Another source warned that law enforcement and intelligence sources living in witness protection could be exposed by the data, as well as everyday Americans who could be viewed by Musk and the Trump administration as political enemies.
Some of those perceived enemies could include transgender Americans, according to Zinnia Jones, a transgender activist and researcher. Jones warned that the SSA data could be used to âidentify nearly all likely transgender people in the US with 99 percent confidence.â Jones cited a 2015 U.S. Census Bureau study that utilized the same SSA data accessed by DOGE to estimate the number of trans Americans.
âFor all we know, they may already know about the possibility of doing this and itâs part of why they insisted so forcefully on full accessâ to the data, Jones tells Rolling Stone. In her deposition, Flick noted that Bobba requested and was eventually given access to the SSAâs full dataset, âincluding source code.â
A former federal employee speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution agreed with Jonesâ assessment, telling Rolling Stone that the Trump administration could use the SSA data â as well as agency hiring paperwork and passport applications â to identify and purge transgender employees from the government.
Authoritarianism / Fascism
Why DOGE Having Your Social Security Data Is Dangerous
in Rolling StoneThe New McCarthyism: LGBTQ+ Purges In Government Begin
in Erin in the MorningIn the early 1950s, a moral panic over gay people swept across America. LGBTQ+ individuals were cast as threatsâvulnerable to blackmail, labeled âdeviant sex perverts,â and accused of colluding with communist governments. Senator Joseph McCarthy, infamous for the Red Scare, pressured President Eisenhower into signing an executive order purging LGBTQ+ people from government service. With that signature, the campaign escalated rapidlyâup to 10,000 federal employees were fired or forced to resign during what became known as the Lavender Scare, a far less taught but even more devastating purge than the Red Scare. The episode remains a lasting stain on U.S. history. And now, it appears we are witnessing its revival: 100 intelligence officials were just fired for participating in an LGBTQ+ support group chatâan internal network not unlike employee resource groups (ERGs) at most companies.
The firings stem from out-of-context chat logs leaked by far-right commentator Chris Rufo on Monday. Sources tell Erin in the Morning that the chat functioned as an ERG-adjacent LGBTQ+ safe space, where participants discussed topics like gender-affirming surgery, hormone therapy, workplace LGBTQ+ policies, and broader queer issues. Rufo, however, framed these conversations as evidence of misconduct, claiming that âNSA, CIA, and DIA employees discuss genital castrationâ and alleging discussions of âfetishes, kink, and sex.â To Rufo and his audience, merely talking about being transgender and the realities of transition is enough to be labeled âfetishâ content.
Eisenhower and McCarthy would have killed for such an easily accessible list of LGBTQ+ federal employeesâand the flimsy pretext to purge them.
Within a day of the chat logsâ release, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that all participants in the âobscene, pornographic, and sexually explicitâ chatroom would be terminated.
Politics, Not Biology, Is Driving Legal Efforts to Classify Sex
in Scientific AmericanA useful explainer for bewildered relatives, etc.:
Clear definitions of categories matter in the law. The use of two sex categories to talk about a species is standard in biology. In many animal species, including people, however, there are individuals who are neither male nor female or who are sometimes both. In other species, there are two sexes, but they arenât male and female (usually these are intersex and male). And a few species have only one sex (usually female). The biological reality is that âmaleâ and âfemaleâ are not universal immutable biological classifications but rather descriptions of typical patterns in reproductive biology. These categories, male and female, are used by biologists who fully understand that they rarely represent all the relevant biological variation in any given species or identical sets of variation across different species.
Sex is not one single, simple, uniform biological reality. Thus, biology cannot be invoked as a basis for such in legal terms. Thatâs the bottom line.
Of course, men and women are not the same, and reproductive biology does structure important aspects of human bodies and lives. But none of the key biological systems associated with sex in humans (chromosomes, gonads, genetics, hormones, and so on) come exclusively in two âimmutableâ categories. Yes, most humans have either XX or XY chromosomes, but as Judge Reyes noted, some donât. People with either testes or ovaries are most common, but some people have both, and a few have ovotestes. Usually those with testes can produce sperm, and those with ovaries produce ovaâbut not always. The chromosomes one has do not always predict oneâs gonads or oneâs genitals or even all the elements of oneâs reproductive tract. It is true that most people have the âtypicalâ combo of chromosomes, gonad and genitals, yet there are tens of millions of people alive right now who donât. These people are not errors, aberrations or problems; they are a part of the range of variation in our species. They are all real people. In fact, many who have these variations donât even know it. You might be one of them.
