The Freedom Mommies are Being Weird Again

 

So, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, Bridget Ziegler and her husband, who happens to be the chair of the Florida GOP, were in a relationship with a third party, a woman who claims she had been sexually assaulted by the husband, Christian Ziegler. If there was a book about this, no one in Florida would be allowed to read it. 

I don't find it hard to believe a GOP official is capable of sexual assault: my word! I'm not the one who will pretend for a minute Republicans are actually moral exemplars--actually, they are kind of fucked up. Just a little bit ago, it was revealed that a spokesperson for the Freedom Mommies in Philadelphia (my home!)  was a registered offender. 

Look, the sexual morality thing is just a grift. Take poolside threesome aficionado Jerry Falwell Jr. as an example. "We're saving kids from being sexually tempted and confused--like we are! So ban books!' 

It's just anti-intellectualism with a spicy homophobic and sex-negative twist, It's not new, and it's dumb. But just so I can sort it out in my mind--is it not queer for the same-sex business to be happening so long 2/3rds of the people are openly Christian and straight-married? Is it less than two mommies queer? Is it more than two daddy penguins raising a baby penguin queer? 

Or is it Anne Frank wants to compare breasts with another adolescent female queer? Because teenagers are curious, but banning Anne Frank's diary has farther reaching concerns. Anti-Semitic ones. Because despite their vehement protestations, The Freedom Mommies are associated with Proud Boys. Though they want to sink that connection. But they stay "Klanned Karenhood" in my mind and so many others.

The Un-Woke Mind Virus

 

Consider if you will, unwoke Ron De Santis--the bland Florida man at war with Disney and Dylan Mulvaney. (Do I need to tap the scoreboard on old Ron?) making his pitch to the American people and the world he's ready to fight for them because...he's mad at Disney and mad at Bud Light, and mad transgender people exist and also still mad about CRT which has never been taught at K-12 and probably mad that Gitmo prisoners both threw up on him and remember his face. He's cautioning against the "woke mind virus."

Who knows if he actually gives a fuck about any of that--the bandwagon exists and the man has feet. I didn't know who Dylan was myself until the Bud Light kerfuffle and now want to protect her like she was my own daughter. If someone thinks it's okay to demonize someone just trying to live their life and be enthused by stuff, surprise--you are the weirdo. Hating someone for their gender expression makes you the hater. That's how it works. Supporting Dylan, or supporting so-called "wokeness" isn't a virus, it's basic decency. I share a planet with other people and we need to coexist. It costs me exactly nothing to respect someone else's pronouns, and it actually enriches me to know that human experience is diverse. 

Just the other evening, Elon Musk sat down with Bill Maher and they talked about the "woke mind virus."

A View of DeSantistan

 

“Leave our country go back to Israel”
“Heil hitler” “sir do you think you should be put in an oven”

These “GDL” nazi animals have been terrorizing & targeting Jews & Jewish communities with impunity

Police are refrained from doing anything. This needs to be stopped pic.twitter.com/WGJrt9GZjE

— Baruch Sandhaus (@BaruchSandhaus) February 22, 2023

While I could talk about how Trump threw hats at the good folks of East Palestine and offered them his brand-name bottled water, I am more interested in what is happening in the state where his chief rival is governor--his "home" state of Florida (since New York's fine but it ain't home no more). More than a year ago, I noted that Florida Nazis were a very bad sign. I think something is very rotten in Florida.  I understand this guy--I do. 

He looks like a little pouty potato, but he's always thinking about how to destroy the history he learned so that no one is ever troubled by it again. He's a clever spud who wrote his own book trying to ignore race and its impact on our history, He would rather no one was ever confronted by bad thoughts. So he's removing the libraries and the people who want to remember what libraries used to be. 

And We All Got a Little Dumber That Day

 

Greene: Can you tell me how much money went to CRT?
Dodaro: CRT?
Greene: It’s a racist curriculum used to teach children that somehow their white skin not equal to black skin and other things pic.twitter.com/ssFZE7Gxlz

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 1, 2023

This hearing was supposed to be something to do with the waste of Trump-era Covid-19 spending, so I don't know how we got here, but I think it has to do with MTG being an astonishingly stupid bubblehuman who does not have any information outside of culture war propaganda. And for a person who received a PPP loan and got forgiveness, she seems stupid as hell about how funds were wasted since it literally looks like she has first-hand experience. But no, Marge, the large sum of money you think went to CRT didn't and why do you think that, and why do you think that's even what CRT is? 

