United States (US)

“For a medieval historian, they’re really obvious red flags,” she says, and all the experts interviewed expressed similar unease and anxiety. “If you told me that it was some random proud boy, I wouldn’t be surprised for a second. But given his position it is pretty shocking,” Elley says. Lodder echoes this exact feeling: “It’s both absurd and terrifying; terrifying that … someone with such prominent and worrying tattoos on their body is getting a Cabinet position in the U.S., but also absurd, because it’s all very cosplay.” 

When it comes down to it, there are some undeniable features of Hegseth’s collection of tattoos. “It’s all very specifically violent,” summarizes Jannega. “There is no way of reading this that isn’t about violence, when you have guns and swords all over you. He’s telling you this. He cannot play the misunderstood Christian — he’s violent.” What a medievalist finds particularly troubling in the real history of the Crusades is what happened before Crusaders got to the Holy Land. “One thing that happened was horrific violence here in Europe,” Janega continues. “There were so many knights so keyed up — why would they bother waiting for the Holy Land when there were non-Christians in their backyard?” Lecaque, too, is anticipating increasing oppression at home — already seen in Hegseth’s book “American Crusade,” which, in its own words, “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies,” as well as more violence abroad, especially in the Middle East. 

Even in LGBTQ-friendly states like New York, transgender Americans are what estate attorney Elizabeth Schwartz politely calls “concerned” or “alarmed,” but she knows it’s much more than that. “I don’t want to sound like I’m downplaying it or making it sound milquetoast,” Schwartz said. “My inbox has been blowing up with people who are absolutely freaked out.”

Schwartz, who is based in Miami, has been working nonstop the past two months to help clients complete name and gender-marker changes, healthcare proxies, powers of attorney, wills, trusts and confirmatory adoptions. “If you’re married and have a child and both parents are on the birth certificate, there shouldn’t be a question of who the parents are, but this is a belt-and-suspenders kind of situation,” Schwartz said, meaning you have to double up protections. 

“The selectivity about whom the Fourteenth Amendment ought to apply to is stunning,” said Khiara M. Bridges, professor at University of California at Berkeley School of Law. “It’s not demanded by the text of the Constitution at all. Instead, these are political choices that are being made, and they’re elevating certain individuals’ rights.”

[…]

The recent Supreme Court arguments about Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for adolescents underscored the selectivity in who gets to exercise Fourteenth Amendment rights. The conservative position in U.S. v. Skrmetti is that while parents typically get to argue a due process right to direct their children’s upbringing, that right does not extend to parenting that affirms their transgender child’s identity. Trans adolescents can’t access medical care that is legal for their cisgender peers, and Republicans claim this is a regulation, not discrimination based on sex. Under this interpretation, even trans and nonbinary adults could continue to see their rights diminished.

“This [incoming] administration would be interested in denying them health care and, if not criminalizing them, certainly banishing them from public spaces,” Bridges said. One conservative group says it will pursue a ban on federal insurance covering affirming treatments, akin to the Hyde Amendment for abortion.

[…] 

As far as immigrants are concerned, President-elect Trump has also said he wants to end birthright citizenship and start a mass deportation program, which would necessarily rope in U.S. citizens. While citizenship for people born on U.S. soil is written verbatim into the Fourteenth Amendment, conservatives have previewed an argument to gut it.

[…]

Bridges said this country’s history of mass deportations is rife with evidence that legal residents will be caught up in the dragnet. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens with Mexican ancestry were deported during the Great Depression under President Herbert Hoover. (His slogan was “American jobs for real Americans.”) President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1950s deportation regime also wrongly removed American citizens of Mexican descent.

“This wasn’t about undocumentedness, and this wasn’t about immigrants. This was about non-whiteness,” Bridges said. Under Trump 2.0, she said, the U.S. would once again be removing people from the U.S. because they are not white. “We’re talking about building camps, right? That’s where we are.” 

