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Best of Right Wing Watch - 5/19/23
Our Right Wing Watch team at People For the American Way works hard to document, expose, and disrupt right-wing extremism in America.
Here are our top five posts from the past week. Be sure to also scroll down for another subscriber-exclusive piece this week!
Click on the images or headlines for the articles.
Ted Cruz Wants Money to Defend Clarence Thomas’s Lawbreaking
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NEW: Subscriber Exclusive!
Authoritarians Talk Openly About Their Goals to Friendly Audiences. That’s Why Right Wing Watch Goes There.
In the more than two decades I’ve been covering the religious right and its political allies for People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch, I’ve been to more right-wing gatherings than I’d want to count. The hours of anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ, pro-voter suppression, and Christian nationalist rhetoric form a deep cesspool of memories that sometimes meld into a murky mess. But there are moments that stand out for sheer weirdness, alarming extremism, or the clarity that can come when speakers talk honestly about their goals or brag about their actions to a likeminded crowd in ways they would not if they were speaking on television.
One of those clarifying moments came in June 2017, about five months after Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States, at the Road to Majority conference sponsored by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition. The mood, of course, was depressingly triumphant. Trump had, against all odds, defeated Hillary Clinton, who many religious right activists viewed as essentially the devil incarnate. Reed and the rest of the religious right political universe had pulled out all the stops to help Trump get elected, largely based on his promise to give them the Supreme Court of their dreams, one that would overturn Roe v. Wade. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell all came to thank the crowd for the overwhelming support white evangelical voters had given Trump.
But the moment of memorable clarity did not come from the main stage. It came during one of the non-televised breakout sessions. High-ranking staff from the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives celebrated the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as a “huge, huge, huge victory.” Another Supreme Court vacancy would let Trump make “epic, titanic shifts” in the country said Paul Teller, a special assistant to Trump.
A McConnell staffer agreed, saying that a second Trump justice could “fundamentally change the country.” She cited New Deal and Great Society programs while saying, “we now have to undo so much.” Legislation has its ups and downs, she said, but “with these lifetime appointments we can really change the country in a short period of time.”
McConnell had made a similar point the same point on the main stage, congratulating himself for having refused to allow the Senate to consider Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland and bragging that Trump’s judges would give him an impact “far beyond his time.” The breakout session brought home the reality and magnitude of the impact being sought.
Sad but true. Last year, Trump’s Supreme Court justices eliminated a constitutional right recognized by the Court for 50 years, overturning Roe v. Wade and opening the door to new red-state laws making abortion illegal and targeting doctors. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who recently reached back to the 19th Century to find a dormant law that could be used to justify his judicial attack on the availability of a safe and widely used abortion drug, is one of many hard right ideologues wreaking havoc on Americans’ rights and legal protections, who and are preparing to do so much more.
Another moment of clarity came at the Evangelicals for Life conference in 2018, when attorneys for anti-LGBTQ legal giant Alliance Defending Freedom bragged about writing an abortion ban soon about to be introduced in Mississippi with the explicit goal of giving the right-wing Supreme Court majority the opportunity to “eradicate” Roe. That’s exactly what happened, and the ADF achieved one of its “generational wins.”
No reporters were in the room when ADF lawyers boasted about their strategy for banning abortions nationwide. There were no TV cameras in the room when right-wing staff bragged about taking control of the courts to repeal the New Deal and return us to a constitutional order centered on states’ rights.
Right Wing Watch goes to places—online and in real life—where extremists reveal their true nature and goals. Our work to fight authoritarianism helps journalists and scholars understand the far right and helps progressive activists devise strategies to defend the values, people, and communities targeted by the far right.
Please make it possible for us to continue this valuable work by making a contribution to People For the American Way.
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