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Late Wednesday night, there was finally the first snippet of good news this year in the never-ending abortion wars.U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman temporarily blocked Texas' near-total ban on abortions.The injunction was in response to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against Texas.Attorney General Merrick Garland called the ban on all abortions two weeks after a missed period which are 9out of 10 cases "clearly unconstitutional."

Signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, Texas' abortion bansets up a bounty hunter systemthatallowsany random stranger to claim sovereignty over a woman's body and sue anyone who helped her abort a pregnancy. In his 113-page decision a searing and angrybreath of fresh air for those Americans who believe women are people Judge Pitmancalled the law an "unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right."

Thisdecision wasn't just a rebuke to the misogynist Texas legislators who passed this law, but to the Supreme Court that upheld it.

Without hearing arguments, the highest court in the nation allowed Texas' ban to go into effect through an unsigned "shadow docket"decision short enough to be written on a postcard. So Pitman put in the work that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court wouldn't do. He listened to arguments, he examined the evidence, and he wrote a decision painstakingly explaining his reasoning. It turns out that banning abortion through the back door is not as easy as Republicans and the partisan hacks they installed on the Supreme Court thought it would be.

And yes, conservatives clearly thought they could quietly overturn Roe v. Wade without the public noticing.

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The entire Texas abortion ban was built on a cloak-and-daggers strategy. The law itself was an effort to get around the problem of the news coverage that flows from clinics and reproductive rights suing the state for passing abortion bans. The "shadow docket" move was more of the same, allowing the Supreme Court to overturn Roe without coming right out and saying that's what they did. As soon as the non-decision decision came down, the conservative propagandists fanned out, insisting that the Supreme Court ruling wasn't really a Roe overturnbut merely a "procedural ruling" that causes "no harm."

But as Pitman's decision demonstrates, that's a flat-out lie.

His ruling cites numerous examples of harm that the Supreme Court ignored in issuing its paragraph-length decision, including to "a Texas minor who had been raped by a family member" and had to drive eight hours for care, and "another woman from Texas who had been raped" and struggled "to take extra time off from work to make the trip to Oklahoma, as well as find childcare for her children."

In one sense, this nonsense about how this is merely a "procedural" decision as if people weren't going to noticethat 90% of abortions were banned in Texas worked. Every time I tune into a cable news show discussion about abortion and the courts, the discussion is over "if" the Supreme Court will overturn Roe in the "future," with little acknowledgment that they already did it through the back door. While the Supreme Court is hearing a more formal case in December Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health that will allow them to legalize abortion bans nationwide,the damage has already been done. And let's face it, even when they do issue a more extensive ruling, they're going to be deceptive about itand try to find some legal reasoning that allows abortion to be banned without coming right out and saying they're overturning Roe.

The reason conservatives want so much camouflage for their Roe overturn is not mysterious.Abortion rights are very popular, and there's a real chance thiscould hurt Republicans electorally. Sexism and still-lingering American puritanism may cause all sorts of chaos in polling people's moral judgments on abortion, but when people are asked point-blank about the right to get one, around three-quarterswant it to stay put. Even 40% of people who call themselves "pro-life" want the right to abortion, because even they know, on some level, that being against abortion is easy until you need one.

So really, it should be no surprise that approvalof the Supreme Court has plummeted to a new low of 40%, down from 58% a mere year ago. Even more detailed polling shows that skepticism of the court has dramatically increased, with more Americans agreeing that Congress should do something to reinthe court in or abolish it altogether.Somehow, however, conservatives seem to be shocked that their efforts to ban abortion under the cover of darkness have not gone unnoticed.

The conservative justices behind the shadow docket abortion ban, for instance, have becomeincredibly whiny in the face of all the completely earned accusations that they are sleazy fundamentalists who are too cowardly to own their rejection of law and custom in their frenzied efforts to turn the U.S. into Gilead. In the past month alone, Amy Coney Barrett gave a protest-too-much speech denying she and other conservative justices are "partisan hacks," Samuel Alito blamed the media and not his own actions for people disliking him, and Clarence Thomas accused peopleof wanting to destroy "our institutions because they don't give us what we want, when we want it," seemingly talking to a bunch of toddlers wanting candy, rather than citizens demanding basic human rights.

