This is one of the best sentences I’ve read about the rest of this year: Messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio explains that victory in November depends on convincing low-information voters that the MAGA threat to democracy is real. That they want to be in charge, regardless of what you have to say about anything, and that they want elections to happen, maybe – but they most certainly do not want them to matter.
I can’t agree more. The MAGAts want elections only they can win, and the low-information voters desperately – desperately – want to believe that everything is normal and fine and ordinary when it is ever so not. They will and do absolutely both-sides everything, and yes, they’re the people who will believe Trump when he says he made insulin cheaper when it was Biden, and yes, they’re the people who think Biden caused Roe v. Wade to be overturned.
These are the people we have to find a way to reach, in no small part because the MAGAts rely on them in so many ways, and are always looking for ways to reach them with disinformation. Not just at the national level, but at the local level, too.
Just for one example, here’s Sinclair Broadcasting pushing another faux “local” story onto every local TV station they own, this one a hit piece on Joe Biden. They do this regularly and will do more of them, particularly as the election approaches.
These are disinformation pieces with scripts sent to each local station with orders to produce them as “local” stories, but in reality, they are centrally coordinated propaganda campaigns.
I don’t normally edit to add in an essay like this, but I am; today, June 14th, rightist media across the board pushed a disinformation video claiming President Biden wandered off into a field at the G7. This is a lie. The video is deceptively edited, and cropped to hide the paratroopers he was talking to, and the parachuting demonstration they had just completed. Here is a more complete video. This was done knowingly, with intent to deceive, but that doesn’t stop millions of people from accepting the lie without question.
Low information voters have no idea that this is happening. None. They’ll catch “joe biden so old and feeble isn’t it worrying” and integrate it without much of a thought while waiting for Wheel of Fortune to come on. And as much as that sounds like a slam, it’s not; the local Sinclair station literally drops these things in before Wheel of Fortune.
Because they know how that works.
Another example are the new crop of disinformation websites that have gone up posing as local news, funded by “dark money” sources, particularly in swing states, where they outnumber actual newspapers. These are, naturally, honeypots, and they overwhelmingly – overwhelmingly – lean hard right.
So since we’re talking about state and local propaganda and state and local disinformation and state and local low-info voters, let’s turn to actual state-level Republican actions across the country. Let’s talk about what they’re doing with power, things “low information” voters don’t know, but might be less likely to tune out reflexively as soon as you bring it up.
I mean, they’re used to aggressively turning out the national situation. Maybe they’ll pay more attention if it’s closer to home, right?
The Colorado Republican Party issued a call to burn all Pride flags, complete with a nod to an infamous anti-gay slur. The slur they reference is “God Hates Fags,” and the reference is “God Hates Flags.” They also called LGBT people paedophiles, using the phrase “godless groomers.”
I want to stress: this isn’t a faction, or a fringe group. It was put out by the state party on their own social media, and it was signed by the party chair, Chairman Dave Williams.
That’s the kind of reality you have to stress when you talk about this: it’s not fringe groups anymore – not that it ever really was – and it’s not people on the sidelines trying to get attention. It’s entire state parties and their leadership calling for this, and it’s all the state parties.
Washington State Republicans want to hide the cost of their pro-climate-change anti-health-care-funding tax-cuts-for-the-rich initiatives. So far, happily, they’re failing – but they’re still in court trying to get it done They’re also backing a stealth anti-LGBT initiative they’re calling a Parental Rights Act, as so many other state Republican parties are doing. Read up on “Let’s Go Washington” and their Tim-Eyman-with-a-budget leader, hedge fund manager Brian Heywood.
Low-information voters will absolutely fall for the “make gas prices cheaper!!” campaigns. It’s a lie, obviously. But most of ’em will fall for it, if we can’t get through to them.
Virginia Republicans blocked a bill banning police from getting search warrants for menstrual data. This data is already being used elsewhere to try to prosecute women for possible/theoretical abortions, so it’s not just theory, and even if it were – why would you block this if you didn’t want to use it that way?
Low information voters need to know that yeah, the Christofascists really do mean to follow through on all this, and yeah, it’ll affect them and theirs, not just “other people.”
