Fascism Watch for 16 May 2023

Missouri Republicans are gearing up to making attacking trans people (and LGBT people in general) the number one priority of the legislative year. Blocking health care for trans kids is, of course, at the top of that list, but it’ll extend down.

Hey, Democrats. Take some goddamn notes from Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh of Nebraska, who has been filibustering for three weeks, blocking literally every bill to stop anti-trans legislation from getting through the state Senate. This is the heroism we need.

Local Putnam County, Tennessee churches teamed up with literal swastika-flag-waving neo-Nazis against a bar’s drag show. I can’t stress that enough: literal swastika-flat-waving neo-nazis and local fundamentalist churches. There’s no longer a line.

Police harassed the bar patrons and blamed the bar for the nazi presence, reviving the age-old “outside-agitators” trope, and now they – yes, they, the police – are helping evict the bar and driving it out of business.

There is no line between fundamentalism and fascism. Which is why this is the Fascism Watch and not the old Cultural Warfare Update.

CNN has a reasonable analysis and opinion piece on the fascist DeSantis, his drive for authoritarian power in Florida, and how he explicitly intends it to be a model for national governance: “[A]round 80% of Republicans support either Trump or DeSantis. But rather than representing different visions of the Republican Party, different strands of ideology or different approaches to power, they present a united front for a party that has embraced a cruel-edged, power-hungry right-wing politics – and now is weighing who will be the most effective messenger for that brand.”

They also point out that Virginia’s Youngkin is doing the same thing, just with softer presentation.

Talking of DeSantis, he of course thrilled Russian propagandists with his rejection of support for Ukraine’s fight against the illegal Russian invasion. Fundamentally – GET IT? – the right is in full agreement with Putin on authoritarianism, on crushing LGBT people and minorities, on press freedoms (latest being that he got a reporter fired for criticising one of his statements), on authoritarian rule, and so on.

There’s also a new DeSantis bill to make having an undocumented immigrant in your home or vehicle a felony. So that’s fun.

And there’s another GOP bill to require schools teach… oh jeez it’s a list… “abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for all school-age students while teaching the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage,” and “sex is determined by biology and reproductive function at birth …and that these reproductive roles are binary, stable, and unchangeable,” while also banning discussion of things like women’s periods and saying that HIV can only be transmitted through sexual intercourse.

Obviously, it also includes clauses making it easier to ban books. Relevantly, The New Republic has an article up on Republican book bans, and the librarians fighting them.

He and Florida GOP aren’t the only Republicans targeting education, though. Texas state-level Republicans just took over Houston schoools. They’re also working on a bill to create militias allowed to act with impunity – and legal immunity – at the border. This will kill a bunch of people and create multiple international incidents – but then, that’s the point. What they want is to invade Mexico.

I don’t consider TruthOut to be incredibly reliable, but I am going to link the latest I’ve seen from them on Cop City in Atlanta, since cop violence has been so extreme and they are talking about it in depth and this article seems okay: Atlanta Was a Constitution-Free Zone During “Stop Cop City” Week of Action.

People are finally paying attention to the Texas court case before a Trumpist Federal judge who will very probably rule that mifepristone – one of the two very early chemical abortion pills – should not have been approved and that it should be taken off the market nationally. This is of course one of the backdoor approaches they’re taking to banning abortion nationwide. Here’s NBC News. Here’s Rolling Stone on what happens next if he actually rules as he’s expected to do. Here’s Jay Kuo’s analysis.

You’ll notice that most of this is state news. That’s where the action is right now. But here’s a supercut of Tucker Carlson boosting Vladimir Putin’s propaganda in his own words.

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A good deal more backfill

Something I’ve started to do is go through the old Active! archives I recovered a few years ago, and copying some of it over to the blog, all backdated to when it actually went out the first time. I’m doing this for a couple of reasons.

1: Completionism. Eh, not the best reason but there it is.

2: Evidence. If there were a hell, a lot of these people would belong in it. And…

3: History.

Apparently there are people who think fundamentalism and the far right are new events, and that their obsession with killing LGBT people is new?! I got news, hon, this goes way back before all of us.

I can’t document everything, gods know, but I can get what I have out there. So I am. I’m not echoing it to Dreamwidth, so if you want to see it, you’ll have to go visit the blog itself. If you’re following via the Fediverse, I can’t stop them from being put onto the timeline so you’ll see updates as they go up, and yes, the dates will be ancient. That’s on purpose.

But it’s going to be here. A little of it is already is. More will come.

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as i post the history, i’m adding current commentary.

I almost posted this pre-WWW update with today’s date, but I really want the original post in its place in the timeline, so I didn’t. They all have modern commentary leading them off, to give context, but particularly in this case – give it a read.

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