United States (US)

In my defence, everybody needs a hobby.

On December 18th, during a Health and Human Services press conference that saw RFK Jr. announce new federal rules that, if implemented, will almost entirely ban gender-affirming care for minors nationwide, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill said the following:

“Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men. [pauses for applause from other Trump officials] Children are innocent and they need our protection. [pauses for more applause] It takes organized efforts to deny these fundamental truths. Sadly, we’ve seen such efforts succeed from time to time.

The denial of fundamental truths can destroy nations from within. At the root of the evils we face, such as the blurring of the lines between sexes and radical social agendas, is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived. This ideology does not just deny biology; it declares war against it.”

[…]

And it wasn’t just O’Neill either. The next day, conservative political commentator Benny Johnson, in a speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, escalated even further while speaking about Charlie Kirk’s death:

“The person who pulled the trigger is part of the demonic transgender ideology that warps the minds of our young children, that poisons them, that is antithetical to creation itself. God called on us: I maketh you, man and woman. God doesn’t make mistakes. Transgenderism is a lie from the pit of hell and I’m sick of seeing transgender violence and murderers in my country!”

Joyless monomaniacs, the lot of them. This one is quite a specimen:

As Utah lawmakers return to Capitol Hill for their 2026 session next week, LGBTQ+ advocates are on guard for what will be the fifth year in a row with multiple bills targeting transgender people.

But one bill in particular — HB183 — stands out as especially bad, said Marina Lowe, policy director for Utah’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group, Equality Utah.

“That is by far the most harmful and outrageous piece of legislation I have seen in a long time,” Lowe told Utah News Dispatch in an interview this week.

The bill — sponsored by one of Utah’s most hard-right Republicans, Rep. Trevor Lee, of Layton — is far reaching and would have broad impacts in a variety of areas of state code.

[…]

The bill would effectively “erase transgender people from existence under state law,” she said — except in one provision, which “allows you to disparage transgender people on license plates.”

Lee told Utah News Dispatch in an interview this week that his bill is aimed at “getting away from this idea that there are like 100 different genders out there.”

“There is no such thing as gender, it’s a made up word and term. It’s actually just two sexes. There’s male and female,” he said. “We need to get back to that basic biology.”

He said he also wants “no more changing birth certificates” because “that’s stupid and it makes it very confusing for people, as we get older, especially our children.”

Lowe said it’s one of the most egregious legislative attacks on transgender people she’s ever seen crop up on Utah’s Capitol Hill because it would basically undo years of progress to create equal protections for a class of people that do exist — whether Lee likes it or not.

[…]

Lee refused to acknowledge that his bill would allow discrimination against transgender people in housing and employment, instead insisting that they don’t exist.

“You’ve got to pick one. You’re not both. See, this is part of getting away from this complete, alternate universe that people have been living in for a long time,” he said. “There’s male and female. There’s nothing in between. It doesn’t happen.” 

An interesting take, although I don't think it's quite right. I think opportunistic plunder motivates Trump, his TV personality flunkies, and his tech oligarch courtiers. They somehow scraped together enough capital to mount a hostile takeover of the US, and are now asset-stripping with a view to cashing out before it all crashes. But I don't think they believe themselves to be unfairly privileged. They sincerely believe in their own self-worth, and that they are getting only what they are due.

The rest of the MAGA coalition have other Utopias, but they are united in a shared pseudoscientific eugenicist/social Darwinist world view, and a rough consensus on who constitutes the common enemy and the immediate steps that must be taken to defeat them. However, I don't think MAGA is just a clumsy proto-fascism. The Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, Miller/Bannon driving force is very clear the mission of (as they see it) restoring the world to the timeless and eternal natural order of things.

From the bizarre cacophony of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, Opus Dei fetishists and Q-Anon hangers-on that compose MAGA red hats writ large, there emerges one unifying notion in Trump’s actions. I do not believe the power and money behind Trump’s 2nd ascendancy cares for any of these ideologies the left frets about. Nor do they want to rule through a fascistic party structure—it would be too much work. The real goal is to return to an era in the United States where property and capital were despotic kings back in the 1890s.

[…]

The powers behind Trump’s second term worship at the altar of patriarchy, property rights, and perpetual wage-slavery. They want to remove anything promoting otherwise. Now, some may still call this fascism—the state is using its power to shape society to serve privilege instead of popular mandate. But I am beginning to believe there is no long-term goal to Trumpism except to steal as much as possible, restore Jim Crow and other oppressive controls, then tear government apart bureaucratically and legally so thoroughly that it will take a generation to recover.

Our transportation systems shape and are shaped by attitudes, norms, and biases. Understanding how to shift these in positive directions can help address the pernicious public health challenges of traffic crashes, urban sprawl, inequities in mobility and accessibility, and other effects of a built environment that essentially requires automobile use. This experiment replicated a recent study of public health social norms in the United Kingdom with a United States sample and found similar social norms that often significantly favor cars and may obscure the public health hazards posted by an autocentric approach to planning, engineering, and policy.

Too often, mainstream journalists treated Project 2025 as a claim to be adjudicated rather than a document to be analyzed. They asked whether it was “Trump’s plan” instead of examining how likely its proposals were to be implemented by a Trump administration staffed with its authors.

CNN published a “fact check” pushing back on claims from Harris’ campaign, stating in September 2024 that “Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative,” even while acknowledging Trump’s extensive ties to it. USA Today went further, rating a statement that “Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan” as “false” on the grounds that the project belonged to the Heritage Foundation, not Trump. After Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 during their only debate, the newspaper published yet another piece insisting, “That’s still not right.” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler emphasized in bold text that “Project 2025 is not an official campaign document,” as if the absence of a campaign logo somehow negated the document’s authorship, intent or utility. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” host Norah O’Donnell cut Harris off during an interview to remind viewers that Trump had “disavowed Project 2025.”

