Lemmings, with the Secret Service locked and loaded. Was this also a protest of DC gyms’ occupancy limits?
— The Hill (@thehill) November 14, 2020
— Clare Roth (@clareeroth) November 14, 2020
— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) November 14, 2020
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) November 14, 2020
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 14, 2020
— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) November 14, 2020
— The Nation (@thenation) November 14, 2020
Fortunately, some of Trump’s plans have been tied up in court, but that’s no guarantee. As Uncle Harry warned and the whole world knows, the courts have been Trumpified. Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) are so far to the right that Chief Justice John Roberts is now a centrist. And in a court with six conservatives, Roberts’s vote may not be needed to inflict grave damage on women’s rights, workers’ rights, civil rights and civil liberties, LGBTQ rights, and of course, voting rights. Can it be that what we naively considered our way of life—that long arc of the moral universe that slowly bends toward justice—could be so easily bent back by simply anointing three young, energetic reactionaries? Gorsuch is a sprightly youth of 53, Kavanaugh is a 55-year-old beer aficionado, and Barrett is only 48. This trio will be dancing on the graves of many of you reading this, to say nothing of myself, assuming Barrett’s male-supremacist tongues-speaking Christian cult permits women to dance. That Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an architect of women’s legal equality, should be replaced by a Federalist Society fembot who thinks abortion is barbaric and wives should obey their husbands is surely no accident. As House Judiciary Committee Republicans tweeted when Barrett was confirmed, “Happy Birthday, @HillaryClinton!”
[…]
For me, though, the hardest thing to reverse is something more nebulous and disturbing: the way Trump has corrupted our understanding of truth and facts and simple human decency. He has turned the most ordinary commonsensical aspects of life into battlefronts in a ridiculous culture war—even wearing a mask to protect yourself from a potentially fatal disease. And no matter what Trump said or did, around four in 10 Americans stood right there with him. Nothing seemed to dent their support: not the boasts and bullying, not the disgusting insults against women, not the shout-outs to xenophobes and white supremacists and neofascists, not the crude belittling of anyone who disagreed with him, from journalists to Dr. Anthony Fauci. No matter what preposterous charges he throws out at his rallies (recently he claimed that doctors have inflated the number of Covid-19 deaths because they get more money if they attribute a death to the coronavirus), he manages to top them in short order. But his followers remain steadfast, even apparently unto death, according to a new Stanford University study linking his rallies to some 30,000 Covid cases and 700 deaths. They may not believe or like everything he says, but they don’t care; that’s just Donald being Donald, or as evangelicals have described him, King Cyrus being King Cyrus.
— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) November 14, 2020
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