Critical Race Theory is a college-level legal conversation about how laws can be made to disadvantage populations based on their legal definition. Race is a social construct that can be codified into law--that is to say, people can write words to define the way certain people get to be oppressed. It can be based on immigration status, it can be based on assumed ethnicity, it can be based on religious affiliation--basically people can be told who they are by law, and they don't have a say about their identification. Being "one of the good ones" doesn't even legally save you. 

This Sums Up the Day For Me

 

You signed a bill last year eliminating the requirement for Texas schools to teach about MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. https://t.co/Lm8m1cXazN

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) January 16, 2023

All Republicans who have promoted anti-CRT (which is so nebulous it might as well be "anti-Black History") curriculums and also who have gone out of their way to support voter suppression and create hateful divisions among people based on race and creed have no business putting Martin Luther King, Jr.'s name in their mouths--but they do try. And they do it in a way that tastes like an insult, to be honest. If they are going to stand for everything the man fought against, they could just as well choose to stay quiet and let their actions speak for themselves, because that's what will actually be remembered of them, anyway.

UPDATE: More of this, actually:

delete your tweet rand. https://t.co/KzovVTcQOW pic.twitter.com/NettLrb0HQ

— Annie Wu (all socials: annie_wu_22) (@Annie_Wu_22) January 16, 2023

We all know the senator changed his mind in an election year and supported the act he previously blocked.  But we don't forget a lot out here on the internet. 

Jesus, Guns, Babies, and American Exceptionalism

 

Rep Brian Babin (R-TX): "The United States of America has always had guns. It's our history. We were built on the Judeo-Christian foundation and with guns" pic.twitter.com/vldB0ODaS7

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) May 25, 2022

When Senator Ted Cruz got visibly disturbed during an interview and walked away after the words "American Exceptionalism" were spoken, something snapped into frame for me:  so much of American history seems to assume our current status in the world is the result of faith and superior firepower. The idea of the gun as a sacral part of our national religion isn't really just a metaphor for some of us--it is reality. 

The religious right has long suggested that if "they" (a tyrannical leftist, probably godless Communist, government) come to take the guns away, the Bibles are next. It always sounded like fear-mongering to me of the typical "Red Scare" tropes, but it also resonated as tangentially white supremacist to me because gun-grabbing was the impetus of the uprising in the neo-Nazi classic The Turner Diaries. I'm starting to see it, though, as an artifact of our founding myths, and it defines the divide in our politics--what makes the US unique or great? Are we a creedal nation or a story of blood and soil? And was any of this especially ordained by God? 

Leave it to the "Jesus, Guns, Babies" lady for clarifying this for me--even though she lost her bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination (or did she? Mike Lindell is asking, so, uh, there's that). The quick capsule review of American history that a lot of people seem to have absorbed goes a little something like this: 

Christopher Columbus discovered the promised land in 1492, then the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock to form a shining city on a hill, so America overthrew British tyranny, had a civil war over states rights, freed the slaves, conquered the West (by killing most of the people previously living there) and then kicked everyone's ass in WW2 because we have nukes now, so thank you Jesus and Smith & Wesson. 

          And they called it manifest destiny. And it was good.

I may be exaggerating, but I don't think I'm off by that much. This is why CRT and the 1619 Project have set the usual suspects off--it challenges their post-Columbian chapters of the American Bible. It's like arguing against creationism.  It fiddles with a worldview where American primacy is founded in freedom and God has always been on our side. They don't see the past is existing outside of the formalized, handed-down from Mount Rushmore version*, and then continue to operate as if might made right. 

And that's where the guns come in. The iron rod is how the faithful Americans earn their New Canaan. The land is purified in blood, because we're in times of tribulation. Wars. Rumors of wars. Pestilence. Famine. You know. Same shit, different century. So you have to be morally and militarily prepared. 

