MS NOW host Chris Hayes eloquently described the blue tsunami of Democratic wins in last night’s midterm elections as a “repudiation” of the Republicans’ “grossness” and “cruelty” of attacking transgender people.
“I was really upset by the the grossness and the cruelty of the closing message of Republicans in Michigan about the things they said about Abdul El-Sayed,” Hayes said in a recent broadcast, “but also the attack on trans folks that has just become so toxic and so common and so cruel and so ceaseless.”
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“It was every ad, every ad. You watch a Sunday football game, and it was, ‘These people are the reason. This is the problem. This is the thing you have to think about.’ And they pumped hundreds of millions of dollars. And I saw Republicans, hardcore Republicans, when asked in man-on-the-street interviews, ‘What are you voting for?’ It’s, ‘I want to get you know boys out of girls’ sports.’”
“And to see the repudiation of that approach specifically, when that pollution was pumped into the discourse with hundreds of millions of dollars, like that people are like, ‘I don’t care about that and I reject that,’ there’s, like, some salvaging of decency for people that are our neighbors and our friends and our loved ones, who are a tiny minority of this population, who somehow have become the ritualized scapegoat for an entire political party that spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make everyone fear and hate them,” Hayes said.
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“I’m just very, very grateful that that did not work.”
In a Bluesky post this afternoon, Hayes wrote, “You’re telling me that an entire campaign that basically called [Texas US senatorial candidate James] Talarico a gay slur for 5 months at the cost of $500 million dollars didn’t work?”
His comment referred to the hundreds of thousands of dollars Republicans and conservatives spent to stop Talarico from becoming the state’s senator. Throughout the campaign, Republicans basically insinuated that Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, was secretly a gay child molester.
However, last night wasn’t a complete rejection of conservative transphobia as voters approved or came close to approving a handful of anti-trans sports bans and other transphobic laws.
Despite this, trans activist Chase Strangio with the ACLU posted on Instagram, “Ballot measures are a function of funding more than anything and are wildly undemocratic. These votes against us should not be used as justification to throw us under the bus.”
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