Even the Texas anti-choice activists behind this ban seem to be caught flat-footed. As Jill Filipovic writes in the Atlantic, "abortion opponents are claiming to be surprised that the law is being used as writtenand are perhaps realizing, belatedly, that their vigilante strategy comes with more than a few perils."

It appears that the people behind this law thought the mere threat of a lawsuit would cause abortion providers to shut down and that actual enforcement which would end up pitting the kind of repugnant people who would be abortion bounty hunters against sympathetic figures like doctors wouldn't be necessary. At first, that seemed likely, as clinics across the state shut down services and sent patients out of state for help. But then a San Antonio-based physician, Dr. Alan Braid, performed an abortion and wrote a Washington Post op-ed about it, daring anti-choicers to sue him. And sure enough, the situation turned into a circus, with two disbarred attorneys from out of state neither of whom actually oppose abortion rights suing Dr. Braid.

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John Seago, an anti-choice activist who helped pass this law, clearly recognizes the optics are bad here, whining to the New York Timesthat the lawsuits aren't "valid attempts to save innocent human lives" and instead are "self-serving legal stunts."

But here's the thing: There is no other way this law could be enforced but through repulsivepeoplefiling lawsuits. Despite all the self-flatteryabout being "pro-life," anti-choice activists are clearly motivated by misogyny, and don't care about "life."That's been demonstrated in a million ways, most recently in the embrace of anti-vaccine/pro-COVID-19 policies by Republicans. So anyone who would sue, declaring sovereignty over a woman's body and announcing his right to force childbirth on her, is going to be an unpleasant character. Seago knows this, I'm sure. He certainly sees the people who protest abortion clinics and how they don't generally do the best job of concealing how much hate and sexual resentment fuels their politics.

In a certain light, it makes a rough sense that conservatives thought they could get away with banning abortion through subterfuge. Americans have a long history of discomfort with the topic, and with talking about sex generally. Pro-choice activists are mostly women, making it easy for the right, in the past, to convincemost Americans that threats to abortion rights are being overblown by hysterical feminists. And while abortion is common in one sense 18% of pregnancies end in abortion, about 1 in 4 women will have one at some point it'snot something most people deal with on a daily basis. It's why the anti-choice movement has been so successful at gradually making abortion much harder to get without most people noticing. It's just not something most people think about until they or a loved one needs access.

But what conservatives are swiftly learning is Americans aren't the prudes and sexist they thought we were. Attitudes about sex are rapidly liberalizing. For instance, 73% of Americans are fine with sex outside of marriage now, up from 53% twenty years ago. (And those who disapprove are hypocrites, as 95% of Americans reported having had premarital sex in 2006, a number that's surely gone up since then.) And a majority of Americans agree that women have a long way to go to achieve equality, which is a good stand-in measure for whether or not people think sexism is wrong.

In light of these changes, it's not a surprise that people are both outraged about the Texas abortion ban and unafraid to say so publicly. The fight to end abortion rights is, politically at least, going to be much harder than Republicans were clearly betting it would be.

Read more here:
Republicans thought the Supreme Court could stealthily ban abortion. They were wrong - Salon

INDIANAPOLIS (Fort Wayne's NBC and AP) Republican lawmakers have given their final approval of their partys redrawing of Indianas congressional and legislative districts while brushing off objections that the new maps give them an excessive election advantage and dilute the influence of minority and urban voters.

The Indiana Senate voted 36-12 and the House 64-25 Friday with no Democratic support of the plan, advancing it to Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb for his signature.

Political analysts say the new maps that will be used through the 2030 elections protect the Republican dominance that has given them a 7-2 majority of Indianas U.S. House seats and commanding majorities in the state Legislature.

The maps divide Allen County into parts of four different state Senate districtssomething Democrats and some minority advocates, including the NAACP, have criticized as an effort to water down representation in one of the state's urban communities.

READ MORE: New GOP redistricting maps confusing, divisive says state, county Democrats

You kept the south side and the people of Fort Wayne from having a voice in this legislative body for things that they think are better for them, their families, their loved ones and thats not right, Democratic Sen. Greg Taylor of Indianapolis said.

