In an earlier post, I wrote about how the GOP is on a slippery slope when it comes to some issues, where in pandering to their base by accepting certain premises like that life begins at conception, they found themselves quickly dragged to the logical end point that embryos produced in the IVF process are children and thus cannot be destroyed. Now they fond themselves struggling to extricate themselves from the mess they put themselves into without disavowing the ‘life begins at conception’ premise because doing so would infuriate their base.
But that is not the only slippery slope that the GOP find itself on. It is as if the floodgates of oil have opened on the slopes and there is no way to halt the descent.
The religious right wing extremists in the party, in their pursuit of creating a Christian nation, are going after their next targets. One is contraception. They seek to overturn the Supreme Court precedent set in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut that overturned an 1879 law “that banned the use of any drug, medical device, or other instrument in furthering contraception.” Religious people hate this ruling because it allows people to have sex without the fear of getting pregnant and the thought that people may have sex for pleasure alone strikes them with horror. They are seeking to outlaw birth control once again.
At a Turning Point USA women’s summit held in June, podcast host Alex Clark encouraged women to stop taking their hormonal birth control, because, she said, “it is completely altering your personality” and that “many birth control pills are actually abortifacients.” The same month, Marjorie Taylor Greene falsely claimed that the “Plan B pill kills a baby in the womb once a woman is already pregnant.” And in his concurring opinion to the Dobbs decision, Clarence Thomas suggested that the court reconsider other cases, including Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that granted married couples the right to buy and use contraceptives.
They also seek to reverse the decisions that allowed same-sex marriage and decriminalized homosexual acts. Tennessee is already targeting same-sex marriage.
There are other slippery slopes. CPAC used to be a venue for conservatives to discuss policy issues and how to advance them. Those days are long gone. This year saw Nazis openly attending and recruiting, something that would have been seen in the past as discrediting the conservative movement.
We also see that GOP candidates for major state and national offices no longer feel that need to hide their extreme views to make them palatable to the electorate. They are letting their freak flags fly proudly. Take for example North Carolina. Note that while it is a generally red state, it is not deep red. In fact, the outgoing governor is a Democrat. But Mark Robinson, the current lieutenant governor, was the winner of Tuesday’s Republican primary for governor, and provides yet another example of how the GOP has become a party of extremists.
Robinson has a history of controversial statements. He has described Covid-19 as a “globalist” conspiracy to destroy Donald Trump. In 2021, he criticized efforts to teach LGBTQ+ issues in sex education, referring to transgender and homosexual people as “filth”. He has also said gays are equivalent to “what the cows leave behind” as well as “maggots” and “flies”.
He implied at a campaign event last month that transgender women should be arrested if they use women’s restrooms.
He once described the movie Black Panther as “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by [a] satanic marxist”. He then said it “was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets”.
It should not be a surprise that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is a huge fan of Robinson and calls him “Martin Luther King on steroids” and “Martin Luther King times two”, whatever the hell that means.
On The Daily Show Ronny Chieng describes Robinson’s views.
It is hard to imagine that such a person is the party’s standard bearer for the position of chief executive of the state. But as Chieng says, SSAT has made the GOP such that to be successful in the party now, you have to be kind of insane. In contrast, his Democratic opponent for the governor post is Josh Stein, the current attorney general, who seems to be a normal human being.
Is it that they’ve become extremists, or that they’ve gotten far worse at masking it? Or that they feel more comfortable NOT masking it?
More comfortable not masking, for sure. I saw it immediately the day after the 2016 election.
North Carolina’s elected Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson is even more extreme than the OP lists.
He said in 2020 that he wants to go back to the era when women couldn’t vote.
Strangely enough, quite a few people who voted for him are…women.
It was said long ago. Women voting for the GOP are like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders.
More from the Huffpost article.
Mark Robinson is a blatant, open misogynist.
He really hates women.
He is also a poly hater. His list of hates includes Muslims, gays, Trans, and Jews.
Notably absent is him saying anything positive or outlining plans to deal with the problems facing the people of North Carolina.
The tories in Britain have also partly given up pretending, but they have not yet reached the depth of their Republican cousins.
Since the Dems have a pretty good war chest and the Republicans are nearly broke, I look forward to brutal campaign ads quoting the crazies. Let voters see Marjorie Taylor Greene and this Robinson person as symbolic of the Trump-era GOP.
@5:
In today’s news I see:
I nearly fucking choked!
xohjoh2n@6
Patel and Braverman are certainly terrorism and extremism experts. Just not counter-…
Roe, Obergefell and Griswold were always givens, but the case I can’t wait for them to bring up will be Lovings. Let’s see Thomas tap dance around that one!