And how do the people in the Church of American Exceptionalism mentally cope with the violence? It's supposed to happen.  It's the Abrahamic sacrifice to show fidelity in order to get that which has been promised. The Lord provided a sheep for the holocaust--and it's hopefully other people's babies. 

That sacrifice is supposed to make us exceptional and give us the freest and most prosperous country on earth. It's why people all over the world want to come here, after all, whether we want them to or not.

I've Seen the Future and It Is Mother

 

The genuinely stoked millennial in the selected picture is Trump-supported state senate candidate Jackie Eubanks, who does not think women should have sex outside of marriage or for other than procreative purposes and definitely should not have birth control.  Birth control is outside of God's moral order, which I guess he told her this one time at Bible camp, and now welp. Also too, you apparently can't have a successful society outside of Christianity. Sorry, most of world history. You are apparently entirely wrong for having existed outside of Miss Thang's experience. 

I'm being mean, but mostly because this moral scold is young enough to be one of my not-even youthful indiscretions. You are not young enough to be the welp of me and tell me when, with whom and for actual progeny!? I am going to fuck. Oh no. Jacky and her sock puppet Jesus are not the boss of my vagina. They can mind their own business. 

But Trumpism is apparently going full metal-mama on us. Matt Schlapp's response to whether Great Replacement Theory is a thing is to tie it to abortion--why don't we just stop white ladies from aborting the future? The white future. The future that isn't reliant on what Steve King spoke of as "somebody else's babies".  (Right up in Hungary where I guess democracy is dead and long live Orbanism? Anti gay, anti-minority, paranoid, declining? ) 

The answer to "white genocide" (which isn't happening, unless you count suicide by desperation and incel by having extremely bad internet habits--but none of that is imposed by the outside) is supposed to be women wanting to have children, but none of this culture is making me even think for a moment I missed out by not making white babies for this shithole culture. Whiteness isn't enough and making kids would be too much for me. Writing is my babies. People who don't read wouldn't understand that and that's why my blog isn't for them. And people who never woke up and cried that they had to get out of bed don't understand why I never wanted kids that I would have to make my body do shit for everyday when it was enough I did anything for me.

Fascism is making reproduction-capable people into baby factories and telling them they need to be happy they have a job.  It is telling disabled people they have to produce to be considered valuable. It is saying something is so special about motherhood that rejecting it is a sin. I sometimes wonder if I might be a good dad-figure to someone--I have lots of drinking and fighting and sportsmanship lessons to bestow. But the government should not tell people how to make their families. They should not tell people with uteruses they have to be mothers anymore than people with penises need to be fathers. We need to do these things for ourselves. And race is irrelevant to what makes a society--any society that hates and micromanages people is already fucked. 

If You Ever Wondered

 

The party of Lincoln, folks, the party of Lincoln. pic.twitter.com/Rd4FiXZmIG

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) March 22, 2022

Yesterday, GOP senators threw skepticism about birth control, the right to choose, gay marriage, interracial marriage, etc. around because there was nothing objectionable at all about the SCOTUS nominee in front of them. Their phobias about humans who are not straight and white and their contempt for child-bearers' rights is what they wanted to talk about yesterday. They used an academic topic they've been demonizing to try to smear an actual well-qualified Black judicial candidate. The image above is not a tasteless accident--it's what they are actually campaigning on. They thought this was a great look for them.

Newt Gingrich is Saying What Republicans Think

 

I was just mentioning that Newt Gingrich is a huge part of the reason why you have to treat Republicans as potentially hostile, but Jonathan Chait explained Gingrich's influence on today's GOP more fully in response to Newt explaining to a fish-jawed Bartiromo that in the event of Republicans taking the House back, the January 6th Committee would be going to jail.

Jail? Is investigating a presidential administration's response and responsibilities regarding a terror attack (because the riot that day was, indeed, domestic terror), then why did nothing happen to House Benghazi investigators? Could it be that no random statute exists preventing Congress from investigating matters of government that concerns them? 

Gingrich knows that. He's also just trying to inflame public opinion against the committee and try to stop them from continuing their duty because he's partisan trash. He's creating that old "permission structure".  Republicans can have their riots, whether of the Brooks Brothers kind or the more army/navy surplus style one, but Democrats are barred from complaint. Democrats should be locked up.  Hillary Clinton, Ilhan Omar, Gretchen Whitmer, any of them.

