Yes, they would really do the unimaginable

There's some good news on price gouging, though

Welcome to a premium Tuesday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!

It is often hard for me to gauge how long it takes for news stories to reach normal, non-obsessive people who work jobs that don’t require them to stare at the internet and consume minute-by-minute updates all day, but I’m guessing that the mere fact of your receiving this newsletter means that you are pretty up to date on national headlines.

With that in mind, I won’t go deep on the first exhausting day of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, which did more to illuminate the warped, perverse obsessions of the Republican caucus than shine any light on Jackson’s stellar record. If you do want a summary, you can read this blow-by-blow live blog, but really all you need to know is that Josh Hawley knows a disconcerting amount about child porn and Ted Cruz got embarrassingly angry about children’s books, retaining his title as the most swag-less member of Congress.

The moment I want to focus on actually came during a media call with local reporters that took place a break in the hearing. Indiana Sen. Mike Braun, who has been a generic replacement-level Republican white guy to this point, calmly endorsed rolling back 50+ years of civil rights law:

Heartland Signal @HeartlandSignal

REPORTER: "You would be okay with the Supreme Court leaving the issue of interracial marriage to the states?" SEN. MIKE BRAUN (R-IN): "Yes. If you are not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you are not going to be able to have your cake and eat it too."

With the story starting to spread so quickly that people on the internet started to realize that there is a senator named Mike Braun, he began trying to walk back the ghastly comment. The best the soft-spoken racist could do was claim that he merely misunderstood the question, a pathetically weak excuse that crumbles the moment you hear the exchange. but what he’s really relying on isn’t that people will believe his mea culpa so much as that they’ll forget about the remark altogether.

There is a tendency amongst the media and even many Democrats to take the most ghoulish and awful things that Republicans say with a grain of salt and write them off as simply red meat being thrown to sate their rabid right-wing base. This is how we get news coverage that creates false equivalency between Democrats and Republicans and treats them as two legitimate political parties and choices in an election.

The hard truth is that there’s no reason to believe that GOP lawmakers in some especially dark red state wouldn’t file a lawsuit or pass a bill intended to get Loving v. Virginia back before this right-wing Supreme Court. Republicans have already crossed the rubicon over these past five years, displaying time and again that there are no lengths to which they won’t go to install a despotic theocracy in this country.

Just imagine if Roddy Piper waved away what he saw while wearing those sunglasses in They Live:

Their Supreme Court is already on the verge of killing Roe v. Wade, and its refusal to place an injunction on the Texas law that pays bounty hunters to track down women attempting to terminate their pregnancies has inspired a growing number of copycat laws, including some that trap women within state lines and force them to give birth. Today the Oklahoma House passed a near-total abortion ban, which would be the most extreme law in the country. Republicans in the Senate today indicated they could go even further than that if they get the chance.

Florida just passed its “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a number of states are criminalizing trans kids and their parents, and a Republican lawmaker in Ohio pushing a bill designed to ban “divisive concepts” in school just explicitly both-sides the Holocaust. The Republicans who droned on and on about child porn and torture during Jackson’s hearing today weren’t engaging in performative histrionics, they were revealing who they really are.

Over the past few months, I’ve received a handful of emails from subscribers telling me that the newsletter was too “doom and gloom” and negative because I cover corrupt, GOP tyranny, and not infrequent Democratic incompetence. It’s certainly their prerogative to offer that feedback (and even cancel their subscription), but I don’t think we can turn a blind eye or shrug our shoulders at what’s happening all around us.

The goal isn’t to stew in despair and helplessness. We have to call out these injustices, whether they’re violations of civil and bodily rights or the desecration of democracy or plundering that leaves working people in enforced poverty. People have to know about and understand these violations if there’s going to be any substantive pushback — just look at our story from this past Sunday about the amazing work being done by housing activists in Florida. Shining a light on the malicious is actually an act of hope.

And with that, let’s get to tonight’s big story, which I can promise you hasn’t been reported by the national media for the last 12 hours.

Quick reminder: For every new paid subscription we sell this month, we’ll give away a subscription to an interested reader who is living on a fixed income or hard up for cash. We’ve already been able to give away nearly a dozen new subscriptions since Friday! Help us make this project sustainable and keep the world informed of these essential stories.

---

---

by Natalie Meltzer

Utility companies are funneling money to dark money groups and Republican lawmakers to roll back climate policy — and you may be bankrolling their lobbying efforts while getting gouged by your monthly energy bill.

The transition away from fossil fuels has never been more urgent. Storms, floods, wildfires, droughts, and other extreme weather events are displacing people, causing hunger and malnutrition, and spreading disease at an accelerating rate. Simultaneous heatwaves in the Arctic and Antarctica smashed temperature records over the weekend, a phenomenon scientists have described as "unthinkable" and "stunning." 

Unfortunately, like the culture wars being waged by Republicans, all of these things are actually happening. As last month’s dire Intergovernmental on Climate Change report warned, unless we take immediate, transformative action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the mounting impacts of climate change will overwhelm our ability to adapt.  

There is, however, some reason for hope — both for the planet and your wallet.