The Witch Switch — Why the GOP Needs 'Witches' to Burn
Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports that the rage farmers of the GOP are in need of a continuous supply of fresh 'witches' in the post-Roe world.
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.
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