Now, over a year later, the administration’s systematic assault on the press reads like a direct transcription of Project 2025’s media section.

A new Justice Department memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi instructs the FBI to create a “cash reward system” to incentivize providing information against domestic terrorists. However, it also makes it clear that the targets of such domestic terrorist investigations will be “Antifa-aligned extremists,” including those promoting “radical gender ideology.”

“The FBI shall establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations,” the memo reads. The memo, dated December 5, was leaked.

Bondi’s memo cites multiple laws that might be used to target domestic terrorism, but also lays out a clear vision for the priorities of the FBI in targeting suspected terrorists. Primary examples given are not the mass shootings and white supremacist actions that have plagued the nation; rather, the document names the “doxing of law enforcement” or the “violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement.”

While it raises the specter of extreme viewpoints, they are not the ones that previous studies have linked most domestic terrorism to. Bondi’s memo suggests that the perpetrators are “certain Antifa-aligned extremists” and that their “animating principle is adherence to the types of extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.”

A long but informative read:

According to the scholar Naomi Alizah Cohen, modern antisemitism and transmisogyny overlap in profound ways. It is no coincidence, Cohen suggests, that TERFs are so frequently to be found in the vicinity of podcasts touting Jewish “transhumanism” conspiracies. For National Socialists, she writes, the figure of the trans woman represented “the Jew’s most abhorrent creation.” Superficially, of course, all things Semitic were aligned within Nazism with Weimar-era Berlin’s demimonde of mollies, dolls, feminine faggotry, transsexuality, and transvestism.

But transfeminine people, specifically, were the figures that German fascism regarded as Jew-like because they are formed against nature — unholy mutants, like Frankenstein’s monster — and Cohen argues that the foundations of transmisogyny and antisemitism were constructed together in this era: On the one hand, there is the “natural” body of the organic, autochthonous Aryan (good), and on the other, there is the “artificial” specter of the wandering, dissimulating “alien” (bad). Trans women and Jews alike, here, belong to the domain of trickery, usury, dysgenics, placelessness, amorphousness, degeneracy, and the demonic. Aryans and cissexuals, conversely, belong to the domain of truth, earth, primal purpose, clean outlines, and palpable borders. 

Paywalled, unfortunately. Overview from the Guardian here.

Planning and transportation policies aim to promote wellbeing and people’s quality of life. One policy implication of our study that stems from the negative association between high levels of car dependence and life satisfaction involves promoting multimodality. One of our measures of objective car dependence (i.e., the share of car trips out of out-of-home trips) captures to some extent multimodality. The results indicate that using a car for more than 50 % of the time in a typical week, which indicates low levels of multimodality, is associated with a decrease in life satisfaction. Thus, planners and policymakers should continue to implement diverse transportation systems that integrate
alternative modes of travel such as biking, transit, ride-sharing, and micro-mobilities. Our results do not necessarily warrant the conclusion that there is a need for a complete shift away from car use; cars undoubtedly offer numerous benefits, especially given the characteristics of the U.S. transportation infrastructure and travel behaviors of American adults. Instead, our research implies the importance of travel mode diversity, which would facilitate mobility based on needs and preferences therefore reducing car dependence and mitigating its potential negative effects on life satisfaction.

Land use changes are also key strategies that would help reduce car dependence and its negative externalities on wellbeing. While many travel by car because of their positive attitudes toward this mode of transportation, not all Americans drive because of a true choice or personal preference. Some are car-dependent due to land use patterns that favor car-based mobility, which may have negative implications on life satisfaction. Policies that may address this issue include compact development patterns, transit-oriented developments, car-free neighborhoods, and mixed-used urban environments.

This:

Amassing authoritarian power depends in part on a willingness of the people to believe in the power exercised. In some cases, Trump’s declarations are meant to test the waters, but in other cases, the outrageous claim is its own accomplishment. He defies shame and legal constraints in order to show his capacity to do so, which displays to the world a shameless sadism.

The exhilarations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life (freedom, equality, justice), but enact these as forms of “liberation” from false ideologies and the constraints of legal obligations. An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.

The sadistic glee at issue here is not just his; it depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist – it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance. And that is why it is no longer a simple matter of exposing hypocrisy that will serve us now. There is no moral veneer that must be stripped away. No, the public demand for the appearance of morality on the part of the leader is inverted: his followers thrill to the display of his contempt for morality, and share it.

Federal immigration officers have started using Renee Good’s death to threaten more U.S. citizens.

A video posted to Reddit showed a screaming ICE agent repeatedly threatening to kill a man who was sitting in his car, asking how he didn’t “learn from what just happened.”

In the two-minute clip, a masked agent wearing a Minnesota Timberwolves hat approached the vehicle already furious, while the driver rolled down his window. “Stop fucking following us, you are impeding operations, this is the United States federal government,” the officer shouted.

“I live over here, I got to get to my house,” the driver replied calmly.

“This is your warning, alright? Go home to your kids, go home to your kids. This is your last warning. I won’t arrest you,” the officer threatened, before stomping away. 

[…]

“You’re not gonna like the outcome of this, sir. I guarantee you that,” the first officer said, circling back. “I guarantee you’re not gonna like the outcome. Go home to your children. It’s Sunday. It is Sunday. You did not learn from what just happened?”

“Learn what?” the driver asked, but the officer did not elaborate, and the group of federal agents appeared to leave without arresting anyone.

It seems clear, however, that the agent was referring to Renee Good, the U.S. citizen who was shot multiple times by an ICE agent last week after federal officers surrounded her vehicle.