What Do Anti-Trans Laws And Critical Race Theory Have In Common?

We actually have a lot in common (Hint: Look at the title of the article), take a look at why the Republicans are attacking CRT…

The engineered conservative panic over critical race theory, explained
CNN
By Brandon Tensley
July 08, 2021


Spare a thought for critical race theory. It wasn't always a conservative bogeyman.

Especially over the past several months, Republican leaders have distorted CRT -- an academic frame that scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw have been using in graduate-level courses for decades to interrogate how the legal system entrenches racism -- into a catchall to describe things they don't like.

In this bastardized telling, CRT is whatever Republicans want it to be; it comes in many guises. "Black Lives Matter" is one name for CRT. "Social justice" is another. "Identity," yet another. "Reparations." "Ally-ship." "Diversity."

But to linger on what CRT is, or isn't, is to miss the more pressing concern: Why have Republicans latched onto a decades-old academic term?

Here are a couple of hints: “Republican leaders have distorted...” and “In this bastardized telling...” does those phrases ring a bell?

Because so many Americans don't know what CRT is, it's the perfect tool for scaring White conservative voters with made-up problems -- for mobilizing them against the racial awakening of the past year. Here's how we got here:

That was a big hint! “Because so many Americans don't know what…”

The backlash to CRT echoes the 1960s
The panic over CRT is hardly the first time that the US has seen such ethnonationalist fearmongering.

In a recent Twitter thread, Pomona College politics professor Omar Wasow argued that one way to understand the anxiety over CRT is as "a reactionary counter-mobilization."
[…]
In the year since the murder of George Floyd and the renewed demands for racial justice, Republicans have once again detected a need to reposition themselves, to turn a cultural shift into a sense of crisis that they can use to their advantage. (Republicans are doing something similar in their war against transgender students, as The Atlantic's Adam Serwer keenly pointed out.)

What the Republicans are doing is trying to redefine, refocus the national discussion on race and on us, to make us and CRT the bogymen. Because not many people understand CRT or us they can easily distort the message and tell their lies.

The article in the Atlantic that they cite is…

The Republican Party Finds a New Group to Demonize
The recent wave of anti-trans legislation follows a decades-long pattern of the GOP targeting those they think lack the numbers or votes to properly fight back.
By Adam Serwer
April 13, 2021


[…]
The interview represented a shift in conservative politics, as the Republican Party moved from demonizing one group of Americans to another. The time for blaming the nation’s problems on gay people was over; now was the time to come together as a country and blame our problems on Muslims. For the past 30 years, the GOP has pursued a consistent strategy: Find a misunderstood or marginalized group, convince voters that the members of that group pose an existential threat to society, and then ride to victory on the promise of using state power to crush them.

Then after the gays they turned their hate mill on immigration,

Also during this period, Republicans pursued a series of draconian anti-immigration laws modeled after Arizona’s S.B. 1070, criticized by immigrant advocates as the “show me your papers” law, because it allowed police to stop anyone they suspected of being undocumented, effectively requiring noncitizens—or anyone who might be mistaken for one—to carry proof of status at all times. Such proposals were a clear license for racial profiling. As with the anti-Sharia legislation, Republican elected officials across the country fell all over one another in an effort to display their animosity toward immigrants by passing or proposing similar legislation. The Supreme Court struck down much of the Arizona bill in 2012 on the grounds that it conflicted with federal law, which takes precedence on issues of immigration.
[…]
Again and again, Republicans have targeted groups they believe too small or too powerless to spark a costly political backlash. By attacking them, the GOP seeks to place Democrats in a political bind. If they decline to bow to demagoguery, Democrats risk looking either too culturally avant-garde for the comfort of more conservative voters—whose support they need to remain viable—or too preoccupied with defending the rights of a beleaguered minority to pay attention to bread-and-butter issues that matter to the majority. This strategy has worked in the past—President Bill Clinton, who signed the federal statute outlawing same-sex marriage in 1996, was no Republican. Many people across the political spectrum accept the premise that defending a marginalized group’s civil rights is “identity politics,” while choosing to strip away those rights is not.

So now it is our turn and CRT’s turn.

It is designed to drive a wedge by creating a false flag to divert attention from them. Where else have we seen misdirection by the Republican party? Ooh, ooh, I know!!! Voter fraud.