If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/19/whats-wrong-with-iowa/#replicable-cruelty

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So when some monstrous new law or policy comes down the pike, it's best understood as a way of getting frightened, angry - and often hateful - people to vote for policies that will actively harm them, by claiming that they will harm *others* - brown and Black people, women, queers, and the "undeserving" poor.

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Pro-oligarch policies don't win democratic support - but policies that inflict harm a ginned-up group of enemies might. Oligarchs need frightened, hateful people to vote for policies that will secure and expand the power of the rich. Cruelty is the tactic. Power is the strategy. The point isn't cruelty, it's power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/25/roe-v-wade-v-abortion/#no-i-in-uterus

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But that doesn't change the fact that the policies are cruel indeed. Take #Iowa, whose billionaire-backed far-right legislature is on a tear, a killing spree that includes active collaboration with rapists, through a law that denies #abortion care to survivors of rape and forces them to bear and care for their rapists' babies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/us/politics/iowa-kamala-harris-abortion.html

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The forced birth movement is part of the wider far-right tactic of standing up for imaginary children (e.g. "the unborn," fictional victims of Hollywood pedo cabals), and utterly abandons *real* children: poor kids who can't afford school lunches, #KidsInCages, kids victimized by youth pastors, kids forced into child labor, etc.

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So Iowa isn't just a #ForcedBirth state, it's a state where children are now to be starved, literally. The state legislature has just authorized an $18m project to kick people off of #SNAP (aka #FoodStamps). 270,000 people in Iowa rely on SNAP: elderly people, disabled people, and parents who can't feed their kids.

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