Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Last week on this show, before Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson sat down to be grilled by the members of the Judiciary Committee, I warned you that the right wing was in a race to see who could be the next biggest-American-thug, and that several Senators could not and would not resist fanning the flames of racist angst among their voting base.
Right on cue, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Lindsay Graham tried to outdo each other in the competition for most vile. And, as expected, a few hours later there was, for example, Ted Cruz on FOX commenting on video clips of his bottom feeding behavior.
The right is not just amping up its racist tropes about Black women. It is also doubling down on determined sense of its own victimhood. “At least these hearings are respectful,” they whined, “unlike the way Democrats treated Brett Kavanaugh.”
Fact check… these hearings were not respectful, and Brett Kavanaugh was facing a woman who says he raped her. As far as Republicans are concerned, just listening to Dr. Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s victim, was seen as disrespectful whereas repeatedly interrupting Judge Brown Jackson one was seen as the height of decorum.
Who are these people?
This week one Republican Senator said states’ rights means the Supreme Court cannot force states to allow contraceptives, or interracial marriage, or gay marriage. That should all be up to the states, he said. This week a Republican Attorney General – Alabama’s highest legal officer- refused to say Joe Biden was duly elected. In around the country Republicans continue to criminalize trans youth, to ban books, to outlaw abortion.
Look none of these things are popular, let along legal. They can only get away with it because they have more power than their numbers in America deserve. Hence their efforts to undermine the democracy. These zealots will burn us all down in the bonfire of books they think we should not read.
They are creatures of the dark. They work best when we do not notice them -- when the rest of us ignore their outrages as just an annoyance we don’t need to take seriously, when their rantings on QAnon channels and FOX TV are not well known by the rest of us.
But their goals are no longer hidden. Most people looked at the confirmation hearings and saw the right-wing Senators’ questions performative, their allegations false, their actions disrespectful. Even reporters are beginning to understand that he-said -- she said reporting is in its own way just as dishonest as the lies one side is eager to tell.
The right is not done smearing a Black Women who would have the nerve to presume to a seat on the Supreme Court. But America is watching, and in the light of day these creatures of dark intentions do not fare so well.
The next bright light? Public hearings by the January 6th commission. Get ready to watch the rats scurry.
