Opinion

The top issue in yesterday's Virginia election was reportedly "parents' rights." I had some thoughts about that but first wanted to see arguments in favor laid out in full. My friend Bill Scher watched the governor's race for Washington Monthly. I asked if he knew of an article capturing the position. He said, "An honest one?" I guess enough said about that.

Juan Williams got ahead of me. He's a news analyst for Fox. He's also a Black conservative, which is not a white conservative who happens to be Black. In his latest for The Hill, Williams said "parents' rights" in Virginia is code for white power. "It is a campaign to stop classroom discussion of Black Lives Matter protests or slavery because it could upset some children, especially white children who might feel guilt."

It's a peculiar pattern of history. Like the axis around which a cycle of ruin spins. Societies — even civilizations — don't see their own collapses coming. And not seeing them coming, they can hardly take steps to avert them. They're left like deer in the headlights. And you know what happens next. If anything, curiously, societies tend to lean into their collapses.

So why don't societies see their own collapses coming? Why do they accelerate and intensify them? It's an especially relevant question, because, well, look around. Things aren't exactly going too well for our civilization. We're threatened by everything from global warming to ecological implosion to mass extinction to the pandemics and poverty and fascisms they're already breeding.

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over SB8, a new Texas law that set up a bounty hunter system that empowers private citizens to use lawsuits to prevent abortions. Going in, most observers expected the Republican-dominated court to be eager to uphold this law. In a twist, however, multiple conservative judges — including Donald Trump appointees, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett — seemed skeptical.

To be sure, it's not because the conservative justices care about human rights, but because they care about their own power and look askance at a law designed to evade legal review by federal courts. Now the expectation in legal circles is that the court will throw out the Texas law and open the door to banning abortion through a Mississippi case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which is a straightforward challenge to Roe v. Wade.

All across America this past year-and-a-half 700,000 people have died an agonizing, terrifying, drowning-in-their-own-fluids death, their relatives helpless, saying goodbye using Zoom or FaceTime. Families broken and shattered; husbands, wives, children and grandchildren left bereft; doctors, nurses, and physicians assistants dying along with them or holding their hands as they draw their final, tortured breath. Many of those deaths were absolutely unnecessary.

They happened because of decisions made by a small group of people led by Donald Trump.

I'm old enough to remember when the Republican Party stood for limited government – when Ronald Reagan thundered "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem."

Today's Republican Party, while still claiming to stand for limited government, stands for government intrusion everywhere:

During last year's vital election season, I worked with the Navajo community to increase voter turnout and ensure that our voices were heard at the polls. Thanks to tireless organizing efforts across the country, the Navajo Nation and millions of Black, Brown and Indigenous voters helped deliver Democrats the House, White House, and Senate, believing the people we voted into office would fight for our communities.

However, a year later, we are still waiting for campaign promises to be fulfilled. Our broken Senate is in a never-ending gridlock on issues ranging from our precious right to vote to much-needed infrastructure investments – both issues that are deeply important to me and Native American communities across Arizona.

Reality is being rewritten before our eyes. Some Americans can see this, and understand it. The results include an inescapable feeling of dread and doom. The frustration mounts because as a group those who see the truth and are ready to speak it do not yet have the full vocabulary required to make sense of it all.

Too many other Americans appear not to care about the blatant effort by the Republican fascists and others to rewrite reality. They are indifferent or tired, or just so hyper-focused on their own lives that nihilism and surrender are preferable to confrontation and engagement. Others are either incapable or unwilling, or remain in a profound state of denial.

When Bobby Kennedy went after organized crime in the early 1960s, one of the things he learned was that the Mafia had a series of rituals new members went through to declare their loyalty and promise they'd never turn away from their new benefactors. Once in, they'd be showered with money and protection, but they could never leave and even faced serious problems if they betrayed the syndicate.

Which brings us to the story of Kyrsten Sinema.

It's election week. So it bears repeating. The race for Virginia governor is not going to tell us much about next year's congressional elections. The results will, however, tell us how strong the backlash has gotten. That, in turn, will help us think about what the midterms might offer.

By "backlash," I mean the reaction by those who defend the status quo against those trying to change the status quo. Specifically, the reaction against political gains made in the wake of George Floyd's murder, which was widely understood to have triggered a "racial reckoning."

The right's desire to suppress any speech they don't like is metastasizing.

Look no further than Donald Trump's latest effort to create his own social media network for the perfect example of the Orwellian way in which conservatives use the term "free speech." The authoritarian right is always claiming to defend against allegedly censorious liberals, but eagle-eyed readers of the terms of service noticed straight away that Trump's "free speech" network forbids users from hurting his snowflake delicate feelings in any way with a rule against users who "disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site." In other words, no making fun of Trump's fingers or mentioning the "pee tape" in this "free speech" paradise!

More than anything, Doug Ducey wants his legacy to be the massive tax cuts that he has given wealthy Arizonans. It's an issue he campaigned on in his first gubernatorial campaign, and in whatever the next phase of his political career brings, he will surely point to it as a victory.

But his true legacy will be the thousands of Arizonans who have died needlessly on his watch, as he repeatedly and stubbornly and maliciously mismanaged the COVID-19 pandemic.

Attorney John Eastman has received intense notoriety lately as the legal architect of Donald Trump's plot to overthrow America's democracy. But doing the Far Right's legal bidding is nothing new for him.

Since clerking for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decades ago, Eastman has built a career as an anti-LGBT, anti-birthright-citizenship, anti-abortion warrior. Until now, perhaps his highest visibility came last August, where he penned a latter-day-birtherism opinion piece for Newsweek arguing that then-Senator Kamala Harris was disqualified for serving as vice president because she was not -- in his definition -- a "natural born citizen."

Years ago, when I was in high school, my friend's older brother purchased a copy of "The Anarchist Cookbook" from the local Army-Navy store. He told everyone he'd gotten the book from the owner in some type of illicit backroom deal. That book had totemic power: Supposedly it was illegal, and even possessing it was some type of crime. Of course that wasn't true. But for teenage boys who grew up during the 1980s, socialized into a fake military ideal of masculinity by movies like "Rambo," "Delta Force" and "Red Dawn," the facts didn't really matter.

My friend told me that his brother learned how to make napalm from "The Anarchist Cookbook." I and a small circle of friends were invited to a "secret" test after school on a Friday, near the running track of a local trade school that had been closed for renovations. Using the military language we were so obsessed with, my friend commanded me and the others to maintain "OPSEC" (for "operational security") telling us that all this was on a "need to know basis."