[…]

The groups of people whose Fourteenth Amendment rights to be recognized as full humans are under attack from Republicans are deeply connected to one another. “It’s an error to read these things separate from one another,” Bridges said, adding that the obsession with mass deportations is connected to the desire to end birthright citizenship, which are both tied to wanting to revert to traditional gender and family norms, and that’s linked to the interest in giving rights to fertilized eggs. “All of these things are part of the same project,” she said. “This is about whiteness and patriarchy. It’s about creating the U.S. as a nation for white men.” 

Gradually, our notions of who a person is have expanded — first to include Germans and Swedes (look it up, Ben Franklin was repulsed by how not-white they were), then Irish men and other European men, then white women, then slowly, everyone else. But that habit — dare I say, pleasure — of being a person among non-people? This country doesn’t let go of it easily. And the personhood of everyone who isn’t a white man is constantly open to question.

You can work non-people like dogs. You can set a non-person on the task of cleaning your house and feeding your children, and whether she likes doing it doesn’t have to enter the equation. You don’t need to care if a non-person drowns in the Rio Grande or dies of thirst in the desert. If non-people are rounded up and sent to Mexico, well, look at the rest of us! We’re all people here, and our being here after the purge of the non-people proves it.

And, sure, maybe you think you’re white. Latinos can be white. Hell, Latinos like Nick Fuentes, Enrique Tarrio and Mauricio Garcia are well-known white supremacists. But that’s not how it works when the monster is loose. White people will point their fingers at other white people and say, “They’re not people like us!” And then, just like that, you go from being white to being the target of white people.

So the reason many of us are confused about why Latinos would vote for Trump is because of that frenzied evil that so often shamefully overcomes white people in America when we let loose our racism. When white people act on our worst racist impulses — like deciding that non-white people don’t belong here, or that some people here are "vermin," or that everyone from a certain place or background is a criminal and a rapist — we enact terrible violence on our neighbors. People get hurt. People get killed. And it is never only the “right” people. When the beast is feeding, it eats everything it can reach. Including you. Including me.

File under "Paywalled but pertinent."

The Harris campaign chose not to respond to the Trump ads — not even to point out, as the Lincoln Project did, that trans health care for prisoners (including surgery) was the policy of Trump’s Bureau of Prisons during his first term. In campaign rallies, Harris’s litany of “freedoms” invariably ended with gay rights (“The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride”). It never once included trans rights. The same was true for Democratic candidates down the ballot. Before McBride was banned from the Capitol bathrooms, she was excluded from the Democratic National Convention stage.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called the  Capitol trans bathroom ban dangerous for “all women and girls” because “all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn’t wearing a skirt because she might not look woman enough.” That’s a lot like someone in 1955 objecting to Jim Crow laws because some white people might get mistaken for Black people. AOC didn’t mention McBride or civil rights.

Trans people have become untouchables.

[…] 

If it sounds like I’m terrified, I am — as are many trans Americans and their families. In recent years there has been an escalation in the number of anti-trans bills introduced in Republican state houses (669 bills in 2024). Most are targeting trans minors, taking away bathrooms, sports, books, forcibly outing them, outlawing “crossdressing,” greenlighting hate speech, criminalizing any mention of gender identity, and criminalizing their parents, doctors and counselors. As Trump has vowed, and as the state of Oklahoma has done, they’re not going to stop with children.

But what terrifies me most doesn’t just concern trans people. I’ll pose my fear as a question: What percentage of the German population was Jewish at the time of Hitler’s rise? The answer — 0.75% — is lower than most people guess.

The Nazi party gaslit a nation into thinking that a group comprising 0.75% of its population was a threat that could “poison” its culture, seize its economy and needed to be stopped. During the 1930s, before Germany’s “final solution” to “the Jewish problem,” more than 400 anti-Jewish decrees and regulations were issued by national, regional and municipal officials, gradually eliminating Jews from public life, employment, education, culture, travel, hospital care and turning them into outcasts.

