2024 GOP: Stopping ‘Wokeness’ is the Plan
Welcome to Florida, where you need a permit to read a children's book about Rosa Parks but not to carry an AR-15.
The Republicans’ Dear Leader is fading in public consciousness. There’s a growing consensus within the party that he’s past his expiration date and early reports on fundraising numbers are discouraging.
While nobody has the cojones to step forward and openly challenge the former president, there’s plenty of posturing and backstabbing going. Trump faced difficulty last weekend in South Carolina in getting enough high profile endorsements prior to his statehouse rally.
So the second best strategy appears to be trying to be more contentious whenever possible. Potential candidates are rolling out rhetoric and actions aimed at garnering both support and outrage.
The Republican National Committee has looked at the data from the 2022 midterm elections and decided the best path going forward for down ballot campaigns is to double down in 2024.
Look for candidates for Congress down to dog catcher to be flogging an issue that proved to be an albatross in the midterms, namely abortion. Supposedly, GOP candidates lost because they weren't tough enough on the issue.
As is generally true with right wing campaigns, this one will start with an oft-repeated lie.
“The Republican National Committee urges all Republican pro-life candidates, consultants, and other national Republican Political Action Committees to remember this proud heritage, go on offense in the 2024 election cycle, and expose the Democrats’ extreme position of supporting abortion on-demand up until the moment of birth, paid for by the taxpayers, even supporting discriminatory abortions such as gender selection or when the child has been diagnosed with Down syndrome.”
It’s impressive, I think, how they worked “gender selection” into this declaration, since it gets twice the traction because gender bending is at the center of the not-very-covert war on LGBTQ+ people.
Once everybody’s worked up over the baby killing lie, the thinking is that the public will be more tolerant of legislating abortion bans starting at six weeks, bans on pharmaceuticals purchased through the mail, and even penalizing health care providers who might assist in out of state travel for procedures.
I’m not sure what data the RNC looked at, but the obvious evidence, i.e.,the failure of the anti-abortion ballot measure in Kansas, and the losses by hardcore anti-abortion politicians in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan certainly don’t bode well for contests in battle states.
The one candidate getting traction with Republican watchers is Florida Governor Ron Desantis.
To hear right wingers talk about it, he’s got the woke brigade fleeing Florida. This, I fear, is the template for any candidate seeking the nomination in 2024.
Gov. Desantis has (or is about to) implemented policies enabling permitless concealed weapons,, eliminating requirements for vaccines, restricting the right to vote, mandating racist educational materials, and banning books from libraries and classrooms.
He’s also working hard at making it easier for the government to kill people. One proposal, unveiled during a Florida Sheriffs Association, would eliminate the need for unanimous jury agreement on imposing the death penalty.
Another plan would make certain child sex offenders eligible for the death penalty in hopes of getting the current Supreme Court to expand legal use of the death penalty beyond the current guidelines to include non-homicide cases. This would, for example, enable candidate Trump’s fantasies about executing drug dealers.
The new year in Florida has accumulated much press coverage about classroom library shelves being emptied out (or hidden) following a State Board of Education ruling that a law restricting the books a district may possess applies not only to schoolwide libraries but to teachers’ classroom collections, too.
From the Washington Post:
House Bill 1467, which took effect as law in July, mandates that schools’ books be age-appropriate, free from pornography and “suited to student needs.” Books must be approved by a qualified school media specialist, who must undergo a state retraining on book collection. The Education Department did not publish that training until January, leaving school librarians across Florida unable to order books for more than a year.
Breaking the law is a third-degree felony, meaning that a teacher could face up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine for displaying or giving students a disallowed book.
The book banning campaign is part of a broader “stop woke” agenda being used to purge schools and other institutions of content that conservatives don’t agree with or simply deny the truth of. A math textbook was removed from circulation because of “impermissible” content around critical race theory and “social emotional learning.”
The chilling effect of Desantos’s restrictions on what people can read or say doesn’t stop at the classroom door. The GOP-led Florida House has a new dress code banning low-cut blouses or dresses, sleeveless tops, and dresses and skirts that are “more than one inch above the knee,” among other things.
Other states' right wingers are copying Florida.
Posters with a quote from Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, peace activist and author, were removed from a school library in Pennsylvania.
Via WHYY:
The directive follows news about the district using Harrisburg based law-firm Independence Law Center to review details of its library book policy, which allows any parent or district resident to raise questions about any book over its “sexualized content.”
The Independence Law Center is the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, the statewide branch of the national organization Family Research Council, an anti-LGBTQ Christian nationalist group designated as an extremist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In Michigan, a right wing group is hoping to mobilize parents to withdraw their children from Sex Ed classes just in case anything having to do with LGBTQ persons is discussed and to force schools to remove any references throughout their facilities.
Texas is considering legislation barring publishers from Texas school libraries unless they create and adhere to an age-rating system for children’s books.
I could go on for thousands of words here. The point is that the “culture war” aka “woke” is going to be a major battleground in the next two years, with right wing politicians hoping to gain points with the Trumpian “base” and drown out the near-constant whining from Mar a Lago.
I don’t think we should run from this. Libraries and public schools are great things. Otherized people are humans and deserve representation in our culture. And banning books is going to prove to be a really stupid idea.
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