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May 15, 2023Liked by Jessica Valenti

If people are busy trying to keep their basic human rights, they don't have time to notice the robber barons are stealing them blind.

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I have been meditating on why our society is not nurturing and has no empathy and collective culture is flying apart. We need to understand, not just the burgeoning deviant political philosophies, but why they are becoming more actively hateful and vicious (especially in the "right to life" states). I watched DJT start with othering Obama by challenging his birth certificate, then othering Muslims and Mexicans as a political strategy, then accepting othering Jews ("will not replace us"), then a vast public movement of science and vaccine denial during COVID, which was not just without empathy, but othered the high risk elderly, essential minorities, the poor and urban elites (as expendable nuisances) in promoting their own libertarian, individualistic freedom, finally culminating in othering all pregnant moms to protect the potential life of a fetus above all values even at the price of allowing raped women and women who experienced incest and eagerly expectant mothers having a miscarriage to suffer and making the ethical practice of medical caring illegal and finally othering children by passing laws re-permitting child labor.

So what does this mean? From a historical perspective it is very serious because wars always start by othering the enemy (see WWII Japanese internment camps, Muslims in the Iraq war among others). It is not alarmist or paranoid to note that Hitler started his extermination project by othering handicapped, mentally retarded and mentally ill Germans and killing 200,000 of them. This is a deep seated pathology. Few people, especially in the media, see how all these events are tied together and are at the core of the Trumpian urge to fascism. It is especially lively in the "right to life" states. Thepoliticians there are eager to pass the most draconian laws, with not one word recognizing the inhumanity of their zeal. We are in a very dangerous period.

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"...these same states are also re-establishing ‘maternity homes’. These are group homes that target vulnerable, poor pregnant women who often have no other place to go; they also often have relationships with anti-abortion centers and evangelical adoption agencies. At the same time anti-choice states are over-funding anti-abortion centers and enabling ‘maternity homes’, they’re also trying to make it easier to terminate parental rights. (I think we can all see where this is going.)"

My weekly reminder that this is the definition of trafficking.

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I was thinking about all the Ukrainian children kidnaped by Russia, presumably to brainwash them into becoming good Russians. Then I was thinking about the maternity homes and the newborns that are going to be taken from their mothers to be adopted by people who will raise them as good republicans.

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There’s really no good news out there on this issue. It’s horrifying and depressing.

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