It’s amazing what conservatives think they can get away with by just lying loudly, and what’s worse, they do get away with it. Here’s a college-educated woman, the president of Americans United for Life, testifying before congress that cities power their street lights by burning aborted fetuses as fuel.
Hi. Hello. The video proof. pic.twitter.com/Z0erhTzYMG
— Renee Bracey Sherman (@RBraceySherman) May 19, 2022
But wait…fetuses are small, wet, and squishy. It’s going to constitute a net loss of energy to incinerate them — they’re not like little candles that you can touch a match to them and they then burn. This is a patently ridiculous claim that makes no sense at all.
Amanda Marcotte writes about the cavalcade of lies that came pouring out of that session.
It was only one half-hour into Wednesday’s congressional hearing on abortion access when it became clear that the Republican contributions to the day would be loonier than a QAnon message board.
“In places like Washington D.C.,” fetuses are “burned to power the light’s of the city’s homes and streets,” claimed Catherine Glenn Foster, who had, just minutes before, sworn not to lie under oath. The GOP-summoned witness let loose the wild and utterly false accusation that municipal electrical companies are powered by incinerated fetuses.
“The next time you turn on the light, think of the incinerators,” she said, apparently repeating a misleading talking point from the same anti-choice activists caught stashing fetuses at home. Everything on the right is psychological projection.
But then, abortion is a topic on which they’ve been building lies for decades. Conservatives can pound their fists on tables while spitting out lies for hours.
Republicans pretended progressives don’t know what a “woman” is. They insisted that the mere existence of abortion shows that birth control efforts are useless. (On the contrary, the abortion rate has gone down as birth control access has improved.) They pretended, over and over, that the issue at hand was only late-term abortions. In reality, the abortion bans being passed start at two weeks after a missed period, if not sooner. And then there was the repulsive contributions of Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who pretended that women wait until they go into labor and then abort the pregnancy right before the baby is born. Having made this lie up, he then berated Alabama-based OB-GYN Dr. Yashica Robinson for the existence of a procedure that, quite literally, only happens in his bizarre fantasies.
It’s not just abortion! They can lie about everything.
As their actual political views become harder to defend on the merits, Republicans increasingly embrace conspiracy theories and urban legends to justify the unjustifiable. Want to ban schoolchildren from reading about Martin Luther King Jr.? Just falsely claim that something called “critical race theory” is being taught to school kids and use that as cover. Want to deny trans kids the right to be treated with dignity in public schools? Roll out some wild story about how kids are now “identifying” as cats and using litter boxes in school. Want to rile up the GOP going into the midterms? Screw making any substantive arguments! Just claim that Democrats are conspiring to “replace” white Christians with people of different races and ethnicities, a conspiracy theory lifted directly from neo-Nazis, with the details barely tweaked before being repeated hundreds of times on Fox News.
CRT was a big fat lie from the very beginning: it’s not taught in the public schools, but if you don’t understand what it is, you can pretend any mention of our country’s racist history is CRT. So here’s a woman, a single mother raising a son fathered by a black man, suing a school because, she says, they made her son aware of his race. He never talked about his race or racial issues until the school forced it on him
.
(Apologies for exposing you to the smarmiest man on television, Jesse Watters.)
I think Melissa Riley is the one projecting racial biases here. She says that once the school told him that he was biracial, that he he has seen himself just as a black man
and when he gets a bad grade at school or a girl rejects him, or when his mother asks him to clean the house, that’s racism. Her lawyer claims that the school is brainwashing him and teaching that his behavior is determinined by his race. That’s probably a lie (there are people who argue that), but if the claim is true, that’s not Critical Race Theory at all — CRT is about social structures that affect everyone. She has her own weird ideas about race, as she has said:
“He looks Hawaiian,” she said of her son. “He’s beautiful.”
Eh, African-American, Hawaiian, they’re all the same thing, right?
It’s all projection with these bozos.