Preview...

Last night was the State of the Union address and the republican response. As is typical two years into the first term of a presidency the SotU also marks the start of the election season. Which sucks. I mean so much. It sucks because it's two years away and it's too much. I wish we had a really limited campaign time period. Like three months maybe. But the toe in the water starts to the primaries then the general it's all so much. 

It also sucks because we got the preview last night of how the campaigning from the two sides will at least start. 

And it's going to be ugly. Just like 2016 and 2020. We thought 2008 and 2012 were ugly but they were sweetness and light comparatively. This is not going to be sweetness and light. 

And it sucks because it's all so predictable, at least from the republican side. See they are doing this thing they do, and have always done, where the take the talking points of the democrats or the progressives and warp them around into something else. 

Feminism. It's not actually the desire for equality among men and women it's actually something designed by ugly women to emasculate men and denigrate mothers. Then when just saying feminist stopped having the same scare Limbaugh changed it to Feminazi and made even more brazen claims about how bad it was. Generations of women don't call themselves feminists because they have been steeped in this negativity around the word their whole lives. I used to be one of them. That shit is constant.

Political correctness used to be a positive thing. It was a way of making sure you didn't say things that were impolitic. Not a word you get much these days but it basically means don't be an asshole. That what you are about to say is likely to be offensive to the person you are saying it to. PC, practicing courtesy, but instead it became shorthand for a bad thing. Oh everyone is so PC these days! Which always seemed to boil down to I can't tell racist jokes anymore without people telling me they aren't funny.

Antifa. Is antifa in the room with us right now? Well, yeah, okay it is. Because I'm Antifa. Anti fascist. That's antifa. Always has been. It's not an organization. People identify themselves as being antifa, but it's not a group. Like Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer... Shall I go on? Blaming Antifa is still used by a certain circle but it got harder to do once the other groups stormed the capitol on live television. I mean they still tried their hardest to say it was Antifa setting them up but when the leaders of those other groups start getting convicted it's hard to keep it up. 

So they moved to WOKE MOB!  Being woke isn't a new thing. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned that people needed to stay awake, to be aware, to not get complacent. To not sleep through the chance for revolution. It got turned to shorthand, someone was woke when they became more aware of the systems around them. Then it made the jump from the black community into the progressive community as a whole and a bit of the nuance was lost, but still not a bad thing to be woke. To be aware. To not ignore things just because they aren't comfortable to you.

But the woke mob is super scary. They insist on being PC! Calling people by their names! Studying history! CRT!! Oh no! Not that! I mean, if you ask them what exactly CRT is they often don't really know. As evidenced by the fact that they ban teaching it in elementary school and it's a college level class. But critical race theory is their catch all phrase for anything they think is critical to the white race. You can't make white kids feel badly about being white. That's their rallying cry. Well nobody wants to make white kids feed badly about being white. What people want is all kids to understand the full depth and breadth of our country's history and what we still are working on correcting to ensure that we live up to that everybody is created equal premise. 

And then last night we saw Governor Huckabee hit "normal vs. crazy" a few times. This election is about normal vs. crazy. Does that sound familiar? That was exactly what democrats ran on in 2020. A return to normal, boring, steady politics after the unhinged four years of Trumpism. But now, it seems that Biden is the unhinged one. Beholden to the woke mob. Which she's not sure he actually believes in all of that, but he is still beholden to it. The nod to that even they know casting Biden as some sort of freewheeling progressive isn't going to stick in 2024 any more than it did in 2020.

So for the next two years we are going to get a whole barrage of how republicans are the normal ones. How it's just crazy to want equality for everyone. Which is the foundation of the culture wars they insist they don't want to fight. I don't want to fight a culture war. I don't know why they are even considered culture wars. I just don't want you to be able to discriminate against people. You can go to your church and pray to your god and raise your kids to follow a set of rules laid out by your holy books. I'm fine with that. But I don't think you should get to apply those rules to those of use who don't agree with either your interpretation of that book, for those that read the same book but take away different lessons, or the fact that some of us don't believe in that book at all. 

I refuse to think it's normal to be okay with a kid committing suicide but not with calling them by a different name. 

I refuse to think it's normal to ignore our history and insist that it has nothing to do with our present. 

I refuse to think it's normal to ban books that talk about ideas you don't like and couch it in protecting the children when it's really you that you are protecting. You having to explain to your kids that not everyone lives the same way you do.

I refuse to think it's normal to brag about the statues of the Little Rock 9 while also preventing kids from learning why there are statues. What they went through. Why it was significant that the doors were held open for them in the dedication ceremony. You have to learn about them being barred shut before them being open means anything.

I refuse to think it's normal to be terrified of Drag Queens. 

I refuse to accept that "define a woman" rhetoric is anything other than transphobia. 

This is the vicious last gasp of an ideology that is cornered. They have seen with gay rights that once the needle starts moving, once people come out of the closet and live openly, once you get to know that nice couple down the street, that it become unpalatable to discriminate against them. So they have to stop that from continuing to happen. They want to force people back into the closet. They want to make sure you don't get to know any trans people because then they become people not scapegoats. They want to make you go back to blaming someone else for your problems, LGBTQIA+, women, black, brown, immigrant, whoever they can pin it on so you don't look at the accumulation of wealth upwardly that had happened. The hoarding of resources UP, not the sharing of them down that has made your life harder. 

If they can keep the culture wars humming (Steve Bannon talked about this as a strategy back in 2016) then they think they can win. Fear is a motivator. Fear isn't rational. Fear is all passion and energy and can move on to hate very quickly and that can also be aimed and used. 

We got our preview for the next election cycle last night. 

Buckle up.