Rachel Maddow calls GOPs anti-trans scapegoating a sign of profound political weakness

Out MS Now host Rachel Maddow joined journalist Pablo Torre on his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, last weekend to discuss the midterms and the failed messaging of the Republican Party.

One major focus of the conversation: trans athletes. Maddow slammed the anti-trans right for concocting an issue where there is none but pointed out that despite how silly it is, there are “very serious elements of it.”

“Number 1 is just seeing this national, insistent, now years-long political project to scapegoat and vilify and try to direct violence and hate toward a tiny, disfavored minority, which is trans people,” she said.

“That is something that has profound, profound impact on some of our fellow Americans. And it is repulsive, and it is politically as transparent as any other exercise like this has been from any other authoritarian movement in politics, in any country, in the last century and a half.”

She said the GOP invented “a fake problem” that “has literally no contact with the real lives of 99.9999% of Americans,” and then said it was “the problem that the American government must be reorganized to prioritize and to never solve for you, so we can continue to run on it forever.”

She called the tactic “pitiful” and “a sign of profound political weakness, and something that I think has now been exposed as the fantasist BS copout that it is.”

But, she warned, we must keep in mind both the “profound unseriousness of this as a political tactic” and also the “profound, dangerous, life-threatening harm this is causing to real Americans.”

Torre called “redeeming” that the American people didn’t fall for the messaging this time around, but Maddow brought up the anti-trans ballot measures that still passed in multiple states as evidence there is still work to do.

Four states – Arizona, Nebraska, Colorado, and Washington – passed trans sports bans via ballot initiative, even while all except Nebraska elected Democratic majorities to their legislatures (though Nebraska did end its GOP supermajority).

“The thing that we’ve learned over generations in multiple countries in multiple eras about scapegoating disfavored minorities is not only to pay attention to what it does to their lives, but also what it does to the rest of us,” she said.

“If you are taught to believe that some disfavored minority is the cause of everything that’s wrong… Then not only is that disfavored minority being targeted… but we’re taught to look at each other and to try to suss that out and try to find that quality in our fellow citizens so that we can misdirect toward them all of our grievance.”

“Trying to get us to see some of our fellow citizens as subhuman,” she concluded, “is trying to get us to erase our own moral core so that we can do horrible things.”