When news broke this week that there are now cases of
Children diagnosed with Monkeypox,
it came without clarification that this disease is not simply an STI.
And as a result the right wing has exploited this story to further
their inaccurate narrative about the LGBTQ community and
how they're all groomers preying on Children.
Now it's disgusting.
It reminds me of what happened during the AIDS epidemic in this country and
really what we're experiencing with right wing extremism
within our own borders today is a repeat of some of the worst moments in
American history like reproductive rights being stripped away.
This focus on whether sodomy should be banned in certain states,
like just whether we should outlaw gay marriage and now we have the same
homophobic narratives that we dealt with in the eighties with the AIDS epidemic.
Now, in the context of monkeypox,
men who have sex with other men have been identified as a higher risk group and
have therefore been prioritized in the rollout of this monkey pox vaccine,
but that does not make monkeypox a gay disease just like HIV and
AIDS is not a gay disease.
Straight people can get it as well.
Now, according to the CDC,
the monkey pox virus spreads through close person-to-person contact.
This can include through both skin touch and
respiratory secretions during kissing hugging and sex, but
there are other ways that it can be transmitted non sexual ways such as
touching items that have been exposed to the in infectious rash or bodily fluids.
Now if you're wondering what monkeypox leads to what kind of symptoms
you can expect.
Symptoms include things like fever, headache, muscle aches, and
backache, swollen lymph nodes, chills, exhaustion,
respiratory symptoms like sore throat, nasal congestion, a cough.
It's very rare for an individual to die from monkey pox,
99% of people who contract it do survive.
So that's an important element to the story as well and
no one should be hysterical about this, but it doesn't matter.
The right wing has seized on this opportunity to say terrible,
terrible things about the gay community.
For instance, far right activist Laura Loomer, who's running for
U.S Congress again out of Florida, asked on Telegram who's raping
kids in D.C after news broke that an infant there had contracted monkeypox.
There are other right wing activists on Instagram like this Lauren person who
says gays are raping babies and monkeypox is spreading rapidly throughout
their communities because they can't stop themselves, nor
can they stop raping babies.
We're about to see a lot more child cases and that should concern everyone.
The idea that the right wing in America is concerned about rape is laughable to me,
especially when they just went through this process of trying to deny
that a 10 year old rape victim in Ohio had to travel out of her state to
get an abortion because she didn't wanna have a rapist baby as a 10 year old,
they tried to deny that story even existed.
They tried to erase her because she was inconvenient for
their draconian stripping of reproductive rights for women.
People get raped every day in this country.
They get raped in our military.
Republicans don't wanna do anything about that.
They get raped in our prisons.
That is the biggest open secret ever.
They don't wanna do a damn thing about that.
They can't get enough of the rape that takes place.
They refuse to do anything about rape but they will pretend to care about
rape victims when they're trying to demonize members of the LGBTQ
community regardless of how inaccurate their narrative is.
>> Well it's deeply disturbing and I mean this resurgence
of this kind of rhetoric is not by accident.
This is a way to galvanize the right wing and
to get them involved on the grassroots level.
It's all connected when we saw that anti CRT push recently that was
a way to activate republicans on the grassroots level electorally.
Because if you're going to your school board meeting to complain
about CRT you're also going to vote in the polls in the election.
They understand that and it's the same thing with these don't say gay bills which
are a way to target LGBTQ teachers and the bigotry that balloons from that.
They see that as an advantage because it means it's more fertile ground for
them to have more electoral success if more hatred is spewing out of their mouths
and more people are invested in it.
And so I also just want to point out that this disgusting narrative about
gay people and trans people that right wing influencers and
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a part of this as well
claiming the kids are being targeted or assaulted.
I mean. >> Can I just read her tweet real quick
since you referenced it?
She's like if monkeypox is a sexually transmitted disease,
why are kids getting it?
Maybe it's not a sexually transmitted disease, you moron.
But anyway.
>> She's such a damn idiot right?
But she's also just so hateful and it was not her actually but
Candace Owens and Paul Gosar who is another far right
Congressman who was involved in January six.
They were spreading this conspiracy theory about the you've all day shooter
being trans and when they talk about mental health and
they're always saying we have to address mental health.
And then they're spreading conspiracy theories about the shooter being trans and
the shooter in Illinois who wore women's clothes too.
And the right wing influencers are like well probably trans probably mentally ill
because there's something wrong with them.
They're doing the same thing with gay people, they want to stigmatize people to
such a degree that they have electoral success and
they don't wanna see them in their lives.
So they either want you to go back into the closet or they want you to die.
And that is the direct result of this kind of stigmatization that we're seeing.
>> Yeah, you're exactly right.
It's just amazing how everything old is new again, right?
All of the terrible social stigmas and social issues that this country
finally overcame are now coming back to the spotlight.
And we're seeing the reversal of some of the gains that were made.
And I really do think part of the problem is that and broadly speaking left,
I'm not talking about just left, I'm talking about broadly speaking Democrats,
Libs, whatever you wanna say, they just kind of took those gains for
granted and thought, no, we're good now, we're good now.
But you have to continue to fight for those rights.
You have to continue to fight to maintain those rights and you have to do it as
aggressively and viciously as corporate do to protect all of the goodies they get and
all of the handouts they get.
>> I think that there's this commitment to the progress myth among
the Democratic Party where they perceive progress as this fluid and
almost natural, not unnatural, but a natural way of the world,
that it's always going, progress is inevitable and it's like a tide.
It's just gonna keep going and it's the way of the world, and frankly,
what that does is it erases the blood and the sweat of the activists and
the people fighting on the ground for these rights that caused
these rights to be enshrined into law for them to be acceptable.
It's not something that happens naturally,
it happens on the backs of people fighting for it.
And I think democrats in power are very quick to erase that struggle because
it doesn't really involve them.
And also, it's an easier myth to believe that that's how things are just gonna
magically work themselves out than to understand that it's really hard work.
>> Yeah, it is hard work.
And the fight has to continue its and it's not necessarily just about fighting for
more rights, although we need to do that as well, right?
But to maintain the rights that we fought for
and managed to succeed in getting, because there's always going to
be the opposing side wanting to chip away at those freedoms.
Especially, by the way, when we're dealing with this pro corporate era where
you've got the legalized bribes, you have members of Congress investing in
individual stocks, I mean, there's a huge conflict of interest there, right?
So they're not going to pass legislation reining in corporate greed
when they know that that's gonna harm their own stock portfolio.
And so in lieu of real governing all of the focus is on culture,
war narratives, because what else are they gonna campaign on?
And so of course, Republicans are gonna focus on that?
Yes, there's the fact that many of these lawmakers are homophobic and
racist themselves, but outside of that, in addition to that, they
also need something to run on and they're not gonna run on economic populism.
Their donors don't want that, they don't want that.
And so they're gonna go from one disenfranchised group, one powerless group
to the next, making them the boogey men, making them the scapegoats for
all of the terrible things that Americans are going through in this country,
whether it be economic anxiety and what have you, and this is what we deal with.
This is what we see.
>> To back up and this point,
I mean I also think that Republican power players [CROSSTALK].
>> That they end up getting what they want.
>> Yes, and Republican power players understand that the rules don't
necessarily apply to them.
So if they have a gay son, they're gonna be okay.
They're gonna be okay.
A Republican politician who just voted against marriage equality, just officiated
his son's wedding to another man, they'll understand the rules don't apply to them,
but they will even if they don't hate people,
they'll write it to electoral success because that's how craven they are