Opinion

A number of years ago, I sat on a long plane ride next to an orthodox Jewish man. We struck up a conversation and found out that we each had three children. I have three daughters, while he told me he had two daughters and a son. When I told him I was a law professor, he told me with delight that both of his sons had expressed some interest in going to law school. I asked him about his daughter and he said that she would, of course, be a wife and mother and take care of the home.

I expressed surprise at this (naive, I know) and asked him what his teen daughter thought about these differing expectations based on gender.

The Republican "Big Lie" about voter fraud takes root in the fact-free soil of opposite world, where the Oscars are held at Mar-a-Lago and honor Dinesh D'Souza's "documentaries."

Here in reality, D'Souza is a convicted felon, his films amount to a lucrative grift operation and should be filed under fantasy, and GOP claims of voter fraud actually seek to distract from their own extensive pattern of rule-rigging, lawlessness and brazen vote suppression. (As for D'Souza, he received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.)

Like everyone else in the House Republican conference, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has done her share of inciting white political violence. While the House debated recently additional aid for Ukraine, the No. 3 Republican chose during her allotted time to rail against the president for “the invasion at the southern border.”

That “invasion” plays a small role in the larger story of “the great replacement” feared by right-wingers to such a degree that one of them, Payton Gendron, took matters into his own hands last week and shot to pieces 10 Black people at a supermarket on Buffalo’s eastside.

Deficit reduction sounds like one of those nonpartisan measures of governing competence. That’s why Joe Biden has been touting it.

In fact, it’s largely irrelevant to voters – for good reason.

Republicans believe that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán has figured out the “secret sauce” to turn a republic into a hard-right oligarchy, and today they’re in Budapest drinking deep from his insights on the fine points of destroying democracy.

In two speeches this week, Orbán laid out his Hungarian version of the racist American “Great Replacement Theory,” trashed Jewish financier George Soros as a proxy for Jews around the world, reiterated the importance of having friendly rightwing billionaires seize control of a nation’s media, and attacked societies that allow gay marriage and tolerate trans people as engaging in “gender madness.”

On May 15, a young white man carrying a semi-automatic rifle opened fire outside a supermarket in a predominantly Black eastside neighborhood of Buffalo. The rifle barrel had the N-word written on it along with the number 14, a well-known white supremacist slogan.

Payton Gendron killed three outside the grocery store and wounded another. Then he went inside. When it was over, 10 people were dead, including a security guard with whom he had exchanged fire. Of the 13 people shot, 11 were Black. Gendron, clad in body armor, live-streamed the shooting on Twitch. (Twitch has since deleted the video).

A troubled student who spent hours surfing the internet, he was inspired by websites that “spoke the truth about the demise of the white race.” He plotted for months to kill Blacks, Jews and Hispanics, and he apologized to some of those he shot at because “They were whites.”

This sounds like Payton Gendron, who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo on May 14. Gendron threatened to shoot up his high school last year. He said “sorry” to a white person in the store after pointing, but not shooting, his assault rifle at them. Gendron said his murderous rage against Blacks, Jews, and immigrants was meant to prevent “white genocide.”

It was only one half-hour into Wednesday's congressional hearing on abortion access when it became clear that the Republican contributions to the day would be loonier than a QAnon message board.

"In places like Washington D.C.," fetuses are "burned to power the light's of the city's homes and streets," claimed Catherine Glenn Foster, who had, just minutes before, sworn not to lie under oath. The GOP-summoned witness let loose the wild and utterly false accusation that municipal electrical companies are powered by incinerated fetuses.

The Pennsylvania primaries of May 17, 2022, proved a good night for Donald Trump, a better one for “Trumpism” and a problem for moderates hoping for a candidate primed to capture the center in the upcoming midterms.

Trump’s officially endorsed Senate candidate, Mehmet Oz, is currently in a tight race with main GOP rival David McCormick – with the balloting set for a recount.

The chyron on MSNBC yesterday said, “Populist Fetterman Wins PA Primary.” A few weeks ago during the French elections the American press was referring to Marine Le Pen as a “French populist.” Trump is often called a “populist” in our media, as is Bernie Sanders.

All of which raises the question: “Why are we using this one single word to describe radically different types and stripes of politicians?”

Republican primaries in Pennsylvania and North Carolina may have been a big win for the Big Lie, but they were devastating for headline writers at political websites. After years of Donald Trump-inflected voting for the biggest troll they can find, Republican voters largely did what a GOP campaign consultant would prefer they do this time around. They went for candidates that, while fully committed to the anti-democratic cause, are missing that je ne sais quoi to produce outrage bait that has so appealed to Republican voters in the past. Two of the flashiest trolls on the ballot, Kathy Barnette of Pennsylvania and Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, went down in flames Tuesday night.

To be certain, Republican voters still want to complete the authoritarian destruction of democracy Trump set in motion in 2020. It's just that they have now come to realize that the key to pulling it off is running candidates who are a little bit better at hiding how evil they are. Their best disguise? Being very boring.

Yesterday‘s elections show both a strong progressive drift across the Democratic Party, and an aggressive move toward fascism being driven by the base of the GOP and some of its billionaire donors.

But more urgently, the Republican Party has a terrorism problem, and the failure this week of the party’s leadership and members to call it out after the terrorist attack in Buffalo suggests they’re just fine with it.