United States (US)

Actually, the Kimmel story mattered quite a lot – both diagnostically (meaning: as a window into the state of American politics) and politically (in terms of how it is impacting the ongoing struggle). Regardless of its outcome, it pointed to what is one of the key differences between the first Trump administration and his second presidency. While the Trumpists were never defenders of free speech, there was no systematic attempt during Trump I to nullify the First Amendment or use the levers of state power to suppress protest and public dissent. They simply didn’t know how to use the government in that way, and they didn’t have the people in place who could have systematically used the state machinery as an instrument of repression. This led to a pervasive frustration within MAGA, and it is precisely what animated the big planning operations the Right launched during the Biden era – most infamously Project 2025. In fact, Brendan Carr literally wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025’s policy agenda – in which he envisioned using the agency exactly the way he has since taking over as chairman in January: As an instrument to put pressure on business and media, threatening regulatory action or lawsuits against anyone not sufficiently deferential to Trump’s will.

The FCC’s attempt to coerce ABC into canceling Jimmy Kimmel was a reminder that the Trumpists intend to use the federal government as a machine that serves only two purposes: To impose Trump’s will and desire for retribution – and to impose a reactionary societal order against the will of the majority. It was also a demonstration of how an authoritarian transformation of a democratic society tends to work in the twenty-first century. Kimmel’s cancellation sits right at that intersection of open state repression – and pre-emptive self-censorship and complicity by businesses and civil society actors. No need to send the thugs in boots and brown uniforms to rough the place up, or to send the secret police to arrest everyone, if you can also “nudge” these institutions to comply by… less untidy means.

Senator Eric Schmitt took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference this past weekend and declared that America is “a nation and a people.” With those five words he threw aside the pluralism that has defined this country since before its founding and embraced an ideology rooted in blood and soil, in exclusion and hierarchy. He put it in context:

   “That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests…

   “When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us.”

It’s not new to hear Republicans peddling this kind of racialized “us versus them” rhetoric, but it’s still shocking to see a sitting United States senator parrot phrases that would be more at home in the speeches of European fascists or Confederates in the years leading up to the Civil War than in the halls of Congress.

In the days since [Charlie Kirk's] killing, the US right wing has fallen over itself to blame trans people or, as Alex Jones put it to his almost 5 million followers, “the tranny death cult”. Similar formulations can be found across social media. Trans people are terrorists, a death cult, like the Taliban, need to be socially ostracised and banned from transitioning. And we all know there is only one type of trans person most of these people are imagining when they call for us to be electroshocked, shunned, and – let’s be real – beaten and killed. And that’s trans women.

It's over. There and here in the UK. Today I doubt I will see another progressive measure (either in legislation or healthcare policy) put in place for trans people in my lifetime. Who knows what may yet be taken away. In the UK, the terf campaign groups make their goals quite clear: they would like transition banned before the age of 25 and for trans women to be compelled to carry male government ID in all contexts. Once the EHRC guidance banning us from all women’s groups and spaces across society is in place, they intend to sue organisations and service providers that don’t exclude us. Right now, I think it’s best to assume all these things are a likely prospect in the next ten years.

In the community itself there’s been a definite shift in the way we speak about the future. The middle-class trans micro-economy that boomed in the 2010s: Pride month corporate sponsorship, jobs at LGBT charities, DEI talks and panels, diversity modelling and ad campaigns, progressive theatre, educational books about being trans etc, which some of us used to make a living, has gone. A friend and I used to riff on the old Susan Stryker joke that as a trans woman you must commodify yourself one way or another: it’s either escorting or the diversity and inclusion panel. The friend (a sex worker) always said she found more dignity (and better money) in the former.

Why is this happening now? The Right itself offers two contradictory answers simultaneously. On the one hand, they are constantly trying to project strength: They want us to believe they represent a vital, virile alternative to anemic liberal democracy – and a cohesive vision far superior to weak, divisive pluralism. Liberal democracy, in this tale, is destined to surrender to the far right. On the other hand, rightwingers are also obsessed with their own weakness. The Trumpist imagination is defined by a sense of besiegement: Powerful enemies everywhere, anti-American forces both from without and from within conspiring to destroy the nation, “real Americans” constantly victimized by a society they believe owes them eternal adulation and deference, made to suffer under the yoke of crazy leftist politics.

Relentless self-victimization – a veritable persecution complex – has been a defining feature of modern conservatism since its inception. The heightened version of this type of siege mentality we are seeing now points to something that is diagnostically important: Until very recently at least, the Right was indeed losing the fundamental struggle over what kind of country “America” should strive to be. The idea of a “crisis of liberal democracy” has dominated the political and broader public discourse over the past decade. But in crucial ways, it is the conception of “real America” as a white Christian patriarchal homeland that has come under enormous pressure. Socially, culturally, and – most importantly, perhaps – demographically, the country has moved away from the rightwing ideal since the middle of the twentieth century. It is not just a figment of the reactionary imagination that America has become less white, less religious, and more pluralistic in basically every dimension. As a result, the conservative hold on power has become tenuous. In a narrow political sense, they may be in charge right now – in the White House, in Congress, at the Supreme Court. But it is not just political power the Right seeks. They desire cultural domination and affirmation. In the cultural sphere, the public square, and across many societal dimensions like the family, the shift in power away from white male conservatives has been more pronounced. The Right has engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization in response – a radicalization fueled not by a feeling of strength, but by a sense of weakness.

[…] Clinging to the idea that “The Right won’t go THAT far” is futile because they have convinced themselves that their leftist enemies have already gone *much further*.

