Recommended Reading: The Problem With Ignoring Right-Wing Media Trolls

This Week's Recommended Reading on Substack: Oliver Willis, Justin Ling, Judd Legum, Jill Filipovic, Andrea Grimes, Jonathan Katz, and Noah Berlatsky

The Week's Recommended Reading on Substack:

Oliver Willis

writes that “for a long time the wider progressive movement decided to just ignore the growing conservative media… It was thought that conservative media was the fevered swamps, far away from the more “legitimate” world of politics and the establishment Republican Party. But there was a direct connection between modern conservatism and its media arms. The Goldwater moment led to Reaganism and that ushered in decades of conservatives regurgitating the lies and bigotry of major figures like Rush Limbaugh (who I will remind you, is very dead). Ignoring this is not an option.”

Why Can't We Just Ignore Right Wing Trolls?

Justin Ling

writes that Dennis Prager’s “particular appeal to nostalgia — when a marriage was between a man and a woman, ass-slapping was a friendly greeting from a man to a woman, and puppets were heterosexual felt monsters with a man’s hand inside them — was honed over his years on the airwaves.”

PragerU Kids is Sesame Street for the Terminally Online

Judd Legum

writes that “all the book challenges in Clay County schools have been submitted by Bruce Friedman, an activist associated with the right-wing group No Left Turn in Education. Among other things, No Left Turn in Education seeks to ‘screen and monitor the curriculum, materials and any other resources used in all classes’ to prevent the “sexualization of children.’”

Right-wing activists seek to ban "Arthur's Birthday" from Florida school libraries

Jill Filipovic

write that “over and over again, the anti-abortion movement claims it has no interest in prosecuting women for abortion. This isn’t true… The reality is that prosecuting women for abortion is politically unpopular, and that’s the only reason it’s not happening yet on a wide scale. Republican attorneys general want the ability to easily investigate abortions as crimes because they are looking toward a future where abortion is a crime for which women are punished.”

Conservative Attorneys General Want Your Private Reproductive Health Information

Andrea Grimes

writes that “suffering and criminalization are not unfortunate side effects of abortion bans; they are the desired outcome, and we will experience the heat death of the universe as we know it before anti-abortion folks start feeling guilty or ashamed about causing harm and trauma to people who need abortions.”

Anti-Abortion Politicians and Judges Do Actually Want to Make Pregnant People Suffer, That Is In Fact The Entire Point

Jonathan M. Katz

writes “let’s be clearer about what’s happening here: If restored to office, Trump and his post-coup inner circle intend to completely dismantle the federal government as it exists, and replace it with a bureaucracy of cadres who are answerable to and function at the pleasure of one man. That, in a word, is autocracy.”

Trump is planning to ratchet up the authoritarianism in a second term

Noah Berlatsky

writes in

Public Notice

that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “name is associated with the Democratic Party, but RFK Jr. is a much more comfortable fit within today’s conspiracy-addled GOP. Kennedy’s inflammatory remarks about covid, which came to light earlier this week, are a perfect example of this.”

Republicans love RFK Jr. because his conspiracy theories are theirs

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