ok also im seeing some misinformation in the tags about zooey zephyr so let me clarify. she was NOT blocked from speaking on the house floor because of an anime tweet, she was blocked because she told republican legislators they had "blood on their hands" for voting for a bill banning gender affirming care for minors. this resulted in insane amounts of backlash from pretty much everyone anywhere left of center, so naturally right wing talking heads not directly involved in montana politics started finding reasons to discredit her. one such talking head is that asshole whos gotten plastic surgery to look like jimin from bts and identifies as transracial or whatever. that was the person who dragged up the genshin impact tweet she made a few years ago in an effort to distract from the blatantly undemocratic actions of the Montana GOP.
but that isn't to say that these issues have nothing to do with the legislative session this year — far from it. for my job, ive had to watch hearings or read transcripts for almost every anti-trans bill in the montana legislature this session. ive followed those politicians on twitter, talked to bill sponsors and majority leaders. and i kept seeing the same underlying rhetoric as ive seen used in "anti" spaces. namely: that children need to be protected from degeneracy at all costs, that this can be done through restricting access to certain fiction and entertainment, and that fiction and entertainment being unsuitable for children means it and any of its creators must be morally corrupt. that there is no reason to enjoy transgressive art beyond sexual titillation. that enjoying things for pornographic reasons is inherently wrong, especially if those things are not perfectly good and christian. that harassment and dehumanization is an appropriate response to creating degenerate entertainment. that people can't be trusted to interpret art and fiction, but instead must be protected from anything potentially objectionable. these arguments barely need to be changed at all to be leveraged against problematic shipping instead of like, drag shows. because they're all part and parcel of the same underlying ideology
of course, this is just one state, and people in the notes have correctly pointed out that this is by no means a new thing. but i think what is new is how GOP puritanism has dovetailed with the vocabulary, rather than just the ideology, of fandom puritanism
i think one reason why so many US antis don't recognize this commonality is because the left-of-center perception of conservative ideology is a monolith. there's this common idea that "conservatism" is a bloc of ideas that always go together and cannot be separated from each other, leading to the idea that it's impossible to internalize any conservative ideals without being right-wing oneself. and in a country where the right is explicitly trying to enshrine and preserve ideals that are already woven into society, largely trying to preserve existing biases rather than creating new bigotry, that could not be further from the truth. i guess this is my protip for everyone in america: if the GOP supports something, there's a good chance that you have also absorbed some of the underlying ideology beneath that thing, and that's worth examining
