Linkage

On 27 March, some 20 police officers burst in on a group of young women at a Quaker’s meeting house in central London and arrested them on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.

The women were activists who had gathered for an open meeting of Youth Demand, a pro-Palestine and climate justice movement demanding an end to UK government arms sales to Israel and new fossil fuel licensing. The group emerged in the aftermath of Israel’s war on Gaza, which began in October 2023.

“It was a publicly advertised talk,” said Lia, 20, who attended the meeting. “It was a low turnout - six people in total.”

The women were sitting in a circle drinking tea when Lia looked up to see a large group of police pressed against the window.

“Their hats were tapping against the glass,” she told Middle East Eye. “Then, there was a big thud. They kicked down the door, and then the whole room was full of police.”

The officers seized the women’s laptops and phones, and led them off one by one, some in handcuffs.

“None of us were resisting arrest,” Lia said.

Three of the women were taken to Bromley police station, the others to Kingston, where they were held incommunicado and interrogated in the middle of the night.

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 stipulates that detainees are permitted an initial phone call, although this right may be delayed in cases relating to serious organised crime, terrorism or espionage.

It is a tactic increasingly deployed against pro-Palestine activists.

Simultaneously, police officers conducted overnight raids on their homes with the keys they confiscated from the arrestees.

Ella Grace Taylor, another one of those arrested, said she came home to find her room ransacked.

“My bed was stripped. All my things were lying across the floor,” she told MEE.

“We were left this piece of paper that acknowledged they’d been there. It said in small print on the back: ‘If you want to know what's been taken, you have to come to the police station.’”

“We’ve all been having nightmares. When we hear a noise outside or a van go past, there is this sense of paranoia,” she added.

The police are still withholding the women’s phones, laptops and university coursework. 

This week, a Georgia woman was arrested for her miscarriage. I’ll let that sit with you a moment.

The 24-year-old—found bleeding and unconscious outside her apartment complex—was charged with ‘concealing a death’ and ‘abandoning a dead body’ after placing fetal remains in the trash.

Georgia has no law dictating how to dispose of miscarriage remains, but police arrested her anyway. Her mugshot is already splashed across the local crime pages. Did you know that one million American women miscarry every year? I hope the cops are ready to run out of film.

While this young woman sat behind bars, Georgia lawmakers considered a bill that would lock up even more women: The Prenatal Equal Protection Act (HB 441) would charge abortion patients as murderers—a crime punishable by life in prison or the death penalty.

You wouldn’t know it from looking at the headlines. From the Associated Press to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, HB 441 is being covered as a “total abortion ban” rather than a radical step toward punishing women.

Fertility doctors could also be jailed for life; under HB 441, discarding frozen embryos would be a criminal offense. Fertility specialist Dr. Karenne Fru asked lawmakers at a Thursday hearing, “Am I guilty of murder? That makes me a serial killer.”

This isn’t an issue of a single extremist state. The legislation in Georgia is one of eleven ‘equal protection’ bills that have been introduced across the country since the start of the year. All of them seek to punish women who have abortions. The rest of us, of course, remain suspect: An Idaho legislator explained to a reporter last month that his ‘equal protection’ bill would allow for the investigation of miscarriages.

We’re barely three years out from the end of Roe. Still think feminists are ‘hysterical’?

Connecting all these dots leads to a fairly clear conclusion: Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza — through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment — into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area. Anyone caught outside its boundaries would be killed, and buildings throughout the rest of the enclave would likely be razed to the ground.

Without mincing words, this “humanitarian zone,” as Magal so kindly put it, in which the army intends to corral Gaza’s 2 million residents, can be summed up in just two words: concentration camp. This is not hyperbole; it is simply the most precise definition to help us better understand what we are facing.

[…]

Perversely, the plan to establish a concentration camp inside Gaza may reflect Israeli leaders’ realization that the much-touted “voluntary departure” of the population is not realistic in the current circumstances — both because too few Gazans would be willing to leave, even under continued bombardment, and because no country would accept such a massive influx of Palestinian refugees.

According to Dr. Dotan Halevy, a researcher of Gaza and co-editor of the book “Gaza: Place and Image in the Israeli Space,” the concept of “voluntary departure” is based on an all-or-nothing principle. “Consider this hypothetical,” Halevy told me recently. “Ask Ofer Winter [the military general who, at the time of our conversation, looked set to be tasked with heading the Defense Ministry’s “Voluntary Departure Directorate”] whether evacuating 30 percent, 40 percent, or even 50 percent of Gaza’s residents would be considered a success. Would Israel really care if Gaza had 1.5 million Palestinians rather than 2.2 million? Would that enable the annexation fantasies of Bezalel Smotrich and his allies? The answer is almost certainly no.”

[…]

Whether or not Smotrich, Katz, and Zamir have read Halevy and Shafer Raviv’s articles, they likely understand that “voluntary departure” is not an immediately executable plan. But if they truly believe that the solution to the “Gaza problem” — or to the Palestinian issue as a whole — is for there to be no Palestinians left in Gaza, then it will certainly not be possible all in one go.

