I find YouTube ads a necessary evil to get free content. I almost never watch them through. Last night I saw one that made me watch to the end.
It was a campaign ad. The candidate was a former student, a MAGA fan who was an unconscionable pain in the ass the whole semester. He’s running for county clerk, who is also the registrar of voters.
The spot itself was unremarkable though professionally done. The candidate appears on camera throughout, first as a talking head then in footage of him walking down a farm road with his wife and preschool-age daughter. He’s as I remembered him, receding hairline, beard, red face, beer gut, etc. Same lack of an indoor voice.
His pitch emphasized his military service and his commitment to faith and family. (The usual conservative campaign ad tropes.) He also promised to “clean up” the voting process in our county. As a sometime poll worker in the county, I can assure you with certainty that our polling process is already clean.
I’m not worried that he will win. Although the long-time incumbent is leaving office, his deputy is running and appears the most viable candidate of the three in the primary race. However, I don't like that many of the disturbing trends seen elsewhere are seeping into my community.
The post-Trump era has not resulted in peace of mind. Voter suppression efforts across the country are just one facet of what Bill Maher has called a slow-moving coup by the right. Approximately two-thirds of Americans are white. They make up three-quarters of registered voters. To not see an underlying white supremacy behind voter suppression laws is willful blindness. And yet the opposition flails impotently to stop them.
Trump-era hysteria permeates red state political culture. Screening proposed textbooks (some of them math!) for “woke” themes or supposed references to Critical Race Theory is a distraction from serious policymaking while inflaming white ressentiment. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and the pending measure in Texas forbidding parents to seek gender-affirming care for their trans children are solutions to nonexistent problems. (Concerning the latter, it strikes me funny that the same people who refused to let the government to coparent when it came to masks now support government coparenting transgender kids.) Adam Serwer got it right; the cruelty is the point.
To add to the darkness enveloping our country, it came to light this morning that a draft majority opinion in the Mississippi 15-week abortion ban case written by Samuel Alito leaked from the U.S. Supreme Court. It comes as no surprise that if issued as written, Roe v. Wade would be definitively overturned. Still, I always figured SCOTUS would probably gut Roe rather than overturning it outright. The Texas snitch law passed last summer was the shape of things to come from our 6-3 conservative majority Court; it’s doubtful there will be a happy ending in this case either.
During his confirmation hearings Chief Justice John Roberts stated that Roe was settled law. Guess he’s changed his mind. Despite her open religiosity, Amy Coney Barrett’s limited record of abortion-related rulings offers a faint glimmer of hope but I’m not holding my breath. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas are lost causes. If one believes Sen. Susan Collins, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lied about their stance on reproductive rights during their respective confirmation hearings. I look upon this development with unsurprised disgust. What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?
There’s been some hopeful commentary that the leak will damage Republican prospects for this year’s midterms and may even fend off a GOP (Trump?) victory in 2024. Don’t hold your breath. It is more likely that it will further energize and further embolden the base, as will the probable passage of the spate of anti-LGBT bills in the South. Speculation on both sides of the divide predicts that Republicans will attempt to overturn results in states with Republican legislatures that go Democratic in 2024. I don’t doubt that such attempts will occur. Perhaps they will succeed.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Somewhere along the way, we took our eye off the ball.
©
2022 The Unassuming Scholar
