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Right-wing grift plugs away at next goal for theocratic authoritarians -- ending no-fault divorce [1]
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Date: 2023-06-20
The right-wing grift is lucrative in this country. Turns out there’s no end to Nazi-collecting billionaires willing to spend gobs of money to make sure Americans are told what to think and how to feel — even as these same Scrooge McDuck-wannabes (sans charm) rob everyone blind through wage theft, inflation and lost pensions.
Billionaires delude themselves into thinking they deserve what they’ve taken, often embracing a theocratic worldview to justify being born into such a privileged spot at the trough. They resent any Democratic check on power, act from a moral high ground despite living lives straight from a sewer, and the cherry atop this Sunday School shit sundae is their total contempt and hatred for women.
The grubby, dirty fingerprints of billionaire theocrats are all over our handpicked Supreme Court’s decision to revoke women’s hard-fought and long-held right. Controlling women has always been page one stuff for theocrats, as generations of insecure halfwit men have been notoriously bedeviled that the women they consider property could ever have thoughts or ideas on their own.
This kind of Old Testament theocratic bullshit doesn’t quite sell as well nowadays -- at least not after folk saw how the wind seems to be blowing in sync with The Handmaid’s Tale. That’s why you go online and find so many well-lit, smooth-talking, deeply-cynical Mouth’s of Sauron doing their darnedest to convince the masses how our ruling class truly has our best interests at heart.
One of these theocratic shills, Candace Owens, said this with a straight face just last week. From Jezebel:
This past weekend marked the conservative organization Turning Point USA’s annual Young Women’s Leadership Summit. Over the course of three days, as Media Matters’ Madeline Peltz reported, a stacked roster of some of the worst people on the internet offered some variation of the same speech imploring young attendees to give up their career aspirations and their birth control. The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens literally wrapped up the convention by telling attendees, “Every ill that we are fighting right now in society has been brought forth by women.”
Candace works for The Daily Caller, a right-wing outrage machine of misfit toys like Ben Shapiro that’s funded by the deep pockets of foundations associated to Charles Koch, along with the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, among others.
That’s totally a fair fight with those of us over here writing diaries in our spare time, amIright? Oh, that left-leaning media!
(Full disclosure: After an earlier well-received diary, a mysterious drone bearing an heretofore lost original Faberge Egg arrived at my window along with a directive to relentlessly nitpick the obscene military spending on display in Top Gun: Maverick. I’ve no idea who sent the drone, but the note was signed, “G.S.”)
(Fuller disclosure: I’m keeping the damn egg).
Listening to this demented mirror world of theocratic authoritarians clues us in on what’s next on the agenda — contraception is the new abortion, and divorce the once-old, now new-again cardinal sin.
This isn’t even the first time the assault on no-fault divorce has been brought up in a diary — Dan K. offered some terrific perspective in May:
More to the point, the argument for no-fault divorce is based on reality — on studies showing that it genuinely helps people. Just as the reality is that abortion is a necessary and safe medical practice that helps women who may be harmed or die as a result of their pregnancy. Just as the reality is that gender dysphoria is a medical condition that needs to be treated medically, which often means gender transition. … Today’s Republican is someone standing in front of reality (often holding out a cross) and screaming, “Go away!”
Let’s check in on this effort and add to Dan K.’s earlier diary, because you can see this train of thought coming down the right-wing grift assembly line like so many conspiracies escaping the treacherous, gravel-lined path of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s throat.
First up is famed theocratic virgin-before-marriage poster boy Steven Crowder, who back in the day got regularly depantsed by Amy Schumer on a FOX News late-night show hosted by Greg Gutfeld (who allegedly considered Steven a “total weirdo”).
When you’re too weird for Gutfeld! Hold on, let me just… whoo, let me get my breath back. Okay.
Anyway, you may recall how the world was exposed to Steven berating his extremely-pregnant wife (with twins!) for not following his orders or properly performing wifely duties. Later on we found out Steven also repeatedly exposed himself to employees, as people who work for him allege which he, apparently, gleefully admits happened.
Yet before Crowder was tipped to have a poor finish in this year’s Husband of the Year sweepstakes, consider the tact he took.
'I loved a woman so much that I married her,' said Crowder. 'A woman who, despite all of this, I still love as the mother of my children and she wanted something else for her life. 'That's not my choice, she simply wanted out and the law says that that's how it works.'
That pesky no-fault divorce, screwing things up for honest guys like… (checks notes) Steven Crowder. Here’s Jezebel with a report on some of Steven’s thoughts on the subject:
Suddenly, his comments bemoaning no-fault divorce last summer make a lot more sense. Shall we review? “No-fault divorce, which, by the way, means that in many of these states if a woman cheats on you, she leaves, she takes half. So it’s not no-fault, it’s the fault of the man,” he said at the time, adding, “There need to be changes to marital laws, and I’m not even talking about same-sex marriage. … I’m talking about divorce laws, talking about alimony laws, talking about child support laws. “If you’re a woman that comes from meager means, and you want to get wealthy—you’ve never worked, you didn’t get a degree, you have no skill set, but you’re good-looking—your best path to victory is simply to marry a man, leave him, and take half. … We need to reform divorce laws in this country.”
