Byline Supplement — ‘The Witch Switch’
Byline Supplement — ‘The Witch Switch’
My latest report in Byline Supplement explains why the GOP needs a constant supply of witches to burn
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Please join me in following one of David Pepper’s key tenets — stop being surprised at how low the party formerly known as the GOP is willing to go to grab power.
Expect criminal behavior, expect the unexpected. We have no room to be on our back foot, we must go on offense. We must all work harder.
My latest report in Byline Supplement explains why the GOP continually needs to create new enemies, new targets of fake wrath, new witches to burn — because they don’t have the votes.
Here is an excerpt:
It was decades in the making. A cruel and sinister plot to turn the Republican party’s base into single-issue voters. As long as candidates professed to be anti-abortion, it didn’t matter if they left a dirty trail of corruption littered with hush money and hypocrisy.
On June 24, 2022, the GOP got its wish, as the MAGA wing of the Supreme Court overturned fifty years of federal protection for a woman’s right to abortion, which really was about health care as people quickly learned.
I recall tweeting the moment I heard the news of Roe that “birds still sing under fascism”. I had written years worth of warnings with Sian Norris in Byline Times of what was to come, and when it happened, I recall sitting in stunned silence, as a chorus of things with wings tried to comfort me with birdsong.
As Strongmen author and scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained at the time: “Authoritarianism is about control of bodies and policing sexuality. That’s why strongmen and their followers have taken away reproductive rights and have also persecuted LGBTQ+ people for a century.”
The impact was immediate and devastating — a raped 10-year-old was denied health care and had to be flown out of state to be treated, maternal mortality spiked, as extremist governors pounced on the opportunity to create positively medieval laws.
But then, something entirely unexpected happened.
It turned out to be a devastating Pyrrhic Victory for the GOP, as they snatched defeat from the jaws of their ‘victory’. Perhaps they miscalculated the math — more than two-thirds of the country is pro-choice.
From Kansas to Ohio, voters showed up across party lines to rebuke the denial of women’s health care rights. The dark money groups that cynically fund organizations to weaponize people to destroy their own democracy overshot the mark….
And remember the border? Remember the Texas caravans? Or was it the migrant caravans? Or is it the trucker caravans?
See, that’s the thing. The ‘othering’ targets are moving so quickly, lurching from outrage to outrage, that the MAGA Cult may be losing the plot….
Remember the “lock her up” days of 2016, when an entire cottage-industry was spawned over the ‘hating’ of Hillary Clinton?
And then when she was defeated, the ‘burn the witch’ target moved to Hunter Biden, just in time for the first Trump impeachment hearing.
“Republicans brought this into play as a distraction from the charges that Trump was facing then,” said reporter Paul Niland. “Classic Russian-style whataboutism.”
Just days ago, the star ‘informant’ against Hunter Biden was arrested by the FBI. Turns out, he’d made the whole thing up.
Enter Taylor Swift, who despite her enormous talent and humanness — she writes beautiful songs about her breakups and imperfections — became the latest witch MAGA tried to burn.
This week’s witch switch is Fani Willis.
Willis, however, handled the spotlight well, so I imagine Fox producers are already rebooting video of immigrants at the border, since the war on Christmas won’t play in February and gender neutral bathrooms have resulted in reduced wait times.
In the astroturfing world of fake culture wars, immigrants are the perennial boogeyman for extremist narrators…
Stephen Douglas, author of Disinfolklore, says this ‘witch switch’ is a method used by the right to “smuggle in their bad policies and cover up their incompetent governing with chaos.”
He said, the witch switch is actually trolling as cover for incompetence.
“The drivers of this trolling learned early in life that they’re congenitally incompetent, but that by creating chaos they can cover this up and compensate for it by ‘othering’,” Douglas told Byline Supplement. “Trump, Putin, all of them are so incompetent really. They sell fear so they can act as saviors. But what they are is incompetent.”
The bottom line, dictators are like petulant vampires, sucking the energy from the people. Stop giving it to them. These are incompetent criminals posing as strongmen.
Thank you to those why support the work we do at Byline Supplement, which is all reader funded. If you are unable to afford a subscription at this time and would like to read the full report, I am authorized to send upon request at bettedangerous/gmail.
Thank you!
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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members. Thank you as well to all those who support my work with your generous coffee tips and who buy my ebooks. Some of you prefer making subsidizing donations via venmo, and it’s always greatly appreciated.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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