Over the last week the right-wing rage machine has manufactured some astonishingly juvenile controversies. And that’s saying something, considering we’re talking about the same conservative movement that, within recent memory, kvetched about Santa Claus’ race and M&M candy cartoons’ perceived lack of sex appeal.
Even against those embarrassing benchmarks, the last week of right-wing whining has been remarkably dumb — and bigoted, to boot.
The latest outrage du jour was over the coincidence of Easter, which falls on a different date from year to year, and Trans Day of Visibility, which occurs on the same date every year. People who got outraged over this entirely random occurrence exposed their ignorance and religious bigotry all at once, given A) they don’t seem to know how holidays tend to work, and B) they evidently think that merely acknowledging the existence of trans people is an affront to God (despite the Christian Bible having nothing to say on the topic).
We saw something similar with the fabricated controversy that followed Monday night’s NCAA Tournament women’s basketball game between Louisiana State University and Iowa University. After conservative social media accounts noticed that LSU’s team wasn’t on the floor for the pregame national anthem, grandstanding right-wingers directed angst-ridden insults and other invective at the team, portraying them as unpatriotic.
The game — between a mostly white Iowa team and a mostly Black LSU team — was already fraught with racial tension. So the outrage seemed like an obvious attempt to inflame that tension by framing LSU as rabble-rousing social justice activists, much like conservatives did with Colin Kaepernick years ago. Some people online accused LSU’s team of “wokeness,” a hilariously absurd claim to anyone who knows anything about LSU’s conservative coach Kim Mulkey.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, lined up with the MAGA mob on Tuesday when he proposed stripping…
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