But in lieu of jailing people for assisting the January 6th Committee, there is possibly, firing them: 

The top staff investigator on the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has been fired by the state’s new Republican attorney general from his position as the top lawyer for the University of Virginia, from which he was on leave while working on the congressional inquiry. 

The office of the Virginia attorney general, Jason S. Miyares, said the firing of the investigator, Timothy J. Heaphy, was not related to the Jan. 6 investigation, but the move prompted an outcry from Democrats in the state, who accused him of taking the highly unusual action as a partisan move to further former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to undermine the committee’s work.

See, Virginia just came under new management, and now they are clearly doing things differently there.  Like, banning mask mandates (even though masks apparently help!) and setting up a hotline to snitch on teachers who might be teaching thoughtcrimes.  So why wouldn't the Virginia AG get rid of a troublesome lawyer? It's probably what Ron DeSantis would have done in his fiefdom state. DeSantis has created a climate of fear, and it really shows. 

Republicans talk a fun game about free speech, but hate being talked about. They still want to be McCarthyites and treat dissenters (even Republicans who disagree with them, who are RINOS) as somehow "un-American".  

I won't call Republicans un-American, though. Staging coups and voter suppression are as American as Red Scares and cherry pie. I am just saying they are wrong and there is never any good reason to support Republicans ever. Their policies are bad and their tactics are bad, and I can't even chicken and egg which part came first. 

This isn't a case of Newt Gingrich losing it--this is who he is and what he represents.  And others of his party in the "comment section" of life say worse all the time. 

The Content of Their Character Is Showing

The family of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and their supporters marched in Washington urging passage of a law to protect voters from racial discrimination https://t.co/5NvZYMy5St

— Reuters (@Reuters) January 18, 2022

Yesterday, a lot of politicians were "busted" quoted MLK, Jr.'s words while doing nothing to support the goals of equality, even some who actively work against them. In order to participate in the day, it would appear that a sanitized and color-blind version of King gives them comfort, but they misconstrue the body of his work. Were he alive today, their criticisms would be similar to those made of today's Black Lives Matter activists--and we know this because we can read the criticisms from that time and compare them.

(There are also people in this country who seem to think "sanitizing" bookshelves will somehow improve upon race relations--a version of "not seeing color" that means not seeing the work of or knowing about the lives of people of color.)

But to put it simply, it's very duplicitous to praise someone for articulating a dream and then working against what would make it a reality--such as equal access to the ballot. In actuality, I would consider it very revealing of the character of those that would do so.

Here's What You Voted For, Virginia

 

His administration first off banned mask mandates in schools and vaccine mandates for state employees and banned CRT (let's get real: he banned Black History) and totally fired the parole board, the Conviction Integrity Unit and staff working on human trafficking. I'm genuinely not sure that Virginia exactly voted for all that, but it was the stuff Youngkin decided to do first off. 

Also his wife's dress is the worst. I am so sorry to bring this up, but it is unflattering in every possible way. Maybe she spent a lot on it, but it is colorful in a bad way, and demure in a bad way, and frowsy in every way. This is not to blame her for any of her husband's policies, but she is married to him and she did choose that dress. And Virginia did vote for Youngkin and these half-assed culture war positions are what they will now have to deal with, because some people thought good effective Republicans who weren't culture war weirdos was still a thing. 

It is not. All Republican politicians should be regarded as potential culture war weirdos. Because if you fall for their promises, you will be stuck in photos (history) wearing them like a bad frowsy regrettable frock. It's just not that easy to tear off a stupid and out of touch governor with bad ideas in the way one tears off an ugly dress that looks like chintz curtains with minimal tailoring, except for unnecessary flourishes.

I don't know why I went so hard on that dress. But it all applies to ever voting for a Republican. And if you stick up for the dress on that regular middle-aged woman who could look so much smarter and actually has, I will hiss at you with great vehemence. It's grandmother's parlor upholstery.  I am for liberating Suzanne from all relevant disasters as a feminist and my support starts with saying no to this Calvinist one room church get-up. I am for liberating the US from wannabe famous signifying politicians, so Glenn is on the shitlist. 