See the article here:
Republicans brush off critics, approve Indiana redistricting - Fort Wayne's NBC

A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals that over half of Republicans (55 percent) believe immigrants and tourists are responsible for current pandemic conditions in the U.S., a much larger proportion than the 32 percent of Republicans who attribute high infection rates to the unvaccinated or to the 28 percent who cite the publics failure to wear masks or maintain social distancing. That pervasive belief that immigrants are to blame for Americas public health crisis suggests that classic scapegoating tactics have led to a dangerous mainstreaming of extremism.

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Classic scapegoating tactics have led to a dangerous mainstreaming of extremism.

There is no evidence that migrants are responsible for the surge in Covid-19 infections in the U.S. or even at the southern border. Across the U.S., Covid outbreaks have consistently been worse in regions and communities with no mask mandates or with low vaccination rates. The delta variant along with three other Covid-19 variants monitored by public health officials circulated in the United States before it was detected in Central America.

These facts havent stopped Republican leaders and conservative commentators from linking reports of migrants at the southern border to the spread of Covid-19. In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott accused the Biden administration of releasing immigrants in South Texas that have been exposing Texans to Covid. In August, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed that no elected official is doing more to enable the transmission of Covid in America than Joe Biden with his open borders policies. That same month, former President Donald Trump issued a statement warning that thousands of Covid-positive migrants had passed through Texas without noting that migrants who test positive are quarantined.

Blaming immigrants for the spread of Covid-19 is a lazy but effective tactic that packs a double punch of disinformation. It falsely places the blame for Covids spread on immigrants rather than where it belongs: on a lack of adherence to evidence-based preventative practices such as vaccinations and masks. At the same time, it stokes resistance to perceived liberal immigration policies by focusing on the threat of disease, infestation and infection, by voicing dehumanizing ideas about purity and contamination and by suggesting that immigrants pose an existential threat to Americans.

This is a dangerous game that mainstreams and normalizes extremist ideas. Blaming immigrants for spreading contagious disease is a popular far-right extremist tactic that has been used for generations to both exploit and stoke xenophobic and nativist sentiments and has been used throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

When such propaganda is spread not only on fringe internet platforms, but also by elected officials whom residents trust as the source of their facts and information, it becomes even more dangerous. Such hateful speech can also incite violence. People dont commit or condone violence against out-groups spontaneously, as Harvards Dangerous Speech project explains: They must first be taught to see other people as pests, vermin, aliens, or threats.

Blaming immigrants is a strategic frame that intertwines anti-elite, pro-nationalist and anti-immigrant discourse all at once. Liberal elites and their lenient immigration laws become the real bogeyman, and those laws must be countered with restrictive immigration policies that will protect people here from the dangerous and destructive force of immigration.

Such hateful speech can incite violence.

We should all be concerned about how anti-immigrant sentiment is being used to deflect attention away from ineffective state and regional public health policies, to discourage people from accepting the science about masks and vaccines and to encourage them to blame others for Covids spread. In linking immigration with the spread of Covid-19, Republicans seek to garner support for stricter immigration laws and persuade voters that the Biden administration is ineffective and dangerous to their health and safety.

But these tactics, which encourage the public to see immigrants as threatening, also lay the groundwork for extremist groups to advocate for violent solutions to address that threat as we have already seen in far-right terrorist attacks across the country and around the globe.

The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a clear illustration of the serious threat that propaganda and disinformation pose to our democracy. With a clear majority of Republicans now believing false claims about immigrants role in spreading Covid while simultaneously rejecting public health evidence that would reduce their chances of getting sick it is equally clear that the danger from propaganda is not just to our democracy itself, but to the health and well-being of the people living in it.

Read the original post:
Republicans blaming Covid on immigrants threatens public health and our democracy - MSNBC

Republicans are apparently too busy stoking cultural grievances and recounting votes from the 2020 presidential election to craft a policy agenda for the next election. Looking forward instead of backward would be a better way to build political support and to channel the populism of former President Donald Trump into programs to help working- and middle-class voters.

The alternative for the GOP is to contest the 2024 election as a referendum on Trumps personality and his false claims of election fraud. Republican partisans are convinced; nearly 6 in 10 Republicans and GOP-leaning independents state that believing the 2020 election was stolen from Trump is an important part of what it means to be a Republican, according to a recent CNN poll. And Trumps fantasy is already a big part of the 2022 midterm elections.

But do Republicans really want voters to focus exclusively on Trump?

