Those hateful and stupid GOP ads wrecking your sports-watching experience? It's by design

In a typical October, a full day of college football and MLB playoffs on Saturday is a fun time. But because we are in "swing-state Wisconsin" in an election year, it also means the commerical breaks are filled with political ads. And especially filled with absurd and insulting Republican ads.

I know the point is to be as disgusting as possible and there's no sense in overthinking it, but the transphobic Trump ad airing during the baseball game is a decent metaphor for the broader goals of the movement. Just smearing their shit over every other thing, making it uglier and more like them.

— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 4:05 PM

We are definitely at the "stir up dumb white people with trans panic and scary non-white people with fuzzy-looking video" part of a GOP campaign. And it's become a consistent, solutionless GOP strategy to demoralize Dem voters and distract other ones.

Let's go back to the last time GOPs were polluting the MLB playoffs and other October sports viewing, back in 2022. And Roth wrote the definitive article on this strategy, titled "The Disgust is the Product." And in the article, Roth focused on gross ads being run by a RW front group known as Citizens for Sanity.

In theory, if not necessarily in practice, ideology exists at a remove from that kind of grubby, rube-running, retail stuff. If the political part can be understood as what a party actually does, the ideological aspect would be the ostensible reason why it does it. Given that the politics looks like what it looks like—one lavishly fetishized crisis after another, each carried forward through aligned media with the goal of creating in the consumer a constant state of furious full-spectrum derangement—the ideology is easy enough to guess. The obvious goal of all this is to get and keep people ready to do or think very strongly about how cool it would be to do some righteous violence against every other person and thing that exists. The name of the organization behind the advertisements, naturally, is Citizens For Sanity....

In its current state, Trumpism is entirely about feeling and fantasy. Instead of any plan to deal with crime, for instance, there is only the lascivious going-over of the problem; there is no program, or really any policies to advocate for, that is more expedient for the party than just continuing to fixate on it. There is a constituency — they are confused and vengeful and fucking livid, they are daily taking in and making up strange new stories to keep themselves that way, they are less mis- or disinformed than they are living inside the bilious and vengeful lore that sustains and explains their movement — and there is what that constituency feels, but there is nothing else. It is again worth noting that this constituency chooses to feel this way, every day; the most comfortable Americans have opted to wander this wilderness of prurience and threat and weird ugly lies instead of living in a reality they would have to share with anyone else. Where there might otherwise be ideology—where there might, actually, have been anything else—there is only politics. Of course it is ugly, small, even more fantastically dark than the truth of the moment. Being ugly, in precisely that way, is the reason that it exists. What began as a cynical set of best practices for keeping distracted people attached to their televisions has become the sacrament itself; they have built a church and then just fucking filled it with cable news.

In a characteristically thoughtful post about the advertisements at Baseball Prospectus, Steven Goldman wrote about how strange and jarring it was to see Citizens For Sanity's ads during these last weeks of extremely exciting and good baseball games, in part because those games consist, as baseball games do, of the best efforts of people from all over the world. "The dissonance tears something within you and you may feel distanced from the joy of the game," Goldman writes. "It’s exactly what they wanted." This is true, and the contrast between the baseball and the advertisements standing athwart it, yelling slurs, was certainly a big part of why I found the ads so repellent. But I also think that this collision is useful. It is not just that the two are in contrast, but that they are in some fundamental sense in conflict. You have these games, unfinished and alive and lit up with brilliance and the basic human thrill in things not yet known, and then you have its opposite: finished, closed, fearful, hateful, heaving itself into the way of all that life.

Trumpists want to bring low-information and casual voters down to their miserable and scared mentality, and anger Dems into distraction with this disgusting garbage. It is also intended to take the concept of hope and positive change away, and make people care more about hurting and resenting others, instead of trying to improve their own lives and demanding more of their government in making a society that improves their chances of stability and improvement.

And guess who gave a lot of money to Citizens for Sanity in 2022?

WSJ: Musk funded Stephen Miller's superPAC, which ran some of the nastiest, most vile and vicious anti-immigrant and anti-trans ads in 2022 "more than $50 million of Musk’s money funded a series of advertising campaigns by a group called Citizens for Sanity" www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

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— Joe Sudbay (@joesudbay.bsky.social) October 2, 2024 at 3:57 PM

I think we found the immigrant who's trying to wreck American society.

Corruption, greed, lies, oligarchy. pic.twitter.com/Aq2PPR3o9S

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) October 6, 2024

It seems well past time for Dems to go hard at oligarchs like Musk, and the hate merchants in the GOP in general. We know that the GOP's attempts to ignite a panic against trans people has been a loser with the wider electorate in the 2020s, and if it can be connected to the reality that GOPs don't want to talk about, which is the growing economy and respectful, decent country that exists in the Real America under Biden-Harris.

And if Elon Musk and the Uihleins (major donors to the smear ads against Tammy Baldwin) can try to get their anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda put in via ads about non-issues, why can't Dems forcefully attack GOPs on real issues? Including the Project 2025 Agenda that would allow a Trump or Vance Administration to turn wide swaths of Americans into second-class citizens, while allowing soulless corporations to run wild over the rights and protections of everyone else?

The only way that these lowlife GOP ads work in depressing Dem turnout is if Dems don't fight back against this garbage and stand up for the values and decency of Real America. I understand the point of the positive "moving forward" kind of campaign that the Harris-Walz team has been hitting on, and it probably does help them with some voters (like my mother, who voted GOP for president in every year from 1980 through 2016, but now votes Dem). But the best way for this country to move forward is to crush the bad guys who want to keep us dumb, desperate, and distracted.

Why don't Dems do a little "divide and conquer" themselves? And you know what else would fire up Dem base voters and reduce the feelings of being up against a wall of oligarch-funded RW hate and BS? Having Dems Americans that the blind eye to Republican lawlessness that Merrick Garland and Joe Biden have given for 4 years will be ended with Kamala Harris as President. And Harris can be included in a group of younger Dems in charge that realize The System doesn't work on its own, but instead requires constant work and activity to keep this country functional for all Americans, not just an elite few.

Anger and mockery is a strong weapon, when the anger and mockery is accurate. And there's plenty of Trump/GOP targets to hit, if Dems want to step up and win this election. It also should resonante to the majority of Americans, and make the GOP's idiotic and hateful ads look lame by comparison.