Linkage

The Trump administration cruelly and abruptly stopped the distribution of live-saving antiretroviral drugs to almost 26 million people worldwide. The program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—PEPFAR—is the global health program started by Republican president George W. Bush in 2003. He celebrated the 20 year anniversary in 2023 at his presidential library.

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Without the drugs for any length of time, HIV will replicate inside the bodies of these HIV-infected people in poor countries across Africa, Asia and elsewhere, who have been living and thriving, as HIV has thankfully become a manageable illness because of the drugs. HIV will be able to transmit from them to others—transmission is suppressed while taking the drugs—and more powerful strains could emerge.

And they will develop full-blown AIDS, suffer immensely, and die.

It’s as simple as that.

Let’s be clear, for Trump this is eugenics, killing off the non-white people in the “shithole” countries who he surely believes we shouldn’t be spending money on.

Trump has promoted eugenics—spouting off about “good genes” and “bad genes” in talking about immigrants he wants to deport who he says are “poisoning the blood” of Americans—and, according to his own nephew, said disabled people should “just die” in the context of his nephew’s own son.

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There is no national registry of civilians killed by police and corrections officers in the United States. Several states, including Texas, Connecticut and California, maintain complete records, but in most parts of the United States, local law enforcement chooses whether to report officer-involved homicides to the federal government. The lack of systematic data poses a challenge both for those who wish to hold police accountable for their actions and for those who want to propose reform measures to reduce police violence. How many killings are committed by police?

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We often use simple statistics that just count things, like how many widgets our factory shipped last year. But statistics is much more useful when it enables us to know something about uncertainty. If we have a measure that we know to be imprecise, how imprecise is it: wildly, or only slightly? If we have a measure that systematically undercounts something (statisticians would call this bias), is the undercount minimal, or is it severe? Can we correct the bias? These are the kinds of questions that statistics can answer.

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Using the correlations from these lists, we conclude that for the eight-year period included in the study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, it is likely that there were approximately 10,000 homicides committed by the police, that is, about 1,250 per year. Keep in mind that the Bureau of Justice Statistics report itself excludes many jurisdictions in the United States that openly refuse to share any data with the FBI. The true number of homicides committed by police is therefore even higher. Though not a true estimate, my best guess of the number of police homicides in the United States is about 1,500 per year.

As I said at the beginning of this article, the estimate of 1,500 police homicides per year would mean that eight to ten per cent of all American homicide victims are killed by the police. Of all American homicide victims killed by people they don’t know, approximately one-third of them are victims of the police.

America is a land ruled by fear. We fear that our children will be abducted by strangers, that crazed gunmen will perpetrate mass killings in our schools and theaters, that terrorists will gun us down or blow up our buildings, and that serial killers will stalk us on dark streets. All of these risks are real, but they are minuscule in probability: taken together, these threats constitute less than three per cent of total annual homicides in the US. The numerically greater threat to our safety, and the largest single category of strangers who threaten us, are the people we have empowered to use deadly force to protect us from these less probable threats. The question for Americans is whether we will continue to tolerate police violence at this scale in return for protection against the quantitatively less likely threats.

Do No Harm presents itself as a grassroots association of doctors against gender-affirming care and diversity efforts in the medical profession. The group, which was founded in 2022, does not disclose its donors. But newly disclosed tax filings provided to HuffPost by Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog, show that the Concord Fund, the funding arm of Leo’s network, donated $750,000 in 2022 to Do No Harm Action, the group’s official lobbying effort.

Do No Harm also received more than $1.4 million from a nonprofit, the Project on Fair Representation, run by conservative activist Edward Blum, new records show. Blum, a conservative activist who helped engineer two Supreme Court cases that struck down affirmative action and major sections of the Voting Rights Act, is now a Do No Harm board member.

HuffPost previously revealed that Do No Harm received $1 million in seed funding from Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge fund CEO, and his wife, Suzy Edelman, who has said she considers “transgenderism” “a fiction designed to destroy.”

