Everything Republicans Are Mad About Is Entirely Imaginary

This needs to be said.

Every once in a while it occurs to me that I am very frequently stuck writing the same thing over and over again. One of those things is "Republicans Mad At Thing They Made Up Themselves." In fact, it has occurred to me at this point that I cannot think of a single real thing that the Right has been truly mad about in the last decade at least. I can't even think of a policy they didn't like based on a thing it was actually going to do.

I'm not talking just the wacky conspiracy theories, the QAnon, the Pizzagate, the Great Replacement, Satanic Panic — I'm talking the regular-ass, mainstream (whatever can even be called mainstream these days) Republican crap. It's literally all made up. They do not have a single position on any issue that is not at least partly fiction.

The thing that just really made this click for me at this particular moment in time is the very casual nature with which they are now insisting that not only is "abortion up until the moment of birth" a thing, but that abortion after birth is a thing as well.

Right now there is a Fox News article up on Yahoo.com (which aggregates stories from various sources) that is literally titled "Arizona Dem gov nominee Katie Hobbs appears to support abortion up to birth." It is not labeled as an opinion article and in fact, beneath the article it even saysThe Associated Press contributed to this report. This is a lot more prominent than the tiny Fox News icon at the beginning of the article, by the way.

They are claiming Hobbs "appears to support abortion up to birth" because Hobbs said during an appearance on "Face the Nation" that abortion, like all medical decisions, is a choice that should be made between patient and doctor. Perhaps just to be clear, she should have said that no, she would not support it if someone were to go through nine months of pregnancy only for the doctor to just stab the baby in its head as it is coming down the birth canal, but given that this is not a problem that currently exists, that is not a place a normal person's mind is going to go. The Roe standard — what the Supreme Court said states had to allow, before the Supreme Court tooketh away — has always been abortion must be permitted until a fetus is "viable," or able to survive outside the womb, or after that if it is necessary save the life of the mother. Perhaps if they were so very worried about people going out en masse and having "day before birth abortions," they should have kept Roe on the books.

What this says to me, like so much of these imaginary things the Right gets worked up about, is that they don't think that the actual reality of abortion in America is all that bad, or at least not something most people would get worked up about. In reality, 93 percent of abortions occur in the first trimester, while fewer than one percent of abortions occur during the third trimester, and those that do occur at that time are performed under extreme circumstances. It's not a pleasant procedure! No one is sitting around going, "Sure, I could do a medication abortion now — but what if I went through months and months of pregnancy, morning sickness, having to buy a whole new wardrobe, other inconveniences, and then just got rid of it at the last minute?" That's not a thing. They just want people to believe it's a thing because they need people to believe that those who choose to have abortions are evil.

But let's look at some of the other things they're currently mad about, shall we?

LGBTQI people trying to "convert" or "groom" heterosexual cisgender children into believing they are gay or trans.

It's not happening. The only way anyone could possibly believe it is happening is if they believe in conversion therapy. You know who believes in conversion therapy? Well, it's not us!

Literally no one is doing that or cares to do that, and conservatives are not scared of the kids turning gay or trans, they are scared of the kids turning tolerant. They are scared that their kids will think they are assholes for continuing to hate perfectly nice people for stupid reasons.

Teachers are handing out hardcore pornography to elementary school students!

They have yet to produce this. They keep saying it's happening, but they never show us the supposed "hardcore pornography" that their children have been exposed to. Strange!

Liberals are being soft on crime and that is making crime go up!

Yeah, that's not even sort of factually true. There is absolutely no data to suggest that harsher punishments lead to people being less likely to commit crime. In fact, a study published in 2018 found that murder rates dropped in 11 countries after they abolished the death penalty. In fact, harsh punishments frequently exacerbate recidivism. You know what has actually been proven to reduce violent crime? According to the ACLU, it's "[i]nvestments in housing , health care , jobs programs , education , after school programs , gun control , environmental design , and violence interruption programs ." All kooky, soft liberal things.

Meanwhile, it also turns out that making prisons unbelievably inhumane does not reduce recidivism, but increases it. So weird!

The fact is, the two countries with the lowest crime rates are Iceland and New Zealand — neither of which even have an armed police force.

