Last week I listened to a Science Friday segment “Gender-Affirming Care Is On The Line In This Election” on Spokane Public Radio. The program highlighted the uproar and fear fomented by Republican Party operatives over gender non-conformity. If you listen for it, nearly every Republican candidate manages to insert into their rhetoric some over-the-top angst over gender issues in women’s sports or bathroom usage or willy-nilly surgical sex changes in children over the lunch break in public schools. The rhetoric translates into action: twenty-six states have passed laws in one way or another restricting physicians’ ability to provide gender-affirming care. Rather than viewing these fellow humans with compassion, Republican rhetoric transforms them into objects of hate and fear, a threat that must be fought and neutralized.
This Republican tactic should be familiar to any student of the 20th century. The rhetoric is meant to rile up potential voters over the supposed threat from an “Other.” The “Other” is almost always a numerically small and often vulnerable group somehow labelled as a scary menace to the “good” or “righteous” members of the dominant group. As I listened to Science Friday, the words of the German theologian and Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller rang in my ears, words I first heard as a child in the 1950s:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me."
The same sort of Republican strategy is used to incite the faithful to overrule women’s private medical decisions around reproductive health. The Republicans behind draconian state-level anti-abortion laws suggest that women and their doctors, if not prevented by law, would feel free to abort a healthy fetus right up to the ninth month—or even kill a baby after birth. These Republican ideologues see women as an evil “Other” suspected of lacking all sense, judgment, and compassion.
This focus, this “othering,” is the devil’s bargain that the anti-regulation, hyper-capitalist, über-wealthy have made with the authoritarian, Christian nationalist far right: “We offer you the opportunity to control the lives of others in exchange for allowing us to pursue, unencumbered by regulation, a level of wealth you cannot even comprehend.”
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, according to Forbes, each have a net worth nearly 200 billion dollars, a fifth of a trillion dollars. Put that into plain numbers: $200,000,000,000.
In 2022 Elon Musk purchased Twitter for a leveraged 44 billion dollars ($44,000,000,000) less than a quarter of his net worth, giving him personal control over a massive news and social media platform. He has 220 million followers on the platform, a huge megaphone. He didn’t buy Twitter for fun and notoriety, he bought Twitter to position himself to further grow his fortune and power.
Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for a mere 250 million: $250,000,000. That is one eight hundredth of his fortune today, 1/8 of one percent—pocket change. This is a tiny investment that nonetheless put him in position to tweak the function of the Post in his favor, as he famously did in overruling the Post’s editorial board’s intention to endorse Kamala Harris. In so doing he effectively prostrated himself in case of a second Trump term, signaling that Bezos’ Post might be managed to be less critical of Trump a second time around. The fate of the Washington Post? No matter. If the Post goes under as subscribers flee, Bezos’ would hardly notice.
Both Musk and Bezos depend on lucrative contracts with the U.S. federal government to advance their efforts toward ascendancy (and profits) in space, Musk with SpaceX and Bezos with Blue Origin. (See this Robert Reich post for detail.) Both men, it appears, have bet they would fare better in case of a Trump victory if they obey in advance.
The Trump campaign works to keep its followers focused on controlling and dehumanizing those they see as the “Other.” Meanwhile, the über-wealthy lust after the riches a Trump presidency could bring, riches that would make a Russian oligarch blush.
Don’t fall for it. Vote accordingly.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry