Posts for Understanding the Next 19 Days
Rupert's Crucial MAGA Crisis Cult Posts ... The Manosphere and January 6th ... And More
OK, the very first thing to do is to visit these Substack folks and read every single thing they’re written on Project 2025. Because despite Trump’s lies, he and his billionnaire comrades are going to implement every tenet of it if they can get away with it. Trump has both houses of Congress, a Cabinet potentially full of Thiel’s acolytes, and a Supreme Court six members of which are answering to the Vatican abusive “teachings” on women’s rights, not to the Constitution of the United States. Here are the savviest and sagest pundits on Project 2025. Subscribe to all of them.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, a best-selling author, and a former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. He writes for The Guardian and appears frequently on all three major U.S. television networks. RobertReich.substack.com
Joyce Vance is an American lawyer who served as the United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017. She was one of the first five U.S. attorneys, and the first female U.S. attorney, nominated by President Barack Obama. She writes “Cafe” with Preet Bharara and appears frequently on MSNBC. She writes
Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She writes
From PolitiSage
1. On Understanding MAGA and Donald Trump
Riddled with racism and misogyny, the wave of conservative radicals behind Trump is a complex melange of predictable and understandable causes married to an unpredictable temperament eroded buy dementia and a longstanding and incredibly dangerous Dark Tetrad personality disorder. To add to these is the observation of election expert Helen Chapman from the UK.
The following article is by Rupert Chapman, Ph.D.—not me! I was having a Substack learning curve moment from hell and couldn’t attach Rupert’s name to the full mailing list. Apologies, Rupert!
2. The Heavily Misogynist Insurrectionists of January 6, 2021
Donald Trump has promised more than 800 insurrectionists now serving prison terms for the assault of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the purpose of which was to stop the peaceful transfer of power from himself to Joe Biden, that he will pardon them on DAY ONE.
So just who is he pardoning? Insurrectionists came from five major clusters of groups centered around five seed groups, three of which were heavily, heavily anti-feminist. When they are released, these men and the groups who support them will be flush with a sense of empowerment, and they will be coming for women in a way that makes the loss of Roe look like a walk in the park.
Peter Thiel, a chief architect of Project 2025, points to giving women the vote as one of the turning points that took America from success to failure. (I didn’t know we were a failure and do not consider us one.) The heavily Radical Right Christian conservatives of MAGA have much more planned: a national ban on abortion (all abortion) and a national ban on contraception even for married couples; an overturning of women’s rights in the workplace; and very possibly a reversal of the financial rights of women to home ownership, their own credit cards and bank accounts, and the like. Some of these are rights women have had only since 1975. And the Equal Rights Amendment is still one vote short of ratification.
The purpose of this is to return control of everything in the public sphere to male authority and to ensure that women stay at home, pregnant and/or raising children, for their entire childbearing age spans. The potential windfall for men in money, power, and impunity is staggering. J.D. Vance has suggested it shouldn’t end there: women in the grandparent age group, he thinks, should be assigned to help the younger women with the children. So not even after your kids go off to school or out into the workforce will you be free: you’ll still be home, not out in the public sphere.
People think this can’t happen, but it’s what happened in Iran after more than 50 years of freedom; it’s what happened in Afghanistan after the reforms of Zahir Shah in the 1950s made Afghan women as free as any British or American woman. This kind of backlash has happened before. It can happen here, too. And it is.
One reason Trump won this election is that he—and J.D. Vance particularly—dog-whistled the dark web Manosphere to get out and vote for them. They did. In huge numbers.
3. A Radical Lurch towards Fascism
Totalitarianism can infect any national group—liberal or conservative. Communism ruined Argentina, Cambodia, China, Russia, North Vietnam, North Korea and a host of other states. Any dictatorship is totalitarian, though in the case of dictatorship it is centered in a personality, male or female, and held away from all group interference. Fascism (and associated Nazism) killed three million people in Spain and 70-85 million in Europe during World War II and from Allied nations who fought the Nazis and Italian fascists. In Romania alone, under the vicious Codreanu, 380,000 Jews were murdered.
Knowing what makes up fascism is incredibly important to recognizing it when it manifests around us, which it is doing now. Here’s a crash course.
4. The Supreme Court Is Gone
The Supreme Court is now deeply compromised both from egregious levels of graft—and from its open espousal of conservative attacks on the rights of women, minorities, and taxpayers. Now that Trump is in office again, we will see no improvement in the Court—and possibly a very, very bad devolution of our last line of defense against special interests and a corrupt government.
5. An Attack on Rational Medicine
The general onslaught by conservatives on education and the intelligentsia nowhere manifests itself more dangerously than in conspiracy theories, which now challenge not only “book learning” but even personal experience and common sense. And their poster child is RKF, Jr., to whom Donald Trump traded the health of the people of the United States for the 3-4% of the electorate he picked up to become president. RKF, Jr. wants to disband the FDA — with which I have more than a few problems, too, but on balance we’re better off with it than without it. He touts Ivermectin, which is a first-class quack scam, is a rabid anti-vaxxer, and is flirting with canning the polio vaccine. No. Just no.
And the most poignant note from children’s book author Roald Dahl, whose daughter Olivia died of measles before the vaccine for it existed.
So those are a few articles from our archives with which to arm yourselves as we head towards the darkest day in American history. We’re going to have to stand up very strongly, and this very taxing peaceful war against having our rights taken is going to be present for us every day in the next four years. Target the mid-terms. If we can get both houses in the mid-terms, we can lock Trump up politically. Then, when we win in 2028, Merchan can lock him up for real.
Thanks for being with us. We appreciate you so much. You don’t just give us motivation to write. You make us feel so much less alone.
All love, all light …
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Great post!
𝗦𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗢𝗨𝗦𝗟𝗬. 𝗪𝗛𝗬 𝗔𝗥𝗘 𝗥𝗘𝗣𝗨𝗕𝗟𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗡𝗦 𝗦𝗢 𝗗𝗨𝗠𝗕?
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗢𝗣’𝘀 𝗪𝗮𝗿 𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲: 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗺𝗽, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘆 𝗛𝗮𝘀 𝗧𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗽𝗶𝗱𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗚𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗮 𝗕𝗮𝗱 𝗝𝗼𝗸𝗲
https://open.substack.com/pub/patricemersault/p/seriously-why-are-republicans-so?r=4d7sow&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false