Now look, Steven may have a big “Mug Club” of weirdos to keep him in supply of steaks and wood chips for the foreseeable future, but it’s doubtful he has broad appeal.
So let’s check in on a new grifter in this space sporting a less gun-toting package — meet Pearl Davis. From Business Insider:
Hannah Pearl Davis, known as just Pearl, is booming in popularity with a brand of anti-feminist content that lands differently since she is a woman herself. Davis, who is 26, saw her YouTube audience grow 50% in the three months since Tate was detained, per the analytics tool Social Blade. Her subscriber base jumped from around 800,000 to 1.3 million in that timeframe. She has increasingly been nicknamed the "female Andrew Tate," including by critics who consider her the latest celebrity misogynist.
Yes, that’s right — one hundred years of Women’s suffrage have finally brought us a “female Andrew Tate.” If you’re unfamiliar with Tate, your keen eyes might have picked up on the word “detained,” as he’s currently in jail in Romania facing a host of charges.
Just last fall, Tate was rated the No. 1 social-media influencer for the under-18 crowd (according to a Piper Sandler survey). Clips using a hashtag of his name have been viewed more than 13 billion times on TikTok alone—though he has been banned from both that platform and YouTube. In his videos, he mostly rambles at length about his life “philosophy,” such as it is, which mostly revolves around cars and abusing women, who he considers nearly subhuman but enjoys for sex.
Again, now we’ve got a female version of this. Fantastic stuff, honestly. Here’s Business Insider, again:
Davis explicitly told Insider that she doesn’t “hate women” but her opinions would say otherwise. Some of her most controversial beliefs include: men should be able to hit women back, women have it “easier” in society, women don’t deserve to be with a well-paid man if they’re obese, it’s a woman’s fault if a man cheats on her and women are entirely responsible for unwanted pregnancies. In one video, with over 3.2 million hits, she said: “A lot of you are shitty wives. You don’t cook for your man, you belittle him, you nag on him all the time. You don’t treat him like a man.”
The charitable view here is she probably doesn’t believe any of this. Reader, does that make it better or worse? Debatable, but it pays the bills.
Pearl bit off more than she could chew in this conversation with Ethan Klein of the H3 Podcast. Skim through to get a taste:
x YouTube Video
Big-time Jeb! energy in some of Pearl’s answers up there. Scintillating personality. I dunno, but that kind of demonstration of passion behind some of her arguments is… less than convincing.
When the topic shifted to divorce, Pearl immediately delivered the desired headline — even if her flimsy argument fell apart under the simplest follow-ups:
“I think we should ban divorce, I think that should be banned, yes,” Pearl said. “I just think that if you want to leave, you just shouldn’t get married. That’s just my opinion.” Ethan, in response, told her that some marriages end because of physical abuse. Pearl said she accepted there were exceptions, such as relationships that were “one-sided physically abusive.” “I just think that the goal should be to keep families together, and the goal should be to work through it,” she said. Ethan asked how physical abuse could be proven to allow this exception, and Pearl said the abuser should be prosecuted in criminal court. “So only if your significant other is tried criminally are you allowed to leave the relationship? Tried and found guilty criminally?” Ethan asked, to which Pearl responded, “Yes.” “I just say, stay out of marriage,” she said. “Marriage is supposed to be for better for worse, in sickness and in health, and for richer or for poorer. It’s not supposed to be, you know, when I feel like leaving.”
Are we supposed to take Pearl or Steven seriously? Is this trolling against no-fault divorce ever going to move the needle in a real way? I’ll leave you with this thought from Katha Pollitt in The Nation, which sums up the threat nicely:
I’d like to believe this crusade against no-fault divorce is the pet project of a few cranks. Most people don’t want to be miserable, even right-wing fanatics. Kellyanne Conway, Lauren Boebert, Sarah Palin, and Marjorie Taylor Greene have each recently gotten divorced, after all. For them, as for their circus master, Donald Trump, divorce is part of the fabric of life. On the other hand, legal abortion was part of the fabric of life too. Until it wasn’t.
Theocratic authoritarian billionaires have a demented world view and a thousand mouthpieces pushing their weird, backward thoughts. Know the grift to stop it before it spreads. The clock is ticking until someone like Ron DeSantis is declaring a “war on golddiggers” that cribs from Ronald Reagan’s “war on welfare queens.”
Tax Churches. Fund Social Services. Get a different result.
Okay, I’m through. See you in the comments.
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