Dennis Prager Thinks The Nazis Had Some Good Points, Actually

Dennis Prager doesn’t think the Nazi slogan, the 3 Ks is bad. The German slogan describes that a woman’s place should be limited to the children, kitchen, and church. The Majority Report crew discusses how they are not surprised by Prager’s view aligning with fascists. The MR crew talks about how Prager and those on the Right like him do not want women involved in politics and the hierarchy Nazis wanted to maintain.

Mitt Romney Is Inventing Policies for a Fantasy G.O.P.

Last year, as an alternative to the temporary expansion of the child tax credit under President Biden’s American Rescue Plan, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah introduced a plan to give every family a monthly benefit of up to $350 per child for children 5 and under and $250 per child for children 6 to 17. It was simple, generous (it included a payment before birth, too) and — on paper, at least — effective. According to the Niskanen Center, which helped devise the proposal, the Romney plan would cut overall child poverty by roughly a third and the deepest child poverty by half.

Republicans hated it. His Senate colleagues Marco Rubio and Mike Lee denounced Romney’s plan as “welfare assistance,” and called for “pro-work” policies to assist families. “An essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work,” the senators said. “Congress should expand the child tax credit without undercutting the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.”

Romney, who voted against Biden’s rescue package, went back to the drawing board and recently unveiled a less generous version of his plan aimed at winning Republican support in the Senate. In this iteration, which would fill the gap left by the expiration of the Biden expansion in December, a family with children would have to earn at least $10,000 per year to qualify for the full credit. Below that, the benefit would scale proportionally so that a family earning $5,000 per year would receive 50 percent of the credit. The most impoverished families would receive the smallest benefits.

This version of the child benefit, to use the lingo of Romney’s earlier conservative critics, would “reward work.”

And yet there’s little indication that any more than a token group of Republican lawmakers is interested in Romney’s latest proposal. There’s no appetite for it. For the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, passing a new child benefit is not the kind of work they came to Washington to do. (It should be said, though, that in the absence of the filibuster, that token group of Republicans plus most Democrats would be enough to pass the Romney bill or something like it.)

The hostile and then indifferent response to Romney’s child allowance from his Republican colleagues — as well as the nearly total absence of meaningfully pro-family legislation from conservative lawmakers — tells us something very important about the future of the pro-life cause in the Republican Party. But maybe not quite what you think.

In the weeks since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, some conservatives and abortion opponents have, as Elaine Godfrey reported in The Atlantic, expressed the hope that their movement and political party would turn their attention to the material well-being of mothers, families and children. So far, that hope seems to be misplaced.

Free, now, to pursue whatever policies they’d like on abortion, most Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion activists appear to be focused on passing harsh new restrictions on reproductive autonomy and creating broad protections for “fetal life.”

Trigger laws and prior statutes have already made abortion illegal in roughly a dozen states. Legislators in Missouri and Texas want to pass laws that would extend their bans across state lines, to punish residents who go to other states to obtain abortions. South Carolina Republicans, likewise, have drafted legislation that would ban all abortions except to prevent the death of the mother and would prosecute anyone “conspiring to cause, or aiding or abetting, illegal abortion.” And an Ohio bill would recognize the “personhood” and constitutional rights of “all unborn human individuals from the moment of conception.”

What you won’t find passing anytime soon in any Republican-led state legislature are bills to reduce the cost of childbearing and child-rearing. At most, a few states that have or will ban abortion have extended postpartum care under Medicaid. But there are no major plans to improve coverage or provide new benefits. As a practical matter, the pro-welfare, anti-abortion politician does not exist, at least not in the Republican Party.

The policy correlation is, in fact, what you would expect it to be. As a rule, the states with the most generous safety nets and anti-poverty programs are also the states with the widest access to abortion and other reproductive health services. The states with the most restrictive abortion laws are also, as a rule, the states that do the least for families and children as a matter of public policy.

Another way to make this connection is simply to look at a map of states that continue to refuse to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and compare it with a map of states that outlaw (or effectively outlaw) abortion. The overlap fits the pattern.

This distance — between the rhetoric of “life” and the reality of conservative Republican governance — only looks like hypocrisy. In truth, it is perfectly consistent.

