Everything is culture war now
But sometimes it misfires
Welcome to a Wednesday evening edition of Progress Report.
Part of me doesn’t want to give anymore oxygen to the cynical gasbags, but if you dig into the year’s first idiotic brouhaha, it’s actually a perfect example of how the right-wing outrage machine works, why it works, and who’s paying to keep the wheels churning.
We’ll focus on the outrage cycle in tonight’s newsletter, and later this week, we’ll take a comprehensive look at critical political and policy stories happening in states and cities across the country.
God, guns, and gas stoves, the true holy trinity birthright of every patriotic American.
Conservatives tried to cook up a new contrived outrage this week, and well, they can’t all be winners, but they get points for trying something new and even more idiotic. The usual right-wing whiners seized on a Bloomberg story about a study that links old gas stoves to an increase in childhood asthma cases. Richard Trumka, the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, suggested that he would like to ban the sale of new gas stoves in the interest of protecting the lungs of children nationwide.
According to Tucker Carlson, who has made protecting kids his supposed life’s mission on TV, the one sentence quote about gas stoves proved that the government treated opioid addicts better than his put-upon audience.
“It’s totally fine to give fentanyl to addicts, but a gas stove is a threat to your life?” he asked, squinting in outrage. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, now the print mouthpiece of the Murdoch empire for which Carlson sets the tone, said it was all part of the left’s nefarious secret climate agenda. “It’s not enough to force Americans to buy electric cars,” the editorial board wrote as one sad entity. “We must all cook on electric stoves too.”
You can see these people popping all the blood vessels in their faces as they strain to wedge kitchen appliances into their version of freedom, which is largely a list of ways for people to get ripped off or killed. There is no better example of the right’s hair-trigger release of nuclear outrage than the rampage unleashed by Rep. Ronny Jackson, who once served as President Obama’s personal physician before entering an Avatar of the Tasmanian Devil.
Here are but a few tweets and shitty low budget right-wing TV networks:
You’ll notice that Jackson began punctuating his tweets with a link to a website called SaveOurStoves.com. Please do not debase yourself by clicking on that link and checking it out, because it’s hardly worth that fleeting moment of your life, let alone the website trackers that it will deploy on you. The entire site is just a sign-up form for a “petition” to stop the “maniacs in the White House” from banning all gas stoves. What the dupe that puts their name and email down is actually signing up for is Jackson’s fundraising email list on WinRed, the GOP’s terrible answer to ActBlue.
The right will run this playbook over and over again, hyping up their base, distracting them from the actual issues that impact our lives, and weaseling their way into the wallets of their most susceptible supporters. Usually there’s some kind of cruelty involved in the follow through, which is cost-neutral to ghouls, but the gas stove outrage, should they have been able to ignite it, had the added benefit of aligning entirely with the interests of the natural gas companies that pour money into Republican (and some Democratic) campaigns.
Right now, in fact, the industry is also in the middle of an underhanded PR campaign in which middle-American influencers sing the praises of natural gas without ever disclosing that they’re being paid to do so.
Jackson, again, was stupid enough to tweet the quiet part out loud:
They were ultimately banking on the idea that anything that potentially inconveniences or tangentially upsets some white families can be spun as an attack on the traditional American value of not upsetting white families. Almost anything can be the subject of culture war.
The gas stove brouhaha, however, is likely running on fumes and ready to be snuffed out now that the Consumer Product Safety Commission has clarified that it is not mulling the ban of gas stoves, but instead hoping to find ways to mitigate the risk through stronger standards (even if voluntary). Still, for Republicans, it was a successful sudden seizer. They were able to get a few news cycles out of it, rile up their base, please their big donors, and continue the narrative about government overreach.
As this immensely stupid episode played out, Republicans at the state level continued to pound on more successful moral outrage and culture war issues.
In Arizona, Republicans introduced three bills that would severely restrict drag shows. One of the bills would reclassify any business or event space that hosts a drag show as an “adult” business, which would essentially end the growing trend of restaurants, bars, book stores, and other Main Street businesses hosting drag cabarets and story times.
Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, would presumably veto any of these bills should they make it through a very narrow legislative majority.
In Oklahoma, state Senator Nathan Dahm introduced an omnibus anti-queer legislative package that combines all the trendiest ways to hate and attack the LGBTQ+ community. Among other things, the bills would:
Ban Medicaid for paying for any transgender care
Ban anyone under the age of 18 from undergoing gender reassignment surgery
Decree that the only permissible applications of the terms/definitions of “gender” or “sex” shall be male (XY) and female (XX), which is specifically designed to rebuke “gender ideologies,” which is a bigoted way to say “something that confuses me or makes me uncomfortable.”
In Florida, librarians are having a hellish time dealing with the intentionally vague rules in the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and have requested retraining so they know how to do their jobs without getting arrested for offering a book that Ron DeSantis would find offensive.
In Arkansas, newly minted Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders just straight up banned the word “Latinx.” There’s no one more qualified to make a decision about another racial group’s identity than the daughter of Mike Huckabee. She also banned Critical Race Theory in the state. Now that’s freedom.
Wait, Before You Leave!
Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, delivers incisive analysis, and continues to grow its paid reporting team. Yes, we pay everyone.
None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So to make this sustainable, hire new writers, and expand, I need your help.
For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:
Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting
Exclusive access to weekly member chats
Financing new projects and paying new reporters
Subscribed
You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in an upcoming edition of the big newsletter!
READ UP, info junkies. This is the deal...
(David Corn, Steve Schmidt, Heather Cox Ricardson, David Sirota, .....TOO!)
Informative? Yes. Entertaining? Definitely