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The medley of conservative groups channeling money to Do No Harm underscores the growing belief on the right that attacking trans rights is “a political winner.”

The scale of the contributions also helps illuminate how Do No Harm became a successful influence operation so soon after its launch. Last year, the group deployed lobbyists to more than a half-dozen states to advocate for restrictions on gender-affirming care, and at least two states passed laws using its model legislative language. In Montana, Do No Harm provided the blueprint for a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, which sparked furious local protests. 

“It just made the worst of the worst people here more bold in their bigotry, and that trickles down to our kids,” Darcy Saffer, the parent of two transgender nonbinary children in Bozeman, Montana, told HuffPost last year. The law is blocked while the Montana Supreme Court weighs whether it is unconstitutional.

Wow. This is mindblowing.

For some transgender people, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is “an ontological necessity for a livable life” (Fondén, 2020, p. 29). Some trans people engage in do-it-yourself (DIY) HRT (aka “DIYers”) because of care barriers, including medication costs, difficulty accessing healthcare providers, and mistrust in professionalized medical systems. Although DIY HRT is often framed as highly risky, we analyzed in-depth interviews with 36 U.S. DIYers to understand how they themselves perceived their goals, challenges, and risk mitigation using the Liberatory Harm Reduction and lay expertise frameworks. Participants emphasized experiences of transphobia within medical spaces. In contrast, participants characterized DIY HRT as a community-driven, accessible, and empowering practice. Through self-organized online forums and mutual aid, DIYers constructed adaptive health-promoting practices that challenge biomedical conceptualizations of risk and affirm trans agency.

A really comprehensive roundup:

In 2018, a physician and researcher named Lisa Littman published a paper in the journal PLOS One describing what she termed “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD). She hypothesized that some young people—particularly those assigned female at birth—might claim a transgender identity after increasing their social media use or befriending trans peers. According to this perspective, online platforms supposedly “infect” teenagers with the idea that they are trans, creating clusters of youth who suddenly identify in new ways.

From the moment Littman’s paper appeared, researchers and advocacy groups criticized its methodology. Littman’s survey collected responses solely from parents recruited on three websites openly skeptical or critical of medical care for trans youth. These anti-trans or “trans-skeptical” forums—4thWaveNow, Transgender Trend, and Youth Trans Critical Professionals—advertised Littman’s survey to parents who already believed their child’s trans identity was misguided. Unsurprisingly, 76.5% of respondents felt their child was “incorrect” in identifying as transgender.

Critics also pointed out that the youth themselves were never surveyed. Parents who participated were asked to diagnose their children with gender dysphoria (a clinical term referring to distress due to a mismatch between one’s internal sense of gender and assigned sex at birth), even though most parents do not have training in psychology or medicine.

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Although Littman’s original 2018 article used the term ROGD, many discussions in conservative blogs and online groups substituted or conflated it with “transgender social contagion.” This idea claims that trans identity spreads from teen to teen like a virus—an online trend rather than a real expression of self.

While the ROGD paper didn’t use the “social contagion” phrase outright, it alluded to the concept through references to “peer influence” and social media immersion. Almost immediately, these concepts were embraced by anti-trans activists, policymakers, and media personalities. The theory gave them a sort of “scientific” veneer to argue that trans kids are just “confused.” As a result, many now simply refer to both ROGD and “transgender social contagion” interchangeably, even though they are (at least in Littman’s framing) slightly different.

Over the last four days, the bizarre Cybertruck fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas has run from comical interlude to possible terrorist incident to tragic suicide of another veteran of America’s forever wars. Each of these descriptions still captures an important part of the story. As I noted yesterday, while Matthew Livelsberger appears to have had a series of combustible and likely abusive relationships going back many years he also appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019. (I’m tentative on the spousal abuse front only because for now the direct evidence for that that I’m aware of comes only from the friend of his ex-wife.) But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “purged” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!

