Linkage

While the editor of this hallowed section and I do not always agree, he has conceded that it’s almost Christmas – which is all the excuse I need for a quiz. So let’s play What Did Nigel Say? Read these broadsides from Westminster’s biggest names, and guess: which are from Nigel Farage?

1) Rishi Sunak was “the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration”.

2) Mass immigration “happened by design, not accident”.

3) British government is “broken”.

4) The UK is a “one-nation experiment in open borders”.

5) The British state is wallowing in “the tepid bath of managed decline”.

[…]

Through his speeches, how he frames debates, and most of all in his shrugging acceptance of how limited and slow his political powers are, time and again the Labour leader makes Farage’s case for him.

Want an example? Go back to the five phrases at the top. A collection of nasties, I’m sure you agree. How many came from Nigel Farage?

None. Nor are they the work of Kemi Badenoch, Liz Truss or any other horror you care to think of. Each was said by Keir Starmer, most within the past few days. Britain’s progressive-in-chief claims that politicians and civil servants have deliberately allowed immigration to run rampant, and that the country has “open borders” to the rest of the world. He did this in a speech at the end of last month, which made not one positive reference to immigrants or migration. During the election campaign, he accused Britain’s first Asian prime minister of being “the most liberal” on immigration, sounding a dog whistle that could be heard by any follower of Farage. As far as I can see, hardly any commentator has picked him up for using such rhetoric – but to talk about migrants as only a burden to this country, here on a scam, is the kind of language that people like me are used to catching after last orders on streets that suddenly don’t feel so safe. To hear them from our prime minister should shame him and his party.

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 Heritage Foundation sent the pitch deck outlining the Wikipedia initiative to Jewish foundations and other prospective supporters of Project Esther, its roadmap for fighting antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The slideshow says the group’s  “targeting methodologies” would include creating fake Wikipedia user accounts to try to trick editors into identifying themselves by sharing personal information or clicking on malicious tracking links that can identify people who click on them. It is unclear whether this has begun.

Tamzin Hadasa Kelly, a prolific Wikipedia editor, said that the methods mentioned in the Heritage document were familiar, and that Wikipedia editors know that it can be difficult to maintain their anonymity.

“It’s scary they want to do this, but it’s not a ‘zero day,’” Kelly said in an interview, referring to the hacking methods that the intended victim is unaware of before they occur.

[…]

A well-funded campaign against individual Wikipedia editors by an organization like the Heritage Foundation, which is one of the most prominent conservative think tanks in the country, it seems, would be a first.

Molly White, an independent journalist and Wikipedia contributor who wrote an article last week describing “the right’s war on Wikipedia,” said Heritage’s plan to target editors was concerning: “The document is sort of vague about what they would do once they ID a person,” she noted, “but the things that come to mind are not great.”

“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.” 

In an answer to the question “Do insults about mental illness and abnormality violate when targeting people on the basis of gender or sexual orientation?” Meta now answers “no.” It gave the following examples of posts that do not violate its policies:

   Non-violating: "Boys are weird."
   Non-violating: "Trans people aren't real. They're mentally ill."
   Non-violating: "Gays are not normal."
   Non-violating: "Women are crazy."
   Non-violating: "Trans people are freaks."

And in a follow-up questions about whether denying that a protected class violates the hateful content policy, Meta also answers no. It gave these as examples of posts that are now allowed on Facebook and Instagram:

    "There's no such thing as trans children."
   "God created two genders, 'transgender' people are not a real thing."
   "This whole nonbinary thing is made up. Those people don't exist, they're just in need of some therapy."
   "A trans woman isn't a woman, it's a pathetic confused man."
   "A trans person isn't a he or she, it's an it."

These seem like strange allowances for a policy that begins: “We believe that people use their voice and connect more freely when they don’t feel attacked on the basis of who they are,” and later states flatly, “we remove dehumanizing speech.” It is hard to imagine speech more dehumanizing than to tell someone that they have no gender and are an “it.”

This is just brilliant:

As I was picking up my car from the mechanic last week, the maskless man ringing me up from behind the plexiglass gestured to my mask and asked a by-now familiar question: “Are you sick or trying not to get sick?” He said it with kind curiosity, with none of the ridicule or hostility that so often meets people “still” wearing masks in public. I happily replied that I was trying not to get sick.

