How the "Transphobic Willie Horton" ads are normalized

Winning shouldn't be a moral arbiter

Welcome to a Thursday morning edition of Progress Report.

First, I hope that all of our readers in Florida are safe and unharmed as Hurricane Milton blows out toward the Atlantic. Some of the images out of the Gulf Coast have been awful. If you want to make a contribution to a mutual aid or relief fund, Feeding Tampa Bay is a good place to start.

Not to be too negative, but between the violence of climate change and the worrying direction of the election, the crisp fall air is beginning to carry the faint scent of doomsday. In a terrific twist of timing, the Mets are in the midst of an incredible playoff run right now, so fingers crossed I get to see a World Series trophy come home to Queens before total societal collapse!

Just a little humor for you, folks.

We’ve got a lot to go over today, from one of the darker developments of this election to news updates from around the country.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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Just call it bigotry

It’s hard to watch sports on TV for more than 20 minutes without being forced to watch one of Trump campaign’s ads about Kamala Harris’s desire to give gender-affirming surgery to undocumented immigrants. Republicans have spent $65 million on these and other transphobic ads, blanketing the MLB playoffs, NFL broadcasts, and college football games with late appeals to culture war agitprop, including endless ads about the very rare trans boy who wants to compete in girls’ athletics.

The ads are ugly little clips, morally and aesthetically, and as disjointed as the narratives they seek to convey. If you haven’t seen them, the author John Ganz put it best when he called the spots “transphobic Willie Horton” ads.

I don’t need to explain what that means, because the name Willie Horton is now synonymous with any ad so racist that it goes beyond the outer limit of what mainstream politics and half-decent society can tolerate. Even Lee Atwater, the racist mastermind behind the ad, apologized for producing it. Maybe Atwater didn’t mean it — he wrote it in a 1990 issue Life Magazine, while on his deathbed — but there was a public obligation to decry it even back then.

Just as the Willie Horton ads were not a reasonable contrast between two candidates’ positions on criminal justice, Trump’s spots do not simply present disagreements on child rearing or bathroom policy. Maybe the Horton ad would today be covered by the political media as outrageous and inflammatory, but in a sign of just how married news outlets are to campaign play-by-play, Trump’s transphobic ads have only been analyzed through the horse race narrative, thus legitimizing overt bigotry as an acceptable campaign tactic.

In a story published on Tuesday, the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher called the ads’ ubiquity “a sign that Republican strategists believe they have found a potent third leg for their messaging stool in 2024, along with the mainstays of inflation and immigration.”

The story quotes a number of GOP consultants and ad makers about the overarching strategy and efficacy of individual ads, as well as which demographics they targeted.

“Republican strategists said the focus on transgender women and girls in sports had been particularly effective with a key group of voters the party has hemorrhaged support from in recent years: college-educated suburban women,” Goldmacher wrote.

NBC News also covered the hateful ad strategy from the cold, cynical campaign strategy perspective:

Trump campaign officials say the ads will make it harder for Harris to make up ground with men, where polls show her trailing Trump. She has an edge with women.

A Trump campaign official said the campaign's internal polling showed the ad was resonating with Black men — a demographic the campaign is courting.

The NBC story hits a lot of the same notes as The NY Times piece, while also giving a bit of space near the end to LGBTQ lawmakers and activists who expressed skepticism and dismay at the advertisements.

A clinical evaluation

Still, the construction sends the message that the reactions, concerns, and feelings of people targeted by the ads are relative afterthoughts, far less important than whether such unvarnished hatred is effective at moving poll numbers.

Both stories lean heavily toward describing the bigoted ads as a master stroke of campaign strategy — the NBC article ends with a Republican operative extolling their genius, claiming that they “kill three birds with one stone,” like this is all a chess game.

The advertisements’ ability to move polls is the only metric that matters in the nihilist world that the authors seem to inhabit. The obligatory responses in the NBC article suggest that not everybody is happy about the message that the ads convey, but there is no indication that their grievances are justified.

There has been a similar approach to the coverage of the hateful lies that Trump, JD Vance, and other Republicans have been spreading about Haitian immigrants. News outlets have been more aggressive in clarifying the actual facts — no, Haitian immigrants aren’t eating people’s pets or causing massive spikes in housing prices — but the reporting has often treated Trump and Vance as incidental instead of central to the disgraceful affair.

While outlets have consistently said that Trump and Vance are promoting a “debunked conspiracy theory,” it was never actually a conspiracy theory. The truth is that the narrative began with one local posting something stupid on Facebook, metastasized a bit once incel posters began to cynically seize on it, and then blew up when JD Vance began talking about it, well aware (and even ultimately admitting) that he was lying. Instead of accidentally passing along a false rumor, Vance and Trump pushed it into the mainstream, knowingly subjecting Haitian communities across the country to endless bomb threats and harassment.

Trump and Vance are egomaniacal racists who are willing to incite race riot mobs and endanger tens of thousands of people for a small potential bounce in the polls. That’s objectively true, but not the kind of objectivity that political media prefers, so now Trump feels comfortable going to start pandemonium in Aurora, CO, based on another obvious and pernicious lie about immigrants.

