a white Christian nation that is diminished by immigrants and is threatened by outsiders. If it possesses any coherent philosophy, it is one of victimhood — which in turn justifies any and all bad behavior.
* * *
Any Republicans thinking of challenging President Trump because they recoil from the party of Trump is, I hate to break it to them, out of luck. The party wants the mocking cruelty, the attacks on the press and on women, the protectionism and the white nationalism. These things define it.
And conservative Max Boot warns The dark side of American conservatism has taken over:
The Republican Party will now be defined by Trump’s dark, divisive vision, with his depiction of Democrats as America-hating, criminal-coddling traitors, his vilification of the press as the “enemy of the people,” and his ugly invective against Mexicans and Muslims. The extremism that many Republicans of goodwill had been trying to push to the fringe of their party is now its governing ideology.
That’s why I can no longer be a Republican, and in fact wish ill fortune on my former party. I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and devastating defeats beginning in November. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as it is currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be any chance to build a reasonable center-right party out of the ashes. But that will require undoing the work of decades, not just of the past two years.
To paraphrase, “It has become necessary to destroy the party to save it” from its xenophobic far-right white nationalist and Know-Nothing elements.
Corruption of the GOP is Complete by Jennifer Rubin https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/10/08/the-corruption-of-the-gop-is-complete-so-whats-plan-b/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0cff462e0b47