In making laws, then, we need to recognize what the actual range of variation in sex-related biology is and how it maps across everyone.
Washington Post opinion editor departs as Bezos pushes to promote âpersonal liberties and free marketsâ
in The GuardianShameless.
Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed âhands-offâ owner of the Washington Post, emailed staffers on Wednesday morning about a change he is applying to the paperâs opinion section that appears to align the newspaper more closely with the political right.
âIâm writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,â Bezos said.
âWeâll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the readerâs doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.â
Transgender Health Data Wiped from CDC Records by Trump Order
in TransVitaeThe CDCâs move to comply with Trumpâs executive order is not just an attack on transgender inclusionâit is a fundamental assault on evidence-based policymaking. Public health data drives funding allocations, legislative protections, and medical advancements. Without accurate data on transgender individuals, lawmakers and health officials will be unable to craft policies that address the unique challenges faced by the trans community.
For transgender individuals, this erasure from federal data is more than an administrative slightâit is a direct threat to their health, safety, and survival. Without demographic representation, there will be fewer initiatives tailored to trans healthcare needs, fewer resources allocated for trans youth mental health programs, and fewer protections against discrimination in medical settings.
âThis is an attempt to legislate us out of existence,â said a transgender activist who wished to remain anonymous. âThey are trying to make it so that we donât âexistâ in public data, and if we donât exist in the data, we donât exist in policy. If we donât exist in policy, we donât get protections. And if we donât get protections, they are making us more vulnerable.â
Project 2025 Tracker
Project 2025 Tracker began as a humble spreadsheet created by /u/rusticgorilla, combined with /u/mollynaquafina's vision for making this information accessible to everyone through a dedicated website.
What started as a passion project by two Redditors has grown into a community-driven resource, powered by people like you who believe in the importance of transparent, detailed analysis.
LGBTQ Federal Workers Brace for a McCarthyist Purge
in Mother JonesSeventy years ago, at the height of the McCarthy eraâwhen federal employees with left-wing views were routinely interrogated and fired for being suspected communistsâa related purge of queer workers was underway. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order listing âsexual perversionâ as a basis for terminating federal civil service employees, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were susceptible to blackmail by the countryâs enemies. In what became known as the Lavender Scare, at least 5,000 federal workers were fired for suspected homosexuality over the next two decades.
âMore people were targeted during that period for being gay or for engaging in same-sex intimacy than were targeted for being communist,â says San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein. The firings rippled out to state and local governments and the private sector, he adds, âaccompanied by notions that the gay people were weak, were divisive in workplaces, were not strong representatives of a moral United States.â Itâs taken decades since then for LGBTQ people to gain acceptance in public life, including in the federal workforce. Not until the Obama administration was Eisenhowerâs executive order formally rescinded.
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Now, the very programs and support groups that have helped queer folks integrate could create risks for their participants. Employee resource groups like Michaelâs have been shutting down operations and wiping their websites, afraid of putting their members at risk in the openly hostile Trump administration.
âWeâve gone dark,â a former LGBTQ resource group leader in the Department of Agriculture tells Mother Jones. âWe have pulled our contact lists off of government systems. Personally, as someone who has been very involved in queer spaces, I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.â
âIâm scared for the people Iâve been trying to help,â says a trans worker for the Interior Department who is involved in employee resource groups. âPeople came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, weâre all just this big target.â
Marco Rubio May Have Just Banned Trans Foreigners Seeking Visas From US Entry
The document, titled âGuidance for Visa Adjudicators on Executive Order 14201: âKeeping Men Out of Womenâs Sports,ââ is ostensibly focused on preventing transgender athletes from traveling to the U.S. However, one section appears to apply far more broadly, targeting all transgender visa applicantsânot just athletes. It mandates that âall visas must reflect an applicantâs sex at birthâ and grants officials the authority to deny visas based on âreasonable suspicionâ of a personâs transgender identity.