Ultimately, neither the NYT or NBC pieces about the transphobic ads even hint at the existence of a basic moral standard for our politics or society at large, a failure that inherently advantages the people who do not hold themselves to any standard.

This is not the sort of issue that can be covered through horse race journalism, which turns elections into consequence-free competitions. These ads are objectively hateful, designed to fearmonger and stir animosity, to isolate and endanger a vulnerable minority. The same goes for the slander of Haitian immigrants. Their success rides on normalization, and it’s up to political media to be willing to break free from the regressive objectivity that enables so many lies.

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Unholy mess: The innocent children of Oklahoma are no longer in danger of being forced to read the Trump Bible — at least by the state government, anyway.

Oklahoma has amended an RFP that had been tailored specifically so that former President Donald Trump’s scammy $60 holy book would be the only version of the Bible eligible to be purchased for classrooms across the state. A spokesperson for Ryan Walters, the far-right schools superintendent overseeing a new initiative to introduce Bible lessons to public schools, called the whole ordeal fake news, citing the fact that it would have been illegal to tailor the request for one vendor.

Walters is a hardcore Christian nationalist who has shown little regard for the law or constitution in recent years. Last year, Walters butted heads with the state’s attorney general, a fellow Republican, when he backed the certification of a Catholic online public charter school. The Oklahoma Supreme Court this summer ruled that it was blatantly unconstitutional.

Knock it off: Florida Gov. Ron “Never Back Down” DeSantis was once again forced to back down on Tuesday after the FCC chair scolded him for threatening a local TV station over airing a pro-choice campaign ad.

“The right of broadcasters to speak freely is rooted in the First Amendment,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “Threats against broadcast stations for airing content that conflicts with the government’s views are dangerous and undermine the fundamental principle of free speech.”

It’s another big L for DeSantis in a year filled with them. Whatever strange power he exercises over Floridians very clearly does not translate to the national stage, where he appears more like one of the Goombas that Mario squashes for fun.

Red Alert: It hasn’t been a great polling week for Vice President Kamala Harris, who looks to be slipping in the Blue Wall states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Part of it no doubt has to do with Donald Trump being a political Terminator sent from a future hell, seemingly impervious to scandals that would end the career of any other politician. He has a lot of help from the media in that regard, which is something we will discuss today.

Harris’s slide can’t be fully attributed to Trump, however, and I hope that her people see the direct correlation between her pivot to the center-right and drop in several new polls. She’s further alienated Michigan’s Arab-American population, embraced credit card CEOs, and wasted time wooing tech kingpins on the coasts instead of parking in swing states.

Most disturbingly, Harris’s most high-profile public appearance of late has been with Liz Cheney, a figure reviled by the left and right alike and whose only constituency is cable news junkies who have never been undecided voters.

President Biden’s re-election campaign was sunk by inflation and his age, but he did understand, at least better than many DC power players, that we are living in an era of populist backlash and desperation for change. Jettisoning big ideas and touting support from warmongers and bureaucrats who epitomize the “establishment” and decades of shadowy conspiracies.

There is still time to turn this around, but it will require an actual change in tactics, messaging, and targeting.

Hide your kids: Nebraskans will vote on a ballot amendment in November that would repeal the state’s unpopular new school privatization program. It would be the first vouchers program to be repealed, and to have it done by voters would be a monumental event in the fight against the right’s war on public education.

This is my new MPU report on the David vs. Goliath battle, which I co-produced with my colleague Paul Blest:

Voucher programs have never been approved by ballot initiative, but repealing them — especially in such a solid red state — is obviously a more challenging scenario. This year may be the year to do it, however, with several competitive elections happening in the state.

Nebraska’s second district continues to poll overwhelmingly for VP Kamala Harris, and is poised to give her what could be a decisive Electoral College vote. There is also a surprisingly competitive Senate race between GOP Sen. Deb Fischer and independent union leader Dan Osborne, who I interviewed long before his campaign began to catch on. You can read that right here.

Tha the school voucher amendment is even on the ballot in Nebraska is a victory in and of itself, for a number of reasons. As the video explains, after public school activists collected 100K+ signatures to qualify an initiative to repeal a proto-voucher plan, the GOP went and passed a full privatization program on the last day of legislative session.

The activists had to go back and collect signatures again, in an incredibly tight time frame, and it all looked good until the Betsy DeVos crony state senator behind the voucher scheme asked the Nebraska Supreme Court to intervene. The challenge to the initiative hinged on a technicality that the high court did not see as a problem, thus certifying it for November.

More Nebraska initiatives: The effort by weed and criminal justice activists to pass a medical marijuana program is also the target of sour right-wing saboteurs, as the state attorney general is alleging widespread fraud in the signature collection process.

Once again, the claim is based on a signature collection texhnicality, which the AG says should disqualify the initiative. The initiative was already certified on the ballot and voting began on Monday, so now the state Secretary of State, who joined the lawsuit, is actually trying n to get his own decision voided. If I were him, I’d just hang in the back and ride it out.

On vouchers: Kentucky will also hold a ballot referendum on school privatization in November, though this one will be a proactive attempt to amend the constitution to allow for the creation of a voucher program.

Republican legislators put it on the ballot after Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed a bill that would have established the program, and now his Lt. Gov is leading the fight to save public schools.

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