Make of any of that what you will. 

CNN Falls for Mommaganda, Again

How two Florida moms spearheaded a parent movement aiming to impact the 2022 elections https://t.co/kfCD4V7G9r

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) December 17, 2021

Oof, it feels like we just went over this. And yet, the journalists at CNN still haven't sorted out that the plucky mommies fighting the system are a front backed by dark money, no matter what kind of festive Xmas tchotchkes they're selling. They are the ones using COVID-19 as an opportunity, and there is nothing warm and fuzzy about people screaming at each other at school board meetings. 

JFC. At some point, it starts to look like they fall for it on purpose. 

 

Where's Your Dr. Seuss, Now?

 

Texas school district pulls 400 books from libraries after state GOP lawmaker's inquiry https://t.co/YFZ3PoP9VI pic.twitter.com/gn68pUEnTi

— The Hill (@thehill) December 7, 2021

Before I freak entirely out:

Many of the books on Krause's list center around abortion, teen pregnancy, sex education, LGBTQ narratives, the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-racism. Some of the popular titles on the list are "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, "The Confessions of Nat Turner" by William Styron, "The Cider House Rules" by John Irving, and "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy" and "Between the World and Me," by Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

"Most of those are appropriate and will stay on our library shelves as is, however, some may contain content that needs further review to ensure the books are accessible based on age appropriateness," Aubrey Chancellor, executive director of communications for the school district, said in a statement obtained by NBC. "For us, this is not about politics or censorship, but rather about ensuring that parents choose what is appropriate for their minor children."

Look, I feel like it's thought-policing the kiddos to limit their choices based on what adults think is age-appropriate because I can not begin to tell you what my hyperlexic reading list was about when I was like, 10 or 11, and my dad gave me a dollar to not read Pearl S. Buck's Pavilion of Women when I already had reread it a few times. (This logically drew me to want to read D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and other verboten authors--and I still don't know exactly what made my dad find that one fraught because it isn't exactly a well-known title and I don't know if he skimmed it and went "whoa!" or what. My baby brain never saw the "Whoa!" bit.) 

Like Mom & Apple Pie

Just to get this off my chest--how did CNN find these ladies? Because Twitter figured out that they were activists of various shades. It shouldn't even be news to an outlet like CNN that when you see supposed "grassroots" movements spring up all over the country in the way school boards were hit by anti-mask, anti-shutdown, anti-CRT activism, like Tea Party activists swarming townhalls just about ten years ago over the ACA--maybe question what you're looking at?

Because while parents have great reasons to be frustrated lately, their anger is being deliberately shaped with outside help. 

Now, I feel extremely cynical writing about this. I'm the goddamn mirror image of the blonde ladies right there, except I'm more red-headed, and have no kids, and am atheist, and queer. But leaving all that aside, I'm culturally Catholic and damn-near white as nurses' shoes. So maybe I almost understand what kind of mistruths move these folks--but I don't. I can't. Lies are lies, no matter who tells them, and when they further marginalize people, I am not there for it. 

So anyway, back to the mom thing: remember this mom? Yeah, she was probably connected to Republicans too, and stuff, but you know what? McAuliffe could have blunted his "parents shouldn't determine what books" etc. soundbite with an ad with another white mom talking about freedom of speech. We don't have to assume all white moms are one way.

Using Words We All Understand

 

.@DanaBashCNN: Are Democrats too woke, Senator?

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA): "There is not a school in Virginia that teaches critical race theory, but Governor-elect Youngkin stirred up the cultural pot there." pic.twitter.com/b2iOCybxIp

— The Recount (@therecount) November 7, 2021

So, I could have blogged about how CNN let themselves be fooled by the nice, blonde suburban housewives in Virginia who most definitely aren't GOP operatives/astroturf-adjacent, but that's something I'll prrroooooobbaabbblllyy get to later? Because The New York Times also falls for this sort of thing, and it it happens so often anymore it really can't be accidental, right?  