JD Vance brought all of that pathological hatred of Haitians to bear when he accused Haitian immigrants, whom he considers a threat, of eating cats (the same cats he also considers a threat to white birth rates). The racists who participate in the anti-immigrant online mobs do the same. Not everybody who is piling on is aware of the deep and disgusting history of racism toward Haitians: After all, many online MAGAs have an aversion to knowing things about the other peoples of the world. But they know enough (that Haitians are Black and vulnerable in this country) to derive glee from participating in cruelty.

It hurts, of course. It always hurts when you are reminded of just how many white folks hate your people. It always stings to see a few other Black people or other supposed allies join in the denigration. I think the insult that Haitians are eating pets is doubled for me because I know for a fact that white Americans care more about their family pets than they do about Haitian immigrants being threatened and harassed right now. If all of Haiti were a nature preserve for cats and dogs, it would be protected at all costs. Since it is a home for free Black folks, its people are treated like dogs.

But being hurt and being defeated are two different things. White folks have been trying to strangle Haiti and Haitians into submission for over 200 years, and yet we are still here. What I can laugh about is this: The white supremacist forces multicultural America is trying to defeat in this election are forces little ol’ Haitians defeated literal centuries ago. America is still trying to get at our level.

My happy but plain vanilla life stands in contrast to the lurid rhetoric and terrifying intentions of Governor Greg Abbott, his allies in the state Legislature, and Republican lawmakers across the country, as well as the goals of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s extremist blueprint for America’s future. Friends out of state urge me to leave Texas, which is where I have always lived. They fear for my safety. Some trans people I know refuse even to travel through Texas.

Their fears are not unwarranted. What I’ve found, however, is that even in rural Texas the average person couldn’t care less about my gender. Most Texans who know me and hear my story are supportive, wherever they happen to lie on the political spectrum. They may not understand it, but they accept it and move on. Those who do shun, hate, or fear seem, in my view, to be either insecure in their own identity or to be captured by merchants of fear in right-wing media.

Trans people endure constant psychic strain as we make our spaces and serve our communities while lawmakers plot our extinction. But the staged uproar over our supposed effrontery has less to do with reality than with our antagonists’ covert aims and unexamined anxieties. Someone I know recently suggested that trans people bring hate upon our own heads by always seeking attention and affirmation. The prosaic truth is that we simply want to exist.

This is just heartbreaking. And this was two years ago!

As some states become increasingly hostile to transgender youth, families are weighing a difficult decision of whether to leave their schools, jobs and communities behind to flee to a state with greater LGBTQ protections.

Finally, the pervasive tendency among nominally anti-MAGA leaders to accommodate Trumpism in power and cling to a treacherous idea of “normalcy” is also rooted in foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary of liberal America, in particular. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called “liberal consensus” of the post-war era, that shared understanding among the country’s elite that America is fundamentally good, the institutions essentially healthy, and the U.S. inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be – but such ideas of exceptional goodness are still powerful today. They often go hand in hand with a mythical tale of American democracy being exceptionally stable. Never mind that, empirically speaking, multiracial democracy has existed for only about 60s years in this country and has been hotly contested at all times: What could possibly happen to America’s supposedly “old, consolidated” democracy? A fundamentally healthy, functioning, consolidated democracy cannot, in this imagination, be brought down by an authoritarian threat rising within its midst. So, either the system is not healthy – or the Trumpist regime is not an acute threat to the survival of American democracy. The latter is a much more comfortable proposition.

The Left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to bend the executive branch to the will of the American people. They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people and the tradeoffs made there. They don’t want empowered members. They want discouraged and bored back benchers. They want all-empowered career “experts” like Tony Fauci to wield power behind the curtains.

And in America, the scary part is that this regime is now increasingly arrayed against the American people. It is both woke and weaponized. The national security state, with organs like the FBI, NSA, and CIA, are aligned against the American people, who are outraged by this revolution they never assented to. The FBI is investigating concerned parents attending open school board meetings as domestic terrorists. They are putting political opponents in jail. The NSA is surveilling the conversations of citizens. Therefore, the hour is late and time is of the essence to expose the charade, rally the country against it toward self-government once again, and seize every leverage point to arrest the damage.