Quinnipiac ran a poll asking people if NFL players have the right to protest on the playing field. The top-line story is that 58% of Americans say they do. But that hides an uglier truth:
The overwhelming majority of Republicans — 81 percent — say that players do not have the right to protest on the playing field. And more than half of white voters, a group Trump won in 2016 that continues to give him favorable marks, say athletes do not have the right to protest.
So I ask, WTF is wrong with white people? Why are they so drawn to authority worship? Why do they side with management instead of labor? If you’ve got answers, post them in the comments.
Just when it started to look as if the Democratic wave might lose its punch before November, Republicans decided it was a smart time to try to kill Obamacare yet again. Given that health care already polls as the No. 1 priority for Democratic voters, and given that only a few narrow slices of the electorate stand to gain by letting insurers base rates on pre-existing conditions again, this is the kind of move that makes independents think the parties are trying to prove which side is stupidest. I think the parties perform a valuable service to humanity: The Democrats show how to fuck something up by overthinking it, and the Republicans show how to fuck it up by underthinking it. Kind of makes you think.
Huffington Post gives prominent play to its interview with Sarah McBride for Gay Pride Month. As the travails of the Parkland students fighting the NRA have also shown, conservatives draw on a nearly bottomless well of rancid hatred:
“It’s been a process to really get to a place where I could deal with the hate and the harassment that comes my way. And I’ll never forget the sort of moment where things changed and clicked for me. It was right after I posted a selfie of myself in a bathroom in North Carolina that I was technically barred from being in, and the level of hate and the heinous threats that came in really shook me to my core. And I wondered whether I could continue to do this work, whether I could continue to be a public voice in this fight. And it was a really traumatic experience.”
They live in constant fear, of what exactly I don’t know, but their project is to make us all live in their tormented world.