Muse – 9/3/24

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Moms For Liberty has been in the news for years – always for all the wrong reasons. Designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an extremist group – they’re known nationwide and here in Indiana for terrorizing teachers, librarians, and school boards who refuse to ban books that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people or racism. Unfortunately, the New York Times recently gave them a relatively glowing write up — describing them as just ordinary suburban conservative moms. For anyone who’s been in their crosshairs, this rings false. Read Parker Molloy’s rundown for more on the NYT’s complicity in rehabbing this extremist group hiding their bigoted rhetoric behind the word “mom.”

The Innocence Project is opening an Indiana affiliate! That’s good news. Nationwide, the project has used DNA and other evidence to overturn hundreds of wrongful convictions. The timing couldn’t be better: Indiana recently re-started executions of death-row inmates in spite of our troubling history of false convictions. Indiana currently incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any independent country on the planet. For more on the Indiana Innocence Project, check out the write-up in Mirror Indy.

Elon Musk, the racist billionaire who ruined Twitter and designs cars driven by the most insufferable people you know, recently amplified a theory that only “alpha males” should get to vote. I mention this less to update you about his character — which has been apparent for years to anyone paying attention — but more to remind you that Twitter (ahem, X) is a platform run by a billionaire oligarch who is using it as a personal propaganda arm for an attempted right-wing takeover of U.S. democracy. There are alternatives, and it’s time to consider them. I suggest you give Hoosier.Social a try — that’s where I spend my time on social media these days and there are 100% fewer Nazi sympathizers in my newsfeed. It’s run by locals who care about building community. I’m one of the moderators!

1. National Voter Registration Dayis coming up on September 17th, and a little bird tells me I’ll be in downtown Indy registering voters with some of my friends at All IN For Democracy. Once I have the meet-up deets, I’ll send them to this list… but if you’re interested in helping out on that day let me know by shooting me an email (kit@kitmalone.com).
2. Put October 24 on your calendar! Indiana Conservation Voters is hosting Green Halloween — a spooky fundraiser with live music at Black Circle Brewing Company!
3. Election season is in full swing! And with it, voter roll purges in several states. Here in Indiana, you should always check your voter registration before the October 7th deadline. It only takes a few minutes and you can do it online. Don’t wait until the last second to check!
4. I’m looking for folks who want to become election workers in one of the many counties in Indiana who are facing a shortage! You get training, and pay for your time. You get the knowledge that you’ve contributed to making democracy accessible to your community. Are you interested? Sign up to be a poll worker here!
   
5. Indiana’s inhuman ban on any form of affirming care for young transgender people is taking effect, and already having a drastic effect on far too many Hoosier families. Do you know someone in need of assistance? My friends at GenderNexus and Indiana Youth Group are partnering with Trans Youth Emergency Projectand the Campaign for Southern Equalityto provide help navigating these grim new realities.

My Muse

I want to look back at the Democratic National Convention this past month. It was wildly successful! Folks were energized, and this new spirit of unity and joy is absolutely welcome. I’m thrilled to see liberal and progressive folk feeling hopeful for a change. I needed it.

But it’s my nature to notice what is missing, and to my mind there were at least a couple troubling omissions: transgender people and Palestine. In a stark departure from recent conventions, there wasn’t a single trans speaker. And the DNC steadfastly refused to put a Palestinian voice on the stage.

“But Kit, we need to avoid bringing up divisive issues because it’s far more important to defeat Trump.”

Hey, in some ways I agree. It is incredibly important to unite around this common threat. But this argument misses a really important fact: conservatives have historically been very, very good at identifying issues that liberals are uncomfortable talking about and exploiting that weakness. When the left is silent about an issue — conservative commenters fill that vacuum with their own misinformation and more harm is done.

There is no better example of that than the trans equality movement. Year after year, conservative think-tanks identify a wedge issue (bathrooms, medical care, sports) that the public is uninformed about — and exploit it to pass breathtakingly regressive policy while hanging misinformation around their opponents’ necks.

Just look at abortion. For decades after Roe, forces on the left allowed conservatives to own the issue. The liberal establishment entirely failed to push back forcefully on misinformation about abortion, thereby allowing it to become a taboo topic in polite conversation. The result was Dobbs.

Palestine is another topic that bad actors on the right are exploiting with both anti-Muslim sentiment and antisemitic tropes. Democrat fear of the issue allows them to fill the void and own the discourse.

Silence on these two issues stands in direct contrast to the chief lesson of the Harris campaign: muscular rebuttals of bad faith arguments with a quick pivot back to the issues. They’ve been so good at this on every other issue, and failing to learn that lesson for trans people and Palestine … it’s not only moral cowardice, it’s a tactical error.

The frustrating part of this is — it wouldn’t have taken much to handle this. In the highly controlled environment of the DNC it would’ve simply taken a couple of speakers to fill the visibility gap.

And as a bonus, no matter what they talk about, a trans speaker or a Palestinian speaker at the DNC would have provoked the conserv-o-sphere into such a racist and bigoted fit that the Harris campaign would’ve been able to dine on sassy tweets for weeks.