But I'd rather just focus on the word "woke" because she used it like it only meant one thing and everyone knew what it was, and it definitely does not and everyone doesn't. So we argue about "wokeness" instead of whether anti-racism and accurate history is valuable, getting bogged down in a term that wholly adopts a right-wing frame that there is something "wrong" with what "wokeness" is, since the term is used so generally to mean "liberal things conservatives don't trust", it might as well boil down to "vibes". 

She knows what she meant by the word--short-hand for, shouldn't Democrats do more stuff to appeal to swing vote Carville thinks is out there? And well. Maybe that's how she could have asked it. 

Autumn of Our Discontent

 

Election Day 2021's warning sign, for me, was the peculiar gathering in Dealey Plaza, of all places, of Qanon faithful assembling for a grand announcement by either JFK Jr. or Sr. (both deceased, and to the best of all inquiries of public record to discern, Democrats at last breathing memory) with the expectation that it would lead to the revelation of the One True President Trump and usher in some kind of new era. What we are looking at here is a phenomenon where an off-shoot of a somewhat incidental and transparently bullshit conspiracy theory (Pizzagate) has transmogrified into a kind of syncretic conspiracy theory cult, looking for a singularity that finally unifies all the conspiracy theories into one big satisfying thing. 

(I kid you not, the allegation that the Kennedys--kinfolk of Brian Boru, represent the Sang Real or Holy Grail legend of human nobility possessed of the bloodline of Christ via the Merovingians combined with the notion of a kind of Elders of the Priory of Sion finagling of an eventual theocratic United States victorious over the bloodsucking Satanist human traffickers that otherwise have been in charge since whenever the cultists deem shit went haywire under the auspices of some kind of God-appointed figure really does seem both like entire nonsense, and kind of cohere if you have studied  US conspiracy theory. )

When JFK Jr. or Sr. did not appear at Dealey Plaza (a morbid location for a revelation, in any event) and it also began to rain, some believers shifted their attention to another location: well surely, at the Rolling Stones concert something might happen (an example of High Boomerism if I ever witnessed one). However, they literally got no satisfaction. 

Hey, Check Out Book-Banning Becky!

 

Was it really just the beginning of this year that conservatives were all over the place whining about how cancel-culture was ruining Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head? And now, GOP VA gubernatorial hopeful Glenn Youngkin is hoping to win his race by featuring the "powerful story" of....

A book-banner, Laura Murphy. Her nearly-college age son was assigned a book in his AP English class which he totally could have opted out of reading, but because it gave him bad dreams (so the story goes) she wanted to have a talk with, uh. The manager of books, I guess. Which is all around a really weird reaction to a Pulitzer prize winning novel that is often read in high school classrooms, but probably wasn't really written for young Blake.  Or at least, not specifically, and maybe that's what really ground Ms. Murphy's gears. 

Now, the lad was hardly scarred for life by the book, but I don't know. Having his mommy tell everyone he was reduced to night terrors to promote a political agenda feels like he may have other issues in his life. But let's say the book truly did disturb him--what is a parent to do?

How about: talk to your kid? See, this is what bothers me about the whole "anti-CRT" movement as well while we're here. You are raising kids to be adults that will live in a real world where bad things happen. Schools can provide a place of physical safety, but they can't always protect from emotional discomfort. Of course, history and literature have tragic and uncomfortable aspects. But if a parent wants to guide their kid, instead of limiting exposure to difficult topics, how about--talking to them! 

But back to the irony--well, there isn't any, really. Youngkin is just reaching for culture war content in the hopes that it nails the race down for him. Sure, you could infer that there's something a little hypocritical about conservatives decrying cancel culture and complaining about woke snowflakes who need safe spaces, when actually, conservatives are fine with cancelling content that makes them uncomfortable and impinges on the safe spaces of white privilege. But that would just be critical thinking on your part.

The culture war wants nothing to do with that, thank you. And unfortunately, an ad where McAuliffe is the bad guy for not sparing young Blake and his concerned mom from the horrors of the icky book might even be sadly effective. I think it's pitiful, because this tells you nothing about Youngkin--other than he thinks this is a winning message, but as policy, it amounts to "Something something schools, something something, I'll let parents pick what books we don't teach."  Which honestly doesn't seem ideal at all.