Klanned Karenhood and Their Fellow Travelers

 

I saw this on Twitter, and wanted to talk about why this particularly bothers me as (extreme Quark from Deep Space Nine voice) a "biological female"--there is a thing we don't really address much: toxic femininity. We can talk about abusive men, men who think with their fists, masculinity in the form of right-fighting and DARVO--but not these women. The ones who wouldn't do violence themselves but would cheer their men on for doing it. (They are also sister shafters--they would sell out any number of women in an instant to gain points with the patriarchy.)

Now maybe the above screencap of a freedom mommy calling for Biden's execution is unfair: she was mad because she thought US military service dogs were left behind, and while that wasn't exactly the case, I also hate to see animals potentially harmed and could get good and fighting mad about it. But I'd have checked the story, and not gone right to talking about execution because I'm not one of these ol' gals.  

But the freedom mommies don't need good reasons to want violence--it avenges them. Or at least satisfies them that their loyalty to the patriarchy has a payoff. See how they love when the daddies get in on the action? Think of a woman goading her significant other to go fight that man who has been looking at her. (Think about the history of white women and lynching, and TERFS and violence against trans people.) They don't get to rock the block of someone they don't like, but they do get told that the one who rocks the cradle rules the world. 

I'm not blaming William Ross Wallace for it--that was the era. We just aren't in the 19th century anymore. And my real problem is--WE AREN'T GOING BACK TO IT, EITHER!

I'd rather we not go back to these old gals from the mid-20th century either:

Hollering in the background at Elizabeth Eckford, or these other ones, hollering in the background at little Ruby Bridges.

The Moms for Liberty don't like that Twitterzens and waspish wits elsewhere are calling them Klanned Karenhood, or Assholes with Casseroles, or the Mary Kay Kay Kay or any of the other nicknames that are less Orwellian and more descriptive. (Whatever happened to the so-called tolerant Left? Indeed!)  I myself have wondered if "Mothers of the Future Confederacy" wouldn't be most apropos. 

But just to take us back to where we left off, they don't quote Hitler by accident: here's one of the speakers at their confab this weekend in my hometown:

“And here’s the thing,” Robinson said during his speech on Sunday. “Whether you’re talking about Adolf Hitler; whether you’re talking about Chairman Mao; whether you’re talking about Stalin; whether you’re talking about Pol Pot; whether you’re talking about Castro in Cuba; or whether you’re talking about a dozen other despots all around the globe, it is time for us to get back and start reading some of those quotes.”

But why? Sadly, I think it's the same thing as when we try to tell the wannabe fascists that 1984 and A Handmaid's Tale are dystopias, not blueprints for something good. They mean to learn from the examples of the past, and BY GAWD THEY'LL DO IT RIGHT THIS TIME! Because authoritarians always think there is a right way, and they have it. That's what makes them that. (I'm whatever the opposite of authoritarian is--I think everything people do is fucked up at least a little, so cut slack wherever and whenever. Except for the authoritarians themselves--they don't cut no slack, they don't get no slack back.) 

Anyhow, to some extent, they revel in getting called out on their violence-ideation and Hitler quotes and whatnot, so they can crow about their opposition being "triggered". That tingling sensation means their message is working!  Take fellow traveler Josh OfErin, who oopsed a fake Patrick Henry quote from a white supremacist magazine:

He was "told" the libs were triggered. Or he was told he was wrong by a multitude of people online, and has decided that attention means he "won" a valuable prize. Nonetheless, I guess persisting in being wrong online is a kind of expression of manhood. I'm sure his wife is proud of him. (I kid. He absolutely isn't doing stuff to prove his masculinity and could so, but doesn't even need to grow a beard. Or whatever. Anyway, he tells mistruths for the greater glory of God, who needs him to lie for some reason.) 

He's trying to retcon history to undo church and state separation. The kind of retconned history the freedom mommies want taught in our schools--the utterly wrong-headed fact-denial that doesn't help anything and would obviously (unless you're ideologically blinkered) make everything actually worse since it means one doesn't understand the realities they're working with. 

In any event, the mocking will continue of these deeply misguided and vicious people until they have dug themselves a hole of the exact depth where they can do their thing and we don't have to listen to them--because they are wrong and noxiously so.