âBoth immigrant and nonimmigrant visa applications request that an applicant identify their sex as either male or female. Moreover, all visas must reflect an applicantâs sex at birth,â the cable reads. When verifying an applicantâs sex assigned at birth, it states that the adjudicator can ârely on documents provided by the applicant,â but that âif other evidence casts reasonable doubt on the applicantâs sex, you should refuse the case under 221(g) and request additional evidence to demonstrate sex at birth.â
The memo goes on to state that applicants âmisrepresenting their purpose of travel or sexâ could be targeted for permanent ineligibility. It states that some common scenarios that would trigger this is if the misrepresentation is âmaterial,â which it states would be the case for transgender athletes entering for an athletic competition. However, even this section does not limit it to transgender athletes - many other reasons for entry may be considered âmaterialâ for transgender entrants⊠for instance, transgender activists, immigrants fleeing oppressive regimes, and more could be swept up under this provision.
"A woman is like a child": MAGA quickly turns its sights on stripping Republican women of power
in SalonFor ambitious women who wanted to climb the ranks of Republican politics, anti-feminism has long been the steadiest of ladders. The propaganda value of their gender outweighed their party's larger hostility to women in leadership.
But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Donald Trump is back in the White House, many on the right feel they no longer need to hide the naked sexism fueling their movement or put up with the annoyance of women in even token leadership positions. As Kiera Butler at Mother Jones reports, the anti-abortion movement is embroiled in an escalating civil war right now over these issues. Male leaders of the Christian right have been swarming Kristan Hawkins, the 39-year-old head of a "student" anti-abortion group, demanding her ejection from the movement. It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder, an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement. But mostly it was about growing male anger on the Christian right that women are allowed leadership positions at all.
"Removed [sic] this woman from public service," declared influential Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, part of the "TheoBros" movement that includes the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's church. Soon other TheoBros jumped in, declaring "We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion," arguing that women's suffrage was a mistake, and accusing Hawkins of emasculating her husband by being "busy jet-setting."
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Webbon and the TheoBros have been clamoring more loudly in recent months about their wish to strip women, especially their own wives, of the right to vote. "You won't let women vote? Well, our society doesn't let five-year-olds vote," Webbon explained in a May podcast. He added that "a woman is like a child" and that "God has appointed men to protect them." As Sarah Stankorb at the New Republic documented, there has been growing support in Christian nationalist circles "for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and support a 'household vote' system in which men vote on behalf of their families." Hegseth's former sister-in-law reports she heard him echo similar sentiments.
Politicians Are Curtailing Liberties and Chastising the Public Over Contrived Antisemitism
for Sydney Criminal LawyersThe political stoking of the spate of antisemitic hate crime scenario, which was concurrently being debunked by admissions from law enforcement in the same reports, staff at the Daily Telegraph concocted the idea for a report that it had entitled âUndercover Jewâ in its internal documentation, and it involved a man wearing an Israeli flag cap being sent into various situations.
Israeli Australian man Ofir Birenbaum was employed by the Murdoch rag to be the undercover Jew, wearing a Star of David on his cap, as well as video glasses to record the incident, although the known provocateur has since denied he was recording footage. And what occurred in Enmore at the Cairo Takeaway was set to be repeated in various suburbs throughout Greater Sydney.
The idea was simple, send Birenbaum into the café to provoke an antisemitic response, as the Cairo Takeaway openly displays its support for Palestine on the side of its building, via a Scott Marsh mural.
So, the Jewish man entered the café, ordered at the counter and then received no derision or ridicule, although a staff member did follow him out of the premises as he left, only to find a Daily Telegraph journalist and two camerapeople waiting outside.
This discovery has only served to support suspicions that these incidents are being manufactured to convey a community riddled with antisemitism. The Murdoch scenario serves as a domestic example of what the federal police consider may be orchestrated by foreign actors paying locals to commit the crimes. And it further serves to leave the public suspicious of the authorities.