A healthy political party cant be stuck in the past and it cant be a cult of personality. This should be obvious from Trumps loss in the personality-driven 2020 contest. That year, the GOP couldnt even write a policy platform for its nominating convention. Instead, it released a bizarre statement of fealty to Trump.

If the GOP wants to make inroads among the many voters who arent loyal to the former president, it needs a policy agenda. Such an agenda would communicate the values the party stands for, as well as offering solutions to the challenges citizens face.

In addition to relitigating 2020, much of the party is sounding the alarm about the excesses of progressive social activism derided as wokeism. I, too, am concerned about the issue and think liberal society is undermined by treating people as members of groups rather than as individuals, and by shutting down the marketplace of ideas rather than engaging in it.

Some Republicans have attempted to marry the cultural grievances invoked by the woke label with policy. Take a new bill proposed by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio which, according to his press release, would enable shareholders to hold woke corporations accountable.

Cultural differences have a place in political debate, but they shouldnt be allowed to push out other imperatives. They are not as urgent as improving the quality of education, figuring out how to retrain workers who have been displaced, or reversing the decades-long decline in workforce participation among men. And they are not the top challenges facing households that need better access to affordable child care or higher education.

The GOP is wedded to Trumpian populism, an outlook of grievance that pits the people against the elites, foreigners and immigrants. This analytically impoverished view of the world takes policy debates in unfortunate directions, as Rubios bill shows.

But there are manifestations of populism that point a constructive way forward. A focus on the working and middle classes could channel populist energy in a healthier direction. To keep its coalition together to keep businesspeople and free market enthusiasts on board Republicans need to marry that focus with traditional commitments to the free enterprise system, individual liberty, personal responsibility and advancing economic opportunity.

One opportunity is to shape policies that can highlight the shortcomings of President Joe Bidens agenda. For example, if Biden is able to expand the size and scope of government involvement in health care, child care and higher education, as he has proposed, this gives the GOP the opportunity to offer alternative policies that are rooted in a commitment to free markets, but that still address the legitimate concerns that working- and middle-class households have.

A second major fault line exists over the value of workforce participation. The progressive left is quick to brand large swaths of the labor market as consisting of dead-end jobs and is eager to divorce safety-net programs from work requirements. A marriage of free markets and populism could push back against this, arguing for the value of employment and for the inherent dignity of work, even flipping burgers and unloading trucks.

An agenda around this wouldnt just be laissez faire. Instead, it could consist of expanding earnings subsidies, redistributing income to encourage employment by subsidizing it. Or it could scratch the populist anti-elite itch by chipping away at employer power in the labor market, restricting noncompete clauses in employment contracts and loosening occupational licensing restrictions, all of which advance the interests of big firms and incumbents ahead of workers.

Defining itself against Bidens agenda and rallying around a pro-work flag are just two of several ways that the GOP might create a coalition that includes stop-the-steal Republicans without alienating the partys traditional interests, and that avoids the trap of betting the next election on anger and grievance.

But moving forward productively will require the right leadership. Its harder to say where that will come from than where it wont: the former president.

Read more:
Michael R. Strain: Republicans need to be more than the party of Trump - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press

This is the latest edition of our column that excavates the origins of public figures factually dubious comments. We explain what their claims are referring to, the evidence (or lack thereof) behind them and where they sprang from in the first place.

A few weeks ago, Breitbart News the right-wing, hyperpartisan news site formerly run by Steve Bannon published a truly galaxy brain column. Editor-at-large John Nolte argued that Democrats have been promoting the COVID-19 vaccine not to save lives but instead to trick Republican voters into not getting the jab. Noltes theory concluded that this, in turn, would lead to unvaccinated Republicans getting sick and dying from COVID-19, ultimately helping Democrats electorally.

Nolte claimed that liberals, in a sinister application of reverse psychology, knew that aggressively pushing the vaccine would lead those on the right to resist, putting them at greater risk for severe infection or death. In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead? Nolte wrote. He then said that the real way to stick it to liberals would be to embrace the Trump Vaccine for the life-saving modern miracle that it is.

Sometimes flawed logic can still lead you to the correct conclusion.

