“We don’t believe those rights should be subjected to majority vote.”
Conservatives are testing new tactics to keep abortion off the ballot following a series of high-profile defeats.
In Arizona, Florida, Nevada and other states, several anti-abortion groups are buying TV and digital ads, knocking on doors and holding events to persuade people against signing petitions to put the issue before voters in November.
Republicans are also appealing to state courts to keep referendums off the ballot, while GOP lawmakers in states including Missouri and Oklahoma are pushing to raise the threshold for an amendment to pass or to make it to the ballot in the first place.
The emerging strategy aims to prevent abortion rights groups from notching their third, and largest, set of ballot measure victories since Roe v. Wade was overturned. And while conservatives celebrated the fall of Roe for returning the question of abortion rights to the people, these efforts are seen as an implicit admission that anti-abortion groups don’t believe they can win at the ballot box — even in red states — and that the best way to keep restrictions on the procedure is to keep voters from weighing in directly.
Like I said in my earlier comment, conservatives tend to be either stupid and/or sociopaths. Generally it seems that the “rank and file” are the stupid ones, while the manipulative sociopaths are the ones running the show.
Looking at the American Conservative pool there’s some muddying of the water. I imagine if you keep slamming garbage into the system eventually the pool you draw your enthusiastic support from will feed back into itself. Sorting your idiots from your proper authoritarian scum though isn’t particularly worthwhile… As long as whatever nonsense you throw into the program is effective in obtaining the objectives you want it doesn’t matter who is a true believer of the grift versus one who understands the point. But I think it’s a mistake to call them idiots. That tends to make them seem less threatening and if you engage with their rhetoric with the aim of exposing idiocy and hypocrisy you will usually lose the ear of those who are being duped. You have to treat those who are caught in the grift respectfully like intelligent humans who have the capacity to make up their own minds or else they shut down and the programming takes over.
Calling them idiots is statistically accurate, and you can find a bunch of studies to that effect in the comment I linked to.
Being stupid doesn’t make them less threatening, though, and I’d be inclined to argue it makes them even more dangerous; a stupid person is much more liable to make, well, stupid choices, and choices that hurt not only others but even themselves