December 1, 2021

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH

Abbott and the anti-abortion zealots haven’t gone after vasectomies because men get them and, anyway, first they want abortions outlawed in as many states as possible, or even a Supreme Court ruling in the future that would outlaw abortions point-blank.

But it won’t stop there. The next step will be trying to prohibit the manufacture and distribution of morning-after pills and pill-induced abortions. And then, mark my words, the next step will be to go after birth control pills. It sounds alarmist, but these are true holy rollers and will push the notion of hindering women’s control of their bodies as far as they can. And enforcements of such laws would be enabled by the growing authoritarian red states.

That is in large part a potential because many Republican states have become autocracies even interfering in the holy grail of Republican principles, businesses.

As David Pepper, immediate past chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party notes in his book, “Laboratories of Autocracies”:

Yet in the statehouses there is a system that Vladimir Putin would be impressed with. For example, in Ohio, even if a majority of people voted for a Democrat, the Republicans would still be in the majority or super majority in the statehouse. When outcomes are guaranteed, there is zero accountability. I wrote the book to wake people up so that we take this as seriously as we would if it happened in other countries.

The two Republican governors and legislatures that best exemplify totalitarian state governments are in Texas and Florida. Both Greg Abbott and Ron De Santis exemplify despotic rule with few brakes to stop their fevered drives to build frenzied support among their voters.

Although the Republican Party and the Southern States after Reconstruction emphasized individual rights of white males, and later white females, they are now embarked on dark mini-experiments in fascism.

Take Abbott for example. He

• Has asserted government control over a woman’s body

• Allowed the infections and deaths of thousands and thousands of COVID patients, such that they could be accused of homicide by forcing all entities in the state to let the virus roam freely

• Ordered books be removed from school shelves and even a “criminal investigation,” as he battles with duly-elected school boards

• Has signed a bill that suppresses voting rights, thus taking power away from citizens to elect a government other than Republicans

• Continued using an unstable electrical grid to avoid connecting to the federal electrical grid

• Promulgated the big lie thus undercutting voter faith in the electoral process

• Wants to harshly punish protesters

Yes, the tyranny of state control over individual lives, and the list above is just partial, is not coming from Washington, DC. It is becoming the de facto style of government in many red states.

It’s not going to stop with abortion bans and voter suppression, which is really the theft of full citizenship.

The states, as David Pepper observes, are fast becoming our laboratories for totalitarianism and anti-democracy laws that constrain the freedoms of individual Americans.

One unfettered freedom is that of gun rights, of which we saw the abject result again at a Michigan high school. And it enhances the violent power of white male privilege.

We are far down the line of “autocratic capture.”