The Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing thinktank currently mired in controversy over its president’s apparent apology for extremism, has appointed as a director the founder of a secretive all-male network of Christian nationalist fraternal lodges.
Scott Yenor, appointed as Heritage’s new director of the B Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, has also recently offered ultra-conservative opinions on women, marriage and LGBTQ rights in recent podcast appearances and speaking engagements.
They have included that there is an association between homosexuality and pedophilia; that adultery, homosexuality, no-fault divorce, and abortion should be outlawed under a regime of “soft patriarchy”; and that elements of the US Civil Rights Act, including its prohibitions against workplace sex discrimination, should be wound back.
Heritage appointed Yenor despite a string of controversies over his reactionary politics, including his resignation in April from the University of Florida’s board of regents following protests and concern from state legislators over his views about women.
I despise conservatives for many material and ethical reasons (I don’t like people who take pride in being ignorant hateful dumbasses) but one of the more aggravating ones is that conservatives never evolve. You can look back in history and find anti-vaxers spouting almost the same exact nonsense as they do now, word for word.
Similarly conservatives have demonstrated that they are fundamentally incapable of getting past the idea that there is some connection between homophobia and pedophilia.
We will be in space with warp drives, quantum computers and unbelievably advanced medical science and older conservatives will still isolate themselves, only consume brainworm causing media and begin claiming homosexuality is connected with pedophilia with zero evidence.
We study history lest we repeat the mistakes of the past whereas conservatives hallucinate a past and then become monomaniacally obsessed with intentionally repeating the mistakes of it…
I don’t think they’re “doomed to repeat it.” I think it’s them taking notes and using the same thing that worked for awhile. Bannon and Trump both have kind of said that in different ways.
To a certain extent yes, they are taking notes, but remember we are talking about ignorant conservatives here, they aren’t going to do the work of researching anything even if it gives them a ready made script identical to the one they would have wrote. Every prominent conservative ideologue is convinced they have noticed something new that others haven’t, they need to for their ego, researching the past isn’t going to help conservatives feel more righteous about their beliefs if they find that dumbasses have been making the same claims for a hundred years and getting publicly embarrassed for being wrong…
A lot of the time the toxic crap conservatives spew all sounds the same because the genesis process of their intellectually lazy fearmongering makes the easiest kneejerk conclusion possible at every juncture and pulls in stereotypes without ever critically examining them and that recipe tends to produce very similar low-quality slop hateporn no matter the context or ingredients that the process began with. There is only so many ways to think like a conservative, that is the root problem and violence of conservatism at the end of the day after all. Conservatism lures people in by their desire to righteously hate someone in a morality story and builds the rational backwards to do that and the resulting narrative is cookiecutter identical to others because of how artificial and contrived the process was to create it.
You’re absolutely right.
I think lots of people don’t understand that conservatism is a subset of reactionary ideology; their primary goal is to reverse the empowerment of the people they hate. They wish to “return” to an idealized past that they feel was stolen from them— one where being a white man automatically granted one a certain status.
They have a zero-sum view of rights: if another group is ascendant it must mean that they’re losing out. They have a desire to control the culture; changing norms and increasing diversity means that they’re having to compete with people who they view as beneath them. It’s why they’re constantly whining about things like DEI and blue-haired lesbians: it’s a way to reframe their bigotry to place the blame on others.
The reactionary right are very good at taking the rhetoric of liberation from the left and twisting it to their perverse purposes— namely, cementing a hierarchy of minority rule.
Airlock.
… as opposed to what?
“Stormfront up in arms over moderator being a Nazi.”