@1 Matt G: All of them at once. The Republican party is caught in a loop where the extremists are doing things that make the moderates leave. Then the Republicans need to keep their numbers up and the only group available for them to recruit from significantly is the extreme right. As the party recruits more extreme right it’s political position (both stated and unstated) moves further right, driving out even more moderates.
The Republican party has be dancing around the edge of that for a long time but the wealthy that finance the party & the senior elected officials have kept it under control because they didn’t want the party to go too far right. Under Trump it turned into an uncontrolled feedback loop. Trump didn’t understand or care about the problem and casually encouraged it because the hard right supported him more.
hyphenman @8: you beat me to it. 😎
At some point the non-fascist segment of billionaire campaign donors may hopefully see the MAGA train has jumped the tracks and is incapable of governing. They can see the example of Argentina and an economic collapse is not what they want.
Question: Do the billionaires have the power to help a new conservative party emerge (like when the Republican party replaced the Whigs)?
I wonder what happens when they realize that miscarriages should be involuntary manslaughter by their logic.
FIFY.
@12:
You realise that’s already happening, right?
birgerjohansson @ # 11: Do the billionaires have the power to help a new conservative party emerge (like when the Republican party replaced the Whigs)?
The situations don’t compare very closely. The Whigs had officially dissolved before the Republicans founded their new party, and the political situation in the US continued its fragmentation (Lincoln, f’rinstance, won in 1860 against three other national-level candidates, divided by both party and region), driven by racism/slavery and by backlash against blatant and publicly-acknowledged corruption.
Perhaps the leading similarity: those pushing for secession/”national divorce” then and now both imagine(d) it would come easily.
@11 birgerjohansson: They have the money to help one but probably not the organization or leadership to create one. The rich Republicans that have the skills to form a new party are the ones that like it drifting far right, the ones that are both social and economic hard right.
The rich are aware of the situation at this point at some level. Money for the RNC and Trump’s Pacs has dried up.
@11 birgerjohansson,
No need. They have the democratic party as the new conservative party.
If a new party forms, it will probably come out of the left.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_(United_States)#Name_and_symbols)
Sad.
@xohjoh2n @13
I havent read about that yet. Im assuming it will be on the legislative agenda after they prosecute people who have abortions for murder though.
@birgerjohansson @11
I think most billionaires (even if they are of the non-fascist kind) see incapable of governing as a plus (no regulations!) and they can still rely on the MAGA politicians to get tax breaks passed (Jesus and Trump are both against tax collectors dont you know?)
Non-MAGA voters in NC must turn out in droves. That someone this vicious and crazed could be the official GOP candidate for governor in any state in the union is terrifying.
I’m thinking that the inter-war years in Germany were about the same duration, and probably had a similar sense of skidding out of control.
The warning xohjoh2n mentions looks to be aimed at the government and comes from what counts as the moderate wing of the Tories! That Patel can now appear to be on that wing (Braverman didn’t sign it) shows just how fast the party is shifting to the right. I thought this headlong plunge to the extreme would happen after the approaching election defeat, but it’s well underway. With the defection of Lee Anderson (former deputy party chair, blatant racist) to
The British Union of FascistsReform UK, the pressure on Sunak to go further (in an attempt to prevent more defections) will increase. If there are any more defections, Sunak may decide to call an election while he still has a party of sorts to lead into it.@22 KG:
That’s one interpretation.
Another I thought of is that this comes about because the tories are introducing a new definition of extremism which will no doubt be interpreted expansively to cover any criticism or disagreement with government policy and any form of protest they don’t like. The letter could be interpreted as a warning to *Labour* not to disagree with the new policy, because that would be “making it political”. And we all know that “making it political” is the worst thing ever and instantly removes all your credibility and no one, not even politicians, should be doing that.
(Most coverage appears to assume the former, but I can’t imagine preserving the rights of the people is high in their priorities.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EKCAE1vDzY
This is a public service announcement
With guitar
Know your rights
All three of them
Number one
You have the right not to be killed
Murder Is a crime!
Unless it was done
By a policeman or an aristocrat
Know your rights
And number two
You have the right to food money
Providing of course
You don’t mind a little
Investigation, humiliation
And if you cross your fingers
Rehabilitation
Know your rights
These are your rights
Hey, say what, hey
Know these rights
Number three
You have the right to free speech
As long as you’re not
Dumb enough to actually try it
Know your rights
These are your rights
Know your rights
These are your rights
All three of ’em
And it has been suggested
In some quarters that this is not enough
Well
Get off the streets
Get off the streets
Run
Judean People’s Front? Or People’s Front of Judea? Probably both, and they’ll spend most of their time attacking each other…
@25:
The Left is as The Left does.
What left? We’re talking about the USA, no?
@8
I think Thomas will have an easy time with Loving: He’ll say “It’s a states’ rights thing,” and Virginia just happens to have a Democratic legislature.