Noltes take has emerged from the toxic politicization of the pandemic in the U.S. Since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout began in the U.S, there has been a partisan gap in vaccination rates. When comparing the rate of fully vaccinated people living in counties that voted for Trump in 2020 with those in counties that voted for Biden, blue counties had a higher vaccination rate by 12.9 percentage points, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Similarly, a Morning Consult poll has shown that Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say they are unsure of whether they will get the vaccine. Republicans are also more likely to say they do not plan on getting vaccinated, according to that same poll. And its true that more right-leaning areas of the country are seeing more deaths from COVID-19, too: a recent New York Times analysis showed states with some of the highest 2020 vote share for Trump also have the highest death rates.

These differences in vaccination rates and COVID-19 death rates can be attributed to a few factors, including misinformation online and the erosion of trust in institutions such as the medical system and the media over the past few years. It can also be partly attributed to the rhetoric from Republican leaders and figures on the right, especially when you consider that similar partisan gaps have not been seen in other countries.

There is no evidence that those who have encouraged Americans to get vaccinated secretly hoped they would do the opposite.

While the Brietbart columns argument may seem unhinged, Nolte is in fact tapping into a number of right-wing tropes. Conspiratorial thinking has become a habit on the right think the Big Lie or QAnon so proposing a conspiracy to explain Republicans low vaccination rates may not be anathema for many of Noltes readers. Similarly, allegations of Democrats or leftists running false flag operations where the responsible party for an event makes it look like another party is in fact behind the act are common among the far-right. Many have claimed, for example, that the rioters who broke into the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6 were actually members of antifa disguised to look like Trump supporters in order to make the right look bad.

The notion that politicians may be using reverse psychology when referencing the vaccine is also familiar to many on the right, albeit inverted from Noltes presentation of it. Those who oppose the vaccine particularly those who incorrectly believe it to be harmful have been surprised to hear former President Donald Trump promote it, and reverse psychology has been a useful explanation for his seeming deviation from their worldview. These theories claim that Trumps encouragement of vaccinations would make the vaccine less appealing to anti-Trump voters, while arguing that those who support Trump are wise enough to do their own research and avoid it despite his recommendation.

As far as him promoting it, my thought is [he is using] reverse psychology for the sheep with [Trump Derangement Syndrome] [who] will automatically just do the opposite of what he says, one Telegram user wrote in a QAnon chat group. What if Trump is promoting the vaccine to get the Never Trumpers to rethink their decision, wrote another in the same chat. Anything he promotes they will do the reverse. He must know that those of us that are aware of the real and apparent dangers will NOT get it, even with his endorsement.

Nolte also specifically tapped into another American tension: As the partisan gap persists, some on the left have shifted from encouraging those on the right to get vaccinated, to getting frustrated and angry that they still havent. This has manifested in sometimes flippant, sometimes cruel reactions to the high rates of infection and death among unvaccinated Americans. Nolte highlighted Howard Stern, who recently suggested on his radio show that unvaccinated individuals who become sick should be denied medical care. Stern also said it was funny that some conservative radio hosts who spoke out against the vaccine later died of COVID-19. Theres also the r/HermanCainAward subreddit, named after the Republican politician who died of COVID-19 in 2020, a group with 343,000 members that exists exclusively to mock people who expressed anti-vaccine views and later died of COVID-19.

Of course, if Noltes column convinces some vaccine-resisters to get the shot, one might argue that the end justifies the means. But so far the response to the column on the right hasnt been positive. On Breitbarts Facebook post sharing the column, many commenters rejected the argument, noting that their personal motivations for not getting vaccinated had nothing to do with what Democrats said, and pointing out that some unvaccinated Americans are on the left. This is a stupid take. You have clearly bought into the democrat talking point that its only republicans not getting vaccinated when the reality is that people across the board are not getting vaccinated, one Facebook user commented. Similar sentiments were shared on Telegram and the pro-Trump message board patriots.win. Me not getting the Vax has absolutely nothing to do with what the left is saying! one user wrote in a QAnon Telegram group. Another user in the same group noted: But didnt Trump get his vax? It isnt about Trump, its about our personal health.

Using conspiratorial thinking to bring conspiracy theorists back to reality may not be the most effective tactic after all. As one Telegram user put it: Sounds like theyre trying to use reverse psychology by saying they are already using reverse psychology.

Read the original here:
Where Breitbarts False Claim That Democrats Want Republicans To Stay Unvaccinated Came From - FiveThirtyEight