United States (US)

The Department of Homeland Security has eliminated policies preventing the investigation of individuals or groups solely based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis quietly updated its policy manual earlier this month, as first reported by Bloomberg, removing LGBTQ+ identities from the General Requirements section that prohibit surveillance based solely on immutable characteristics.

The manual now states: “OSIC Personnel are prohibited from engaging in intelligence activities based solely on an individual’s or group’s race, ethnicity, sex, religion, country of birth, nationality, or disability. The use of these characteristics is permitted only in combination with other information, and only where (1) intended and reasonably believed to support one or more of I&A’s national or departmental missions and (2) narrowly focused in support of that mission (or those missions).”

The manual previously stated, via the internet archive: “OSIC Personnel are prohibited from engaging in intelligence activities based solely on an individual’s or group’s race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, country of birth, nationality, or disability. The use of these characteristics is permitted only in combination with other information, and only where (1) intended and reasonably believed to support one or more of I&A’s national or departmental missions and (2) narrowly focused in support of that mission (or those missions).”

More Americans now say they favor or strongly favor laws and policies that:

• Ban health care professionals from providing care related to gender transitions for minors (up 10 percentage points)
• Require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex at birth (up 8 points)
• Require trans people to use public bathrooms that match their sex at birth (up 8 points)
• Make it illegal for public school districts to teach about gender identity in elementary schools (up 6 points)

At the same time, fewer Americans now express support for laws and policies that:

• Protect trans people from discrimination (down 8 points since 2022)
• Require health insurance companies to cover medical care for gender transitions (down 5 points)
   

The foundation, originally known as the “Pioneer Fund”, was relaunched and rebranded in 2022 as the “Human Diversity Foundation” (HDF) by Danish eugenicist Emil Kirkegaard.

[…]

The aim has been to normalise the Pioneer Fund’s Nazi-aligned scientific racism in the mainstream through the notion of open debate and ‘free’ inquiry. Scientific racism has been rebranded as the story of ‘human biodiversity’.

The key funder supporting this initiative was revealed to be American technology entrepreneur Andrew Conru, who donated $1.3 million to the HDF. Around the same time, Conru was also funding the most influential conservative voices attacking DEI and ‘critical race theory’ – Christopher Rufo, Peter Boghossian, and Richard Hanania.

HDF’s magazine, Aporia, was founded by British far-right activist Matthew Frost. Conru’s donation provided him with a 15% stake in the group. It has defended Richard Lynn’s pseudoscientific racism, published an interview with Nazi sympathiser Jared Taylor, and in 2024 claimed that racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate”.

Hope Not Hate’s undercover reporting recorded far-right activists associated with the HDF calling for “remigration” – the ‘mass removal of ethnic minorities’.

Thomas is the single best commentator on the theology that drives these people.

Where does this end? Who is at risk? Anyone who stands in the way of the MAGA vision of purging the nation. “He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador,” Stephen Miller lied about Kilmar Abrego Garcia last week: “This was the right person sent to the right place.” Who cares what the law says: To the MAGA ideologues, Garcia is outside the boundaries of “real America,” he does not – and must never – belong to the Volk, the “real” people. This is a core tenet of the vision that animates the Trumpist Right. “I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien,” JD Vance proclaimed last September, when he was trying to incite a pogrom against the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio based on vile lies and conspiracy theories he was instrumental in propagating. He knew the people he was targeting were in the United States legally. Yet for blood-and-soil nationalists like Miller and Vance, there is a “Higher Truth” that overrides all else: The “homeland” is under siege, overrun with enemies who “poison the blood.” The allegiance to the “real American” homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional.

The MAGA rage won’t be confined to migrants either. A regime that so aggressively curtails and ignores fundamental rights for one group today will not hesitate to violate and suspend them for others tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. It’s never far from “illegal aliens” and “alien enemies” to “the enemy within.” In the MAGA imagination, America is simultaneously threatened by outsiders and by insidiously subversive forces on the inside. The “enemy within” – those Un-American forces of radical leftism and “globalist” elites – are as acutely dangerous as the invaders from without. In order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make America Great Again, it has as to be “purified” – the enemies have to be subjugated and purged. That is the core promise of Trumpism as a political project.