That’s because the Republican ideal of a “pro-family” agenda is girded on traditional hierarchies. Reproductive autonomy, up to and including the right to get an abortion, weakens hierarchies of gender. And the social safety net — especially one that extends directly to mothers and children — undermines the preferred conservative social order of isolated, atomized households kept in line through market discipline.

If the goal of abortion opponents and politicians is to encourage life and promote families, then, yes, their interests and priorities are at odds with their actions. But if the goal is a more rigid and hierarchical world of untrammeled patriarchal authority, then, well, things are pretty much going according to plan.

The 10 tactics of fascism | Jason Stanley | Big Think

Fascism is a cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, leftists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals, women, in the face of what the fascist leader says is a takeover of the country’s media, cultural institutions, schools by these forces.

Fascist movements typically, though not invariably, rest on an urban/rural divide. The cities are where there’s decadence, where the elites congregate, where there’s immigrants, and where there’s criminality.

Each of these individuals alone is not in and of itself fascist, but you have to worry when they’re all grouped together, seeing the other as less than. Those moments are the times when societies need to worry about fascism.

Read the video transcript: https://bigthink.com/videos/what-is-f…

 

05:56
Loyalty to the dominant group means law-abidingness.
06:00
And the minority group is by its nature not law-abiding.
06:06
Law and order in fascist politics means the members
06:10
of a minority group who accept their subservient role,
06:15
they’re law-abiding,
06:16
and the members of the dominant group
06:18
by their very nature are law-abiding.
06:20
By definition, the leader can’t violate law and order.
06:24
So law and order doesn’t mean justice.
06:27
Law and order doesn’t mean equality.
06:29
Law and order structures who’s legitimate and who’s not.
06:35
Everywhere around the world,
06:36
no matter what the situation is,
06:39
in very different socioeconomic conditions,
06:42
the fascist leader comes and tells you,
06:44
“Your women and children are under threat.
06:46
You need a strong man to protect your families.”
06:50
They make conservatives hysterically afraid
06:53
of transgender rights or homosexuality,
06:57
other ways of living.
06:58
These are not people trying to live their own lives.
07:02
They’re trying to destroy your life,
07:03
and they’re coming after your children.
07:05
What the fascist politician does is they take conservatives
07:09
who aren’t fascist at all, and they say,
07:11
“Look, I know you might not like my ways.
07:14
You might think I’m a womanizer.
07:16
You might think I’m violent in my rhetoric.
07:18
But you need someone like me now.
07:20
You need someone like me ’cause homosexuality,
07:23
it isn’t just trying for equality.
07:25
It’s coming after your family.”
07:29
Fascist movements typically, though not invariably,
07:33
rest on an urban/rural divide.
07:36
The cities are where there’s decadence,
07:38
where the elites congregate, where there’s immigrants,
07:42
there’s criminality, there’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
07:45
In the city, there’s not real work.
07:48
The pure, hard-working, real members of the nation live
07:53
in the rural areas, where they work hard with their hands.
07:57
When our politicians talk about inner-city voters
08:00
or urban voters, we all know what they mean.
08:05
Arbeit macht frei, “Work shall make you free.”
08:08
This was written on the gates of Auschwitz.
08:11
The idea is that the minority group, they’re lazy,
08:16
and they need to be made to work.
08:17
Free labor.
08:19
The minority group and the leftists,
08:21
they’re lazy by their nature,
08:23
and it gives them a work ethic.
08:25
Labor unions are run by communists
08:28
who are trying to make things easier.
08:30
Hard work is a virtue.
08:32
In liberal democracy,
08:34
we don’t value people by how hard they work.
08:37
What would happen to disabled people who can’t work?
08:40
They would then have no value.
08:41
It’s why the Nazis had the T4 program to murder the disabled
08:46
because the disabled were Lebenunwertes Leben,
08:50
life unworthy of life,
08:52
because to be valued was to be capable of hard work.
08:56
Each of these individual elements is not
08:58
in and of itself fascist,
09:00
but you have to worry when they’re all grouped together,
09:03
when honest conservatives are lured into fascism
09:06
by people who tell them, “Look, it’s an existential fight.
09:09
I know you don’t accept everything we do.
09:12
You don’t accept every doctrine.
09:14
But your family is under threat.
09:16
Your family is at risk.
09:17
So without us, you’re in peril.”
09:20
Those moments are the times
09:23
when we need to worry about fascism.