Republican North Dakota passed a bill requiring anti-abortion propaganda be shown to elementary school children; several other Republican states are considering similar laws. Not to put too fine a point on it, if you can’t get rid of public schools, you can at least – they feel – turn them into fundamentalist propaganda machines.
In Republican Arkansas, Arkansas governor says state won’t comply with new federal rules on treatment of trans students, pledging to continue their abuse of trans kids. Republican Oklahoma and Republican Texas are making the same pledges, along with other states.
MAGAts and Christofascists have a marked fondness for hurting children. I hope that pattern is clear, and that you can make that pattern clear to those who refuse to acknowledge the reality of it.
In Republican Florida, “Florida’s Anti-Trans Bathroom Law Spurs Harrowing Vigilante Attacks.” That’s absolutely by design; the fundamentalist movement that now jointly controls the Republican Party with the neofascist movement has always thrived on personal violence, and, well, the fascist wing? Of course they want that.
They’re also banning rainbows. Laugh if you want, but this is literally exactly how Putin started, and how LGBT people are completely illegal in Russia again. And that’s exactly what they want here, and worse.
In North Carolina, Donald Trump endorsed pastor Mark Burns, who calls for LGBTQ+ executions. Literally death to queers. He’s in a runoff for the Republican nomination for Representative, having made it past the first round.
Even when I was being handed pamphlets calling for my own death, low-info and even moderate-info voters refused to accept it was serious, even when I had the pamphlet. So this one’s real work.
Republican Mississippi Passes Bill Allowing Cis People To Sue Over Trans Bathroom Usage. They’re targeting trans people in general, of course, but in particular college students. And yes, the governor did sign it, according to LegiScan.
Republican Idaho passed a “Book Bounty” bill allowing anyone to sue a library for any material that their 1972(!) law considers “harmful to minors,” including – naturally – any reference to LGBTQ characters. As a result, many libraries are trying to figure out how they can operate, and some have barred anyone under the age of 18.
This is, of course, exactly what the Christofascists want. The next step will be to close those libraries. Low-information voters don’t want to think anything like libraries can actually change, so this might be a good one, in that “it already is changing” way.
In Republican Texas: “Texas professors sue Biden for the right to discriminate against trans students. They also want to fire teaching assistants over abortion history” Yes, they want to be able to fire TAs if they had abortions at some point in their lives, and they want to be able to fail trans students for being trans. See also this horror show.
One repeated cry of the low-information voter is “they don’t really mean it” and “they won’t really do it.” They do mean it, and they are doing it, and you will not be an exception. We have to communicate that, and we have to make it stick.
So let’s close on a few examples of the national attacks on the Republic being brought down to the state level.
Pennsylvania Republicans – or a bunch of them – jeered and booed officers who defended the Capitol building on January 6th. This tells you whose side they were – and still are – on.
Back in Republican Texas, Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton Is Increasingly Using Consumer Protection Laws to Pursue Political Targets. Again, not a fringe figure, a statewide leader. When Republicans talk about “weaponising the justice system,” they know what they’re talking about because they’ve already been doing it. We’ll talk about that more in an article later, that focuses on the Federal level.
Finally – and again in Republican Texas – the GOP have learned from their loss of gerrymandering in Wisconsin, and want to set up an in-state Electoral College to break voter equality and insure they cannot lose elections, like Hungary and Russia on a state scale.
The idea is to change elections so that you cannot win a statewide vote without carrying the majority of counties, which will make extremely Republican counties of a few hundred people have the same voting weight as millions of people in San Antonio, diluting Democratic votes by tens of thousands of times.
In the most extreme case, the votes of 4.8 million people in Harris County, Texas will count exactly the same as the votes of 43 fine residents of Loving County, making one (1) Loving County vote count exactly the same as 112,000 votes in Harris.
The number of people voting won’t matter, and that’s what they want.
Again, to stress the reality: this is not a fringe group, this is the platform of the Texas Republican Party. Not of a faction: of the whole.
As one commentator I know likes to say, “they don’t want to represent you, they want to rule you,” and that’s what we have to get through to the low-info voter.
The Republican Party do not want to represent, they want to rule.
And that’s what we have to get the low-information voter to understand.
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