DL Open Thread: Monday, August 7, 2023

‘Woke’ Putting Rethug Voters To Sleep.  Is it too late for DeSantis to shut down that anti-woke laboratory known as Florida?:

Gov. Ron DeSantis last year used the word five times in 19 seconds, substituting “woke” for Nazis as he cribbed from Winston Churchill’s famous vow to battle a threatened German invasion in 1940. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, speaks of a “woke self-loathing” that has swept the nation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina found himself backpedaling furiously after declaring that “‘woke supremacy’ is as bad as white supremacy.”

The term has become a quick way for candidates to flash their conservative credentials, but battling “woke” may have less political potency than they think. Though conservative voters might be irked at modern liberalism, successive New York Times/Siena College polls of Republican voters nationally and then in Iowa found that candidates were unlikely to win votes by narrowly focusing on rooting out left-wing ideology in schools, media, culture and business.

Instead, Republican voters are showing a “hands off” libertarian streak in economics, and a clear preference for messages about “law and order” in the nation’s cities and at its borders.

When presented with the choice between two hypothetical Republican candidates, only 24 percent of national Republican voters opted for “a candidate who focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media and culture” over “a candidate who focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border.”

Lotsa luck with your next rebranding, Ron.

How Right-Wing Propagandists Seek To Defeat Majority Rule In Ohio.  Make it all about ‘sex-change operations’–and drag queens:

Lil Miss Hot Mess, a prominent drag queen, realized about a week ago that she had been pulled into a fight over abortion in Ohio, which is over a thousand miles from her current home. The news came via a message from a friend, who tipped Lil Miss Hot Mess off that she was starring in an ad paid for by the group Protect Women Ohio. The commercial warned an upcoming ballot measure, “State Issue 1,” would allow “out-of-state special interest groups” to “enshrine late-term abortion in our constitution and abolish parental rights so someone can take your child to get an abortion or sex change operation without your consent.” Along with this ominous message, the ad featured footage of Lil Miss Hot Mess participating in a “Drag Story Hour” event alongside images of happy families with prepubescent children.

“It’s not the first time that they’ve used — they being the right kind of broadly — have used footage of me and other Drag Story events for various types of political advertisements. Marco Rubio used some imagery of me last fall,” explained Lil Miss Hot Mess, who said she has consulted attorneys about potential legal action related to the use of her image.

The Ohio campaign takes it a step further. Unlike Rubio’s ad, the Protect Women Ohio commercial isn’t a direct shot in the far-right’s manufactured culture war over sexuality, gender, and children’s education. Instead, it’s a convoluted attempt to bring right wing anger over drag into a fight over the democratic process and reproductive rights in the Buckeye State. 

The ballot measure pushed by Republicans in the state legislature would make it more difficult to amend Ohio’s constitution with ballot initiatives in the future. Currently, these changes can come up for a vote if backers obtain enough signatures to equal five percent of the votes cast in half of the state’s counties in the most recent gubernatorial election. Once an initiative is on the ballot, it can pass with a simple majority. State Issue 1 seeks to change that by making tougher requirements for how these signatures are obtained and by raising the threshold for how ballot measures are passed to 60 percent.

Democracy is on the ballot in Ohio tomorrow.  If you know anyone who lives there, you know what to do.

A Real Republican Faces The MAGAts.  How would you like to be an honest elections official being targeted by your own party?:

Margaret Rose Bostelmann’s ideals are clear from one glance at her well-kept ranch-style house in central Wisconsin.

A large American flag is mounted near the front door, and a “We Back the Badge” sign on her front lawn announces her support for law enforcement. Bostelmann, a Wisconsin elections commissioner, said she voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and added: “I will always vote Republican. I always have.”

But her fellow Republicans have exiled her and disparaged her, sought to upend her career and, on this day in July, brought the 70-year-old to tears as she discussed what she’s been through over the last several years because she refuses to support false claims that Trump won the state in the 2020 presidential election.

Bostelmann, who goes by Marge, previously served for more than two decades as the county clerk in Green Lake County, overseeing elections without controversy. But two years into her term in a Republican slot on the Wisconsin Elections Commission she became a target, denounced and disowned by the Republican Party of Green Lake County, which claimed she had failed to protect election integrity in the state.

Now a suit filed in June by a Wisconsin man who promotes conspiracy theories about election fraud seeks her removal from the commission. Citing her estrangement from the county party, the suit claims she’s not qualified to fill a position intended for a Republican.

The elections commission, which has an equal number of Republican and Democratic members, has faced an onslaught of discredited claims about election fraud in Wisconsin. The most recent drama involves the commission’s nonpartisan administrator, Meagan Wolfe, whose term is expiring and whose future in the role is in doubt. After the three Republican members of the commission supported Wolfe in a June vote, Republicans in the state legislature made it clear they wanted to find a way to get rid of her.

The Republican clashes in Wisconsin exemplify ongoing discord seen across the country, with elections officials shunned, berated and even driven away by members of their own party over their defense of the integrity of the 2020 election.

Margaret Rose Bostelmann is far from the only one.  This article highlights where else MAGAts are eating their own.  Honest elections must be eliminated if the Rethugs are to prevail.  It’s what 2024 is all about.

The Most Powerful Far-Right Christian Lobbyist You’ve Never Heard Of.  She’s from Pennsylvania, and she turns William Penn’s notion of religious freedom on its head:

Every Monday, Abby Abildness leads her “Penn’s Sacred Challenge Tour,” a guided walk through the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg. On the day I join, a group of stylish and well-behaved Christian homeschoolers trail her through marbled hallways, beneath mosaic ceilings, and past stained-glass windows, dissecting the early-20th century art for hidden meanings, like a Christian nationalist Da Vinci Code.

“God’s message is on the walls,” she says, directing our eyes to Edwin Austin Abbey’s “Spirit of Light,” a fresco of semi-nude nymphs silhouetted against burning oil derricks, each holding their own flame. “Doesn’t this remind you of Pentecost?” she asks the students.

To Abildness, the building’s art doesn’t just transmit Pennsylvania’s founding myths—it reveals her state’s, and the nation’s, true Christian origins. The fresco is not only an homage to Pennsylvania’s role in birthing the oil industry, she says, but a call for spiritual light to be “taken to the nations as a holy example.” Abildness traces her particular proclamations back to William Penn, a freethinking Quaker whom she and many other evangelicals have rebranded as “America’s founding grandfather,” pointing to his 1681 pronouncement that the territory he’d been granted would be a “holy experiment” and the “seed of a nation.”

Scholars have long interpreted Penn’s statement as an endorsement of religious freedom: In contrast to the Puritan settlers of New England, Penn, who’d also faced persecution, wanted his new province to be a sanctuary for many faiths. But who cares about the history? As an anointed apostle of a growing charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (think Amy Coney Barrett), Abildness appropriates Penn to underpin a Christian nationalist vision that enshrines her faith above all others.

I’ll close with this: Am I the only one who doesn’t care that the US Women’s Soccer Team didn’t advance in the World Cup?

What do you want to talk about?