Don’t believe me when I say Republicans are lying about abortion

Believe the Puppy Murder lady.

Buried in a story about Trump auditioning running mates, as if it were still 2016 and Apprentice references were still cute because Trump hadn’t tried to have his last running mate lynched, was one of the most revealing and important admissions of this election year.

One other thing that stood out to us from the weekend: what (South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem said about abortion during a panel discussion, according to audio obtained by our colleagues Josh Dawsey and Marianne. She urged Republicans to moderate their language, especially about abortion.

“The best advice that I ever got from somebody when I ran for office was: talk moderately so that you can govern conservatively,” Noem said. “Sometimes we get it backwards. We talk kind of like crazy people sometimes,” Noem added, prompting some laughs, Marianne notes. “And then we never get the chance to govern.”

“...talk moderately so that you can govern conservatively.”

There it is.

That’s code for “Pretend you’re going to leave it up to the states when we all know that if elected Donald Trump will appoint fundamentalists who will use every tool available in the federal government to close every abortion clinic in America.”

Ever since Jessica Valenti explained exactly how Republicans will ban abortion nationally without calling a ban, I’ve been waiting for the press to pick up on the reality of what’s going on in this election. Valenti, with her lifetime of experience covering anti-choice extremists, sees clearly what the right is up to because they keep admitting it, like Noem, over and over.

It’s a tactic so obvious that even the lady who cannot stop bragging about her lust for murdering humanity’s best friends knows that Republicans need to play a coy little game that winks to their far right base, the only people in America who are happy Roe is gone, while lying to the rest of America about what they have in store for them. 

In Lakoff and Duran’s Framelab, I called this “The Unholy Compromise” and it’s pretty standard for all GOP policies that are incredibly unpopular, like tax cuts for the rich. 

But what is being proposed here is something most people who weren’t adults by the early 1970s can even begin to fathom. It’s not just a reversion to a pre-Roe America where pregnant people had to seek out dangerous and brutal ways to end pregnancies. It’s not just a reversion to a pre-Roe America where pregnant people had to seek out dangerous and brutal ways to end pregnancies. It’s a new nightmare where the far right, enabled by leaps in surveillance technology, will will monitor, hunt and terrorize anyone anyone can get pregnant to keep them in a steady state of terror that will keep them from seeking the care they need.  

As Valenti told us and Robin Marty, the executive director of the West Alabama Women’s Center, described from her experience in the post-Roe South, we know that this terror campaign will mostly afflict poor women, especially those who are Black and of color. But the goal is a fundamental reordering of American life with intolerable hierarchies of the past reaffirmed and enforced by law.

We can be honest about that but, as Governor Noem noted, Republicans cannot. Because that’s the only way they can make their dreams become our living nightmares.