{"id":102359,"date":"2022-09-27T01:59:45","date_gmt":"2022-09-27T01:59:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=102359"},"modified":"2022-09-27T02:31:15","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T02:31:15","slug":"beto-orourke-on-abbotts-dehumanizing-stunts-and-why-he-hopes-an-upset-looms-in-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=102359","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Beto O\u2019Rourke on Abbott\u2019s Dehumanizing Stunts and Why He Hopes an Upset Looms in Texas&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/09\/25\/opinion\/beto-orourke-abbott-texas-governor.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NY Times<\/a>: &#8220;We talked about how Democrats run against a politician, his or her policies and the Republican Party as a whole, while Republicans create enemies of classes of people: women, racial and ethnic minorities, L.G.B.T.Q. people, immigrants. This time it\u2019s immigrants and immigration, a charged issue in Texas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>O\u2019Rourke said that Abbott\u2019s plan to bus immigrants to liberal cities was obviously an attempt to distract from his failure to shore up the state\u2019s fragile electrical grids, prevent school violence and reduce inflation, but he also framed it as \u201can effort to incite fear and hatred and connect with people at a very base, emotional level,\u201d an \u201ceffort to dehumanize people,\u201d and that is precisely what it is. Abbott is not only trying to dehumanize immigrants, but to strip them of their individuality and create an ominous class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In that way, immigrants can be converted from throngs of individuals with individual lives, stories and feelings into an amorphous wave, overwhelming and unrelenting, crashing into the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Abbott is using these human beings as a weapon and a tool for the shallow purpose of retaining power. For O\u2019Rourke, this is obscene. As he put it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThere is no way that I would ever, in a million years, resort to that kind of fearmongering and demagogy and vilifying, demonizing people, because, as an El Pasoan, I saw exactly what that results in: Twenty-three of my neighbors were murdered in a matter of minutes there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NY Times: &#8220;We talked about how Democrats run against a politician, his or her policies and the Republican Party as a whole, while Republicans create enemies of classes of people: women, racial and ethnic minorities, L.G.B.T.Q. people, immigrants. This time it\u2019s immigrants and immigration, a charged issue in Texas. O\u2019Rourke said that Abbott\u2019s plan to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsstory"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102359"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102362,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102359\/revisions\/102362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}