Most headlines I’d seen in the news report only that he warned of national decline and bore “no ill will toward Mr. Trump,” in the words of one of the investigators. That gloss on Donald Trump is, shall we say, a bit of an understatement, as you can see in these excerpts.

For activist Raquel Willis, co-founder of the Gender Liberation Movement alongside Eliel Cruz, the fight for trans rights and universal bodily autonomy has to move past the visibility era to be truly impactful.

“This idea of simply using visibility as a means to bring about the kind of culture and society that’s going to receive trans folks with the respects that we deserve is over,” she told PinkNews, “and so we have to be thinking in new ways about how to protect ourselves, our voices, our histories and our brilliance without relying on a lot of the institutions that have really pushed the visibility vehicle.”

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For many, access to abortion and gender affirming care might be thought of as different social issues impacting distinctly different groups of people; things to campaign for separately but not together. This line of thinking is similar to how trans rights and women’s rights more widely are often framed by the right-wing press as in direct contrast with one another when instead they are not opposites sides of a coin but rather intricately intertwined.

New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted this in response to Mace’s bathroom ban, telling reporters in November that such restrictions endanger “all women and girls” because “people are going to want to check their private parts in suspecting who is trans and who is cis”.

“The idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trou in front of, who, an investigator, because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans is disgusting. It is disgusting. And frankly, all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn’t wearing a skirt because they think she might not look woman enough,” AOC added.

The intersectionality between the two issues hence sits at the very core of the GLM’s mission because “many of the same forces and entities that are targeting access to abortion are also targeting access to gender affirming care”, Willis said.

Cruz explained: “In the United States, legal precedents are being used to try to pass one another. So these connections are already there in terms […] of those who are making these attacks and for us it was important to marry the different groups of people that people may not necessarily talk about in the same ways.

“Really bringing those connections together in a very intentional way.” 

Greenfield sites are not the solution for housing affordability, even if it’s an easier political sell than increasing density in existing neighborhoods. Housing needs to work for nondrivers, whether that’s people like me who can’t drive, people who can’t afford to drive, young people or older adults (on average, Americans will spend the last seven to 10 years of their lives being unable to drive). When driving isn't an option for so many people, building more car-dependent communities isn't a solution.

When I see advertisements for greenfield developments, especially ones that are built with “new urbanist” ideals, I think back to my year in North Carolina. Southern Village wasn’t just an exurban housing development: The “Village” featured a town square with an organic grocery store, a small gym, and even a restaurant or two. But it definitely wasn’t possible to get everything you needed without leaving, and leaving meant navigating the highway.

For people who can drive, being able to reduce their driving trips because there’s a cute coffee shop nearby might feel great, but for people who can’t drive like me, places like Southern Village feel more like a desert island than the intended suburban paradise. Without enough transit, and often with only a highway shoulder connecting the development with all the other places a person might need to go, these places necessarily exclude people who are physically or financially unable to drive. Because, sometimes, you need more than a coffee shop or a cute grocery store.

Fully diluted valuation is an estimate so flawed that even publishing it should be considered journalistic malpractice. It is calculated by taking the current going price for a crypto token on an exchange and multiplying it by the total number of tokens that may ever exist for that cryptocurrency. To use $TRUMP as an example, people are currently trading these coins for around $53 apiece. There are 200 million of them in circulation, which puts the token’s (already highly questionable, as I explain in a moment) “market cap” at around $10.7 billion. Eventually, over a period of three years (assuming Trump does not lose interest or change the parameters of the deal), 1 billion tokens are set to be released. It is this supply — three years from now — that is being multiplied by the current price of the tokens to achieve estimates in the several tens of billions for how much Trump’s “net worth” has increased, as though it can be safely assumed that not only will the price remain stable over the next three years, but that there is another more than $40 billion that is guaranteed to just materialize.

This is not to downplay the extent to which Trump is grifting his devotees and those crypto traders looking to make a buck on memecoin speculation. But it is important that we accurately report on his cons and do not contribute to misleading crypto hype for the sake of large numbers.