Academics are nefariously plotting ... something

The Right has a tendency to pluck random academic terms and schools of thought out of nowhere, make up their own definitions, and then go off the deep end freaking out about them. Nowhere has this been more obvious than with "Critical Race Theory." They have absolutely no clue what it is and have no interest in actually understanding it, but they are furious about it and they want it out of their children's schools now!

But before Critical Race Theory, there was "Cultural Marxism." Remember when we were all doing Cultural Marxism all the time, because of how extremely influenced we were by the Frankfurt School? Boy, was it ever awkward when they figured out our dastardly plans on that front.

Liberals going to take away all of our guns so they can do tyranny to us!

The Right refuses to acknowledge that our support of gun control is about making our country safer, about decreasing mass shootings, about decreasing suicides and other gun crimes. They insist that it is all a cover for a nefarious plot to take all of their guns away so that we can tyrannize them.

They work from that premise exclusively, to the point where many of them truly believe that mass shootings are false flags designed to give us cover to take their guns away.

Liberals just want people to take safety measures during a pandemic because they want to control us!

The Right cannot concede that perhaps we want to keep people from getting sick. Nope. It has to be about controlling them. I have to imagine this is some kind of incredible projection because let's be real here, they're the only ones going around wanting to control people in any capacity.

They want to be able to control who people have sex with, what gender they identify as, who they can marry, whether or not they have children, what religion they practice, how they greet them during the month of December, etc. etc. That's weird to me and, I believe, to pretty much anyone on the Left.

Poor people are buying King Crab legs with SNAP cards!

Since Reagan, the Right has perpetuated this idea of greedy, lazy poor people living high on the hog — something that sounds like a thing they can get justifiable angry at, in order to deny necessary assistance to people living in poverty. Because hey, it sounds a lot better than "Actually I am fine with children starving to death." In actuality, people on SNAP do not receive very much assistance at all and welfare fraud is very, very rare .

No one will let us be alpha males anymore!

What they really mean to say here is "We can't act the way we think alpha males should act and then get the social approval we think that ought to deserve." They are free to be alpha males as long as they don't hurt anyone, just as they are free to be anything else that doesn't hurt anyone. One might think that someone who is truly such a macho, macho man would not need a major cheering section standing behind him congratulating him on his performance of masculinity, but who can really say?

Similarly, these people are all free to get married young (although we are being the spoilsports who say they shouldn't be able to marry 15-year-old girls), have as many babies as they want, adhere to traditional gender roles as they please, go to church, celebrate Christmas, and live whatever lives they want to lead. They can do 1950s cosplay all day if they want, no one will step in and stop them. The problem is when they feel like they can't do this and can't truly enjoy this life unless it is being held up as an ideal that everyone else around them is also trying to achieve. Because not everyone wants that life.

Elections are being stolen!

This is an obvious one — but it's a big one. Despite having absolutely zero proof of elections being "stolen," the Right has tried to push for discriminatory Voter ID laws, tried to limit the amount of time people have to vote, and, of course, stormed the Capitol.

They have literally no evidence of this. Like everything else, it's an article of faith. They can't point to anything concrete to say "This is clearly a problem and here is how we are going to try to address it." They just believe, in their hearts, that it is happening.

So, so many other things I can't even name them right now

I legitimately cannot think of a single thing that Republicans are mad at that is real. They're never mad at what is happening, but what they believe could be happening or could happen in the future, hypothetically. Even when they oppose real things, they make up fantastical reasons to oppose them that have absolutely nothing to do with reality. They were upset over the ACA because of death panels, a thing they made up! They were upset over President Obama being Black and tried to pretend like what they were really upset about was that they weren't sure he was an American citizen. They didn't like Muslim people, so they want around screaming about how all the Muslims were going to try to do Shariah law to them. They don't like Mexican people so they accuse Mexican immigrants of stealing their jobs and committing violent crimes.

And let's not forget those Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The problem isn't just that we disagree on issues, but that we disagree on basic facts of reality. Where do you even start when one group of people wants to see something done about poverty and another group wants to see something done about the legions of purple dinosaurs roaming our streets? And how does it ever end when we're expected to graciously meet them halfway, but they are never required to prove that the purple dinosaurs exist and are real?

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