The CFPB received more than 600 comments from the public this year concerning the proposal, titled Protecting Americans from Harmful Data Broker Practices. The rule was crafted to ensure that data brokers obtain Americans’ consent before selling or sharing sensitive personal information, including financial data such as income. US credit agencies are already required to abide by such regulations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, one of the nation’s oldest privacy laws.

In its notice, the CFPB’s acting director, Russell Vought, wrote that he was withdrawing the proposal “in light of updates to Bureau policies,” and that it did not align with the agency’s “current interpretation of the FCRA,” which he added the CFPB is “in the process of revising.”

[…] 

Vought, who also serves as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, received a letter on Monday from the Financial Technology Association (FTA) calling for the rule to be withdrawn, claiming it exceed the agency’s statutory mandate and would be “harmful to financial institutions’ efforts to detect and prevent fraud.” The FTA is a US-based trade organization that represents the interests of fintech companies and their executives.

Privacy advocates have long pressed regulators to use the Fair Credit Reporting Act to crack down on the data broker industry. Common Defense, a veteran-led nonprofit, urged the CFPB to take action in November, blaming data brokers for recklessly exposing sensitive information about US service members that placed them at “substantial risk” of being blackmailed, scammed, or targeted by hostile foreign actors.

Someone starting from the assumption that America has been a stable, consolidated democracy for two and a half centuries must struggle to adequately understand the current political conflict: The contortions necessary to explain why so many millions of Americans are now embracing a blatantly authoritarian leader when they had supposedly been fully on board with liberal democracy until quite recently will quickly lead you to strange, unhelpful places. And if you depart from such a premise, you have no chance of developing a proper response to the current crisis either: If there had been a broad consensus around democratic ideals until Trump came down the golden escalator, it would be reasonable to assume that the restoration of the pre-2016 status quo ante might be an adequate solution. But if the rise of Trumpism is a manifestation, rather than the cause, of forces and ideas that have always prevented the nation from living up to the egalitarian aspirations it has often proclaimed, then restoration is not enough. If our existential crisis is the latest iteration of a conflict that has defined the nation since its inception, America needs a truly transformative effort to propel the country closer to the kind of multiracial, pluralistic democracy it never has been yet and finally establish a stable democratic consensus that has so far eluded these United States.

Anti-trans organizations have floated raising the age limit for care to 25 for years, and GOP architects of youth care bans have been explicit: the real goal is to eliminate gender-affirming care entirely. Donald Trump himself has vowed in the past to target trans healthcare “at any age.” Now, with a new letter from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) circulating to clinics nationwide, the first formal warning shots have been fired. Transgender adults should take notice—and prepare. The infrastructure to strip their care is already being built.

According to a recent CMS letter, clinics across the country are being warned against providing gender-affirming care to individuals under the age of 21. “Federal financial participation (FFP) is strictly limited for procedures, treatments, or operations for the purpose of rendering an individual permanently incapable of reproducing and, under 42 C.F.R. 441.253(a), is specifically prohibited for such procedures performed on a person under age 21,” the letter reads, citing a 1978 regulation restricting federal funding for sterilization. But gender-affirming care for adults rarely meets that definition. Many transgender men and women retain the ability to have children after temporarily stopping hormone therapy, and fertility counseling is routinely offered. When sterilization does occur, it is not the goal of the care—it is an incidental outcome of treatment meant to alleviate gender dysphoria.

More troubling is the use of this decades-old regulation to pressure health care centers into dropping transgender care for adults. The expansion of restrictions to include people up to the age of 21 follows a recent Trump executive order barring gender-affirming care for anyone under 19—a category that includes legal adults. Although that order has been blocked in multiple courts, hospitals have still used it to justify halting care for this population. Now, the CMS letter is having a similar chilling effect: Planned Parenthood of Arizona has “paused” gender-affirming care for all adult patients. This is a deeply alarming development, especially considering that Planned Parenthood is the largest—and often the only—provider of transgender adult healthcare in many parts of the country.

As food prices keep climbing and grocery chains rake in record profits amid slim margins, it’s time to seriously consider a public alternative to the supermarket giants and dépanneurs: municipally owned grocery stores.

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. In Madison, Wisconsin, a city-owned grocery store is in the works to serve an underserved neighbourhood after the last private grocer pulled out. Atlanta operates two public grocery outlets to tackle food deserts — where full grocers are distant and inaccessible for whole populations, typically due to community poverty and poor profit margins. Chicago is moving ahead with a city-run food market to help poorer residents afford groceries. These U.S. cities do not want to become supermarket empires, rather,  they are responding to a market failure causing hunger and poverty. When concentrated corporate ownership meets declining margins and socioeconomic gaps, some neighbourhoods are left with no fresh food options at all.

In New York City, 2025 Democratic Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani is pushing for a public grocery store in every borough. It is a bold idea and campaign policy promise that has emerged in response to rising food insecurity among New Yorkers. The concept gained traction during Mamdani’s Democratic Mayoral Primary campaign, where food justice became one of several economic rallying cries alongside other affordability measures like rent control and free public transit. 

[…]

So far, our food policy imagination has been largely confined to subsidies, zoning incentives, and casual price monitoring. We also tried the classic Canadian tactic of knocking on international doors and asking very, very nicely for prices to freeze or come down. Canadians can likely tell you whether they have felt the benefits of these current approaches. But what if we went further? What if we treated food access not just as a supply-chain challenge or a matter of affordability, but as infrastructure: as essential to community resilience as transit or libraries?