solarbird | Fascism Watch for 22 April 2023, Part 1: Genocide

They. Will. Kill. All. Of. Us. If. They. Can.

Republican North Dakota is making trans youth health care a felony with 10 years in prison. Missouri has banned all trans health care, yes for adults too. (MSNBC also has coverage.) MAGA megachurch preacher Sean Feucht made a direct call for Christian nationalism. Republican Montana is the latest state introducing a wildly-broad drag ban – and they’ve banned the only trans elected member of the legislature from speaking at all because she spoke out against their bills. And Florida’s Republican legislature has passed a bill that is directly intended to take trans children away from their supportive parents – even if one of them lives out of state. (It still has to pass reconciliation, but it will, and DeSantis has said he supports it.)

This is literally genocide. That last one? That’s literally legal genocide. Genocide comes in a variety of forms, but taking children away from a population to give them to others to raise as their own is absolutely one of them.

And I’m barely covering the highlights here. There are no-go states for queers again. Many. People are fleeing, many raising money online to be able to leave. This is fucking real.

I don’t know what it takes to get people to take this seriously. Even a couple of days ago, people were being all jokey in replies on Facebook and I came down hard on them because it’s NOT FUCKING FUNNY.

I mean, Republicans are authoritarians. Many are fascists. They’ll straight up tell you they want to wipe us out. They do it fairly regularly. Remember calling for “eradication” at CPAC? Have you forgot already, like so many people seem to have done?

In reading this next quote, it is important to note that by “target children,” Republicans mean “exist.” What they actually want is Russia’s laws, where existing in public is illegal, and a felony. Again, this is them saying it:

While defending his bill in Florida that would ban drag and pride events, [Representative Fine] “if it means erasing a community, because [LGBTQ people] have to target children, then damn right we outta do it.”
via The New Republic

I don’t know what else they have to say to get cishets to act like they believe it. I mean, for years they celebrated AIDS deaths, laughing about it in public and even on the air. The fundamentalists who now control the Republican Party used to hand out flyers calling for all queers to be put in concentration camps and killed. One was called “The Death Penality for Homosexuality.” I should still have a copy somewhere, and I have to tell you, little else focuses the mind like being handed a pamphlet calling for your own murder.

And yet, the cishets mostly just keep pretending everything is business as usual.

I begin to understand how fascism seems so sudden for ordinary people. For the majority of people, they just ignore it – pretend it doesn’t exist – until they absolutely can’t. You can scream in their faces and they do. not. fucking. listen. and then it’s OH NO HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?! because as far as they’re concerned, it only actually happens when it happens directly to them.

I’ve always understood how it happens, and how it could happen here. But I never understood how anyone could be surprised when it does.

Now I do.

eta: As Transgender America struggles, national news doesn’t know what to write, and by not writing, fails themselves and everyone else. And if you’re wondering where all these laws come from and why they’re so similar, it’s because the authoritarian right have lawyers turning them out in legislature mills, such as the Claremont Institute.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.