He then shared the following information with me: others at the shop had been pressuring him to remove the plexiglass barrier that barely separated him from the customers, but he refused. A friend of his this year died of “it”; the mechanics at the shop are constantly out sick with “it”; and one mechanic lost his leg due to a blood clot after being intubated for three months with “it.” Not once was the word “Covid” mentioned, but we both knew what we were talking about. It had ravaged people he knew, and he wasn’t willing to get rid of the last protective barrier that separated him from the customers who come in sick all the time. In his own way, he insisted on continuing to acknowledge the pandemic by protecting himself the best way he knew how.

The fact that we could talk about Covid without ever mentioning it by name struck me. Others in the waiting room surely heard us, too, and knew what we were talking about. After all, nobody has really forgotten Covid. But what most people have done, collectively, is decide that it is over by fiat; that is, they have ejected Covid from their reality and therefore their vocabulary. “Covid” has become a forbidden word. What has resulted is an unnecessary mystification of the present: gruesome signs of Covid are all around us, as my mechanic saw so clearly, but we are without adequate language to describe it.

[…]

When Trump said that the pandemic would end if we just stopped testing for it, the public was rightly outraged. We were new to the pandemic, not yet fatigued by the inconvenience of caring for others. And so we could easily see through this proposed sleight of hand; we knew that viruses exist even when we don’t go looking for them. But this is exactly the policy that has been universally adopted under a Democratic presidency: almost every method we developed for measuring the true extent of the pandemic in 2020 has been eliminated, not because the threat disappeared but rather to disappear the threat. Just one reliable metric remains, wastewater data, and it reveals the truth: we are still in a biological pandemic, killing and disabling millions. 

[…]

What this sleight of hand conceals is the fact that the social end of the pandemic was manufactured to restart the engine of capital as quickly as possible to quell a newly-radicalized society. At least in the United States, the early pandemic ushered in the most robust social safety net that many of us had seen in our lifetimes: we all received a universal basic income; unemployment benefits doubled; child poverty was cut in half; the changes to manufacturing and travel for which climate activists have been agitating for decades were implemented in the blink of an eye. The lie that bureaucracy is slow and the government’s hands are tied was laid bare. We saw, for the first time, what the state could really do for us when it prioritized people over profits.

In a recent study, I interviewed 12 teachers, primarily in rural towns in the Northeast, about how they deal with problems that arise in the classroom every day. They discussed how they came up with responses based on best practices they had learned in school from resources such as books and videos. They also spoke of techniques they learned in professional development workshops.

Of the nine who worked in public schools or publicly funded child care centers, however, all but one of the teachers were influenced by pressure to follow a curriculum to fidelity. This pressure came from administrators in the form of threats of punishments and even job loss, as well as from colleagues who questioned when they taught a curriculum differently. 

[…]

The term “fidelity” comes from the sciences and refers to the precise execution of a protocol in an experiment to ensure results are reliable. However, a classroom is not a lab, and students are not experiments.

As a result, teachers and teacher educators have long decried fidelity and the impact it has on them and their students.

One participant in my study, a fourth grade public school teacher, described an oppressive environment at her school: “They were really driving the curriculum down our throats. We need to meet this at this date. And everyone should be at this lesson at this date.”

This counteracted what she was taught in college – every student is different, and every classroom is different. Not all teachers will be on the same lesson on the same day.

“Car dependency has a threshold effect – using a car just sometimes increases life satisfaction but if you have to drive much more than this people start reporting lower levels of happiness,” said Rababe Saadaoui, an urban planning expert at Arizona State University and lead author of the study. “Extreme car dependence comes at a cost, to the point that the downsides outweigh the benefits.”

The new research, conducted via a survey of a representative group of people across the US, analyzed people’s responses to questions about driving habits and life satisfaction and sought to find the link between the two via a statistical model that factored in other variables of general contentment, such as income, family situation, race and disability.

The results were “surprising”, Saadaoui said, and could be the result of a number of negative impacts of driving, such as the stress of continually navigating roads and traffic, the loss of physical activity from not walking anywhere, a reduced engagement with other people and the growing financial burden of owning and maintaining a vehicle.

“Some people drive a lot and feel fine with it but others feel a real burden,” she said. “The study doesn’t call for people to completely stop using cars but the solution could be in finding a balance. For many people driving isn’t a choice, so diversifying choices is important.”

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.