Fighting fascism is good politics

And unhinged Arizona Republicans take a big L

Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.

Tonight I’m going to take a look at the latest developments in the live, ongoing stories that I’ve recently written about here in the newsletter.

With so much news constantly being reported, it’s hard to follow threads of stories, especially when things are moving fast on the ground. This election season, I’ll be doing more frequent follow-ups, in large part for paid subscribers. Tonight’s issue, however, is open to all.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Just days after a cynical, cowardly rush to bash the left by short-sighted and self-interested conservative Democrats, far-right politicians and conservative institutions are using the farcical accusations to justify violent crackdowns and abuses of power.

It only took 48 hours from Rep. Jared Moskowitz and Josh Gottheimer’s field trip to Columbia to “protect Jewish students” (by grandstanding for the cameras and harping on crude comments by outsiders) to become a tense campus confrontation between student protestors and Mike Johnson, the Christian nationalist Speaker of the House who demanded that President Biden call in the National Guard to force them off of the quad.

There’s something cathartic about hearing Johnson booed so vociferously by students — it’s at least one thing everybody there seems to agree on. You may find yourself booing, too, after listening to his glib, patronizing, and insensitive statements.

The White House has forcefully condemned protestors at Columbia on a number of occasions, including one admonishment directly from Biden himself, but it has yet to produce any statement about the Texas Department of Public Safety’s violent assault on student protestors and members of the media at the University of Texas’s main Austin campus.

The armored troops, under the orders of Gov. Greg Abbott, met the students with batons and mace and other weapons. Students had been denied a permit to assemble on campus but decided to march peacefully and hold various activities such as an art workshop and pizza break. A combined militia made up of campus police and DPS officers drove them away from the campus’s South Mall by force, and ultimately arrested 54 people, including a professional photojournalist.

Similar scenes have played out on campuses from coast to coast. This evening, USC’s leadership sent the LAPD to deal with student protests.

Each of these conflicts have their own flavor of campus regulations and local politics, and the more that people try to litigate specific bylaws or recreate precise timelines and protest routes, the more it obscures the reasons why students are protesting and how extraordinary it is for so many governments and universities to take violent action against peaceful assemblies of their own students on campus.

Biden’s refusal to end material support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza has him hemorrhaging support from young people, which makes it politically bewildering that he has yet to say a word about the escalating attacks on students. It also fits an emerging pattern of triangulation by capitulation, which seems to be the administration’s policy with regard to Abbott’s barbaric treatment of desperate migrants and the state’s illegal blockade of federal troops at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, TX. Not even a win at the Supreme Court has moved Biden to take action.

There’s a school of thought among some liberals that these students are being counterproductive and that Gen Z will regret this if and when Trump wins the White House once again. This election, they say, is about preventing fascism from overtaking the nation. But early fascism has already taken root in many parts of the country, and as we’ve seen time and again, Biden has to be pushed to mount any sort of aggressive pushback against the far-right’s that goes beyond the rhetorical. Acquiescence out of fear of a bad election result has only ever led to bad election results.

These protests are more likely to save Biden’s campaign than kill it, given how unpopular Netanyahu’s rolling massacre has become with voters across the board six months before Election Day.

Inching toward the bare minimum

There’s good news out of Arizona, where the state legislature has passed a bill to repeal the 1864 total abortion ban. The bill will head to the Senate next week, and should it pass, it’ll be signed by Gov. Katie Hobbs, whose signature will make the repeal official — and ultimately trigger a 15-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest.

As I wrote last night, the Arizona Republican Party is scrambling to minimize the political backlash to its abortion policies while keeping as many of them on the books as possible. Not that all of them seem to care about potential backlash; during debate, ultra-right conservatives from red districts made some unhinged statements, such as Rep. Barbara Parker’s assertion that she could “hear the silent screams” of unborn children. Republicans did block a clause that would have had the repeal take effect immediately after Hobbs signs the law. Instead, it will be 90 days before it is active.

Just before the vote to repeal the 1864 law, Republicans on the House Rules Committee voted forward three bills intended to place additional initiatives on the ballot. They have not indicated the content of those initiatives, but it’s very clear that they are going to be attempts to severely curtail abortion rights in the event that Arizona Abortion Access Act gets voter approval in November.

GOP legislators are also still on track to place an amendment ending retention elections for justices on the Supreme Court, which would end any accountability for reactionary judges and preserve the Republican majority for many ears to come.

I’ll have more on the GOP’s various schemes to restrict the rights of Arizonans in the weeks to come.

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