This is how the attempts to detain, deport, and disappear foreign nationals are directly connected to both the escalating attacks on universities as well as the assault on state institutions and the civil service. To the Trumpist Right, all of these institutions have been taken over by the “globalist” enemy within, they function as power centers for the “woke” elites, they fund and propagate their campaign to subvert and weaken the nation.

What’s especially creepy about conflating anti-corporate sentiment with terrorism is that it opens the door to spying on the American people. Counter-terrorism is literally the business of “pre-crime,” in which law enforcement and its intelligence arm work to seek to prevent hypothetical crimes of the future, even where no information exists to suggest any preparations. This is the post-9/11 standard that has become the norm when it comes to well-resourced terrorist organizations like al Qaeda and ISIS. But it should have no place against random shitposters online.

If it sounds like I’m exaggerating when I say there’s a new War on Terrorism, consider Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent remark calling Molotov cocktails thrown at Teslas “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

“We are not negotiating” with the vandals whom she has elsewhere deemed “terrorists,” Bondi also declared, as if she were speaking of airline hijackers bargaining to release hostages on an airplane. 

The two-page document obtained by the Prospect and compiled by the Connecticut regional intelligence center—one of dozens of fusion centers across the country that communicate intelligence between federal agencies and state law enforcement—is uncharacteristically forthright in its language and assessment that health care costs lead to instability, and that the reaction to suspect Luigi Mangione’s alleged action was largely positive.

According to the dossier, “Healthcare expenditure in the United States increased from $2.75Trillion (T) in 2004, to $4.09T in 2018, in inflation adjusted dollars. 2019 and 2020, saw expenditures of $4.2T and $4.6T respectfully, which represents a 10.6% increase year over year and was largely influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Historically, threats or actual acts of violence against those in the healthcare industry rose by more than 60% from 2011 to 2018.”

The dossier adds that the public “may view the ensuing manhunt and subsequent arrest of Mangione as NYPD, and largely policing as a whole, as a tool that is willing to expend massive resources to protect the wealthy, while the average citizen is left to their own means for personal security.”

The 85-year-old self-described conservative had been invited by his grandson to a public hearing on a Republican-authored bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state. He decided to make the short drive from his home in Milwaukee. 

[…]

For hours, Jones listened to the stories of kids who wanted to transition and said it seemed like “their brain was tearing them apart.” He now believes the decision to receive gender-affirming care should involve a child, a qualified doctor and a parent — not lawmakers. He likened the issue to lawmakers banning doctors from providing abortions.

[…]

Jones said a 14-year-old transgender teen — one of the youngest speakers who advocated for their right to go on hormones — helped to change his perspective at the hearing. In their testimony, they shared that they had recently contemplated suicide.

“I started to listen to this kid, and it wasn’t some kind of whim or something like that. This kid was actually suffering,” Jones said. “And I thought to myself, nobody has to do that. You’re only a kid.”

The GOP-controlled committee voted to advance the bill. Republican lawmakers in the Assembly passed it last week.

“Children are not allowed to get tattoos, sign contracts, get married, or smoke — so why would we allow them to physically change their gender?” Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth, said in a statement.

Jones had a different take.

“All of these kids, they deserve a chance to see where they belong,” he said.

In the wake of the Democratic Party’s disappointing 2024 election losses, a quiet but seismic shift is underway within its ranks. At the center of this transformation is Third Way, a self-proclaimed “centrist” think tank that has long positioned itself as the voice of moderation in Democratic politics. But a closer look at its agenda, funding, and recent maneuvers reveals a far more troubling reality: Third Way is spearheading a Project 2025-style assault on progressivism, steering the party toward a conservative, even far-right alignment that echoes the Trumpist playbook.  

The latest evidence of this shift came in a five-page memo leaked from a recent Third Way retreat with Democratic staffers and consultants. The document, obtained by journalist Donald Shaw, urges the party to abandon its reliance on small-dollar donors, arguing that their preferences “may not align with the broader electorate.” While the memo stops short of explicitly naming alternative funding sources, the implication is clear: Democrats should pivot toward the deep pockets of wealthy elites and corporate donors.

Every fascist movement needs a group of people to blame all the bad things in the world on. Obviously, this is a highly dangerous situation to said people, and they might need to flee the country. This is a small project trying to help them within the bounds of what we can do.