In other words, the idea appears to be: first, corral the population into one or more closed-off enclaves; then, let starvation, desperation, and hopelessness do the rest. Those locked inside will see that Gaza has been completely destroyed, that their homes have been leveled, and that they have neither a present nor a future in the Strip. At that point, the Israeli thinking goes, Palestinians themselves will begin pushing for emigration, forcing Arab countries to take them in.

The Department of Justice and the Department of Education have joined forces to create a Title IX Special Investigations Team, targeting “the pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities,” as per an April 4 press release.

Enacted by Congress in 1972, Title IX was meant to protect students at all levels from discrimination “on the basis of sex.” Traditionally, it’s been used to combat sex-based violence, harassment, and discrimination within federally-funded academic institutions. At least 21 state attorneys general have also explicitly stated that Title IX protections include trans people.

Under the Trump regime, however, Title IX has taken on a new role. It’s become a tool for harassing trans students, or students merely suspected of being trans, especially if those students are athletes.

“Protecting women and women’s sports is a key priority for this Department of Justice,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi, a Trump appointee, in a press release announcing the new effort.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is also standing at the helm. The ex-World Wrestling Entertainment CEO has a messy, decades-long history tainted by reports implicating her in child sex abuse and steroid scandals at the WWE.

Just putting this here until it's superseded by something even more ridiculous.

In an interview Sunday on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures, Alabama Senator and former football coach Tommy Tuberville claimed that “entire men’s teams… women’s teams are turning trans.” Tuberville previously served as the primary sponsor of a national transgender sports ban, which was defeated in the U.S. Senate earlier this year. The senator offered no evidence for his incendiary claim, and to date, there is no documented instance of “entire teams” identifying as transgender. His remarks follow a string of increasingly exaggerated claims from Republicans and President Trump about the presence of transgender people in sports and schools.

“Entire men’s teams across this country now that are turning trans… women’s teams that are turning trans. That’s going to be a situation now where it is going to pick up speed, because these woke globalists are pushing these kids to say, ‘if you can’t compete in men’s sports, let’s just transition to say you’re a woman and participate in women’s sports.’ It is dead wrong, and we’ve got to stand up against it, but the Democrats… they’re all in of keeping this situation going in the wrong direction,” Tuberville said. The host offered no pushback, nodding and replying “yeah” during the segment, failing to fact-check the baseless claims.

The biggest chemical cover up in history. PFAS has polluted the entire global water system. Now, potentially dangerous forever chemicals are being found in the entire US population.

I don't usually even read, much less recommend, anything paywalled, but this makes some important points:

“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said in 1967, in his inaugural address as governor of California. Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, approvingly quotes the speech in his foreword to Project 2025, the conservative think tank’s blueprint for the Trump administration. Roberts writes that the plan has four goals for protecting its vision of freedom: restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”; dismantling the federal bureaucracy; defending U.S. “sovereignty, borders, and bounty”; and securing “our God-given individual rights to live freely.”

Project 2025 has proved to be a good road map for understanding the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, but most of the focus has been on efforts to dismantle the federal government as we know it. The effort to restore traditional families has been less prominent so far, but it could reshape the everyday lives of all Americans in fundamental ways.

[…]

In this vision, men are breadwinners and women are mothers. “Without women, there are no children, and society cannot continue,” Max Primorac writes in his chapter on USAID, where he served in the first Trump administration. (Primorac calls for ridding the agency of “woke” politics and using it as an instrument of U.S. policy, but not the complete shutdown Trump has attempted.) Jonathan Berry writes that the Department of Labor, where he previously worked, would “commit to honest study of the challenges for women in the world of professional work” and seek to “understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.” (This sounds a lot like research predetermined to reach an outcome backing the traditional family.) The Labor Department would produce monthly data on “the state of the American family and its economic welfare,” and the Education Department would provide student data sorted by family structure. Severino suggests that the government either pay parents (most likely mothers) to offset the cost of caring for children, or pay for in-­home care from family members; he opposes universal day care, which many on the right see as encouraging women to work rather than stay home with kids.

[…]

Right-wing leaders have made attacks on trans people and nontraditional expressions of gender a cornerstone of right-wing politics over the past few years. They have spread disinformation about trans people and panicked over the prospect of children adopting different gender identities or names at school. What is the reason for so much fear? Transgender people make up less than 2 percent of the population, and their presence in society doesn’t evidently harm other people. Project 2025’s pro-­family orientation helps explain why the right considers them such a threat. A worldview that sees gender roles as strictly delineated and immutable cannot acknowledge the existence of trans people or anything else that contemplates an alternative to a total separation between what it means to be male and what it means to be female.

Trump has not yet made stricter abortion policies a focus in his new term. Though he has boasted about appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he seems wary of pushing further, for fear of political backlash. Project 2025 has no such qualms. Severino recommends withdrawing FDA approval for abortion drugs, banning their prescription via telehealth, and using 1873’s Comstock Act to prohibit their mailing. He also recommends a strong federal surveillance program over abortion at the state level. Project 2025 also calls for the return of abstinence-only education and the criminalization of pornography.

With a little imagination, we can glimpse the America that Project 2025 proposes. It is an avowedly Christian nation, but following a very specific, narrow strain of Christianity. In many ways, it resembles the 1950s. While fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families. At school, students learn old-­fashioned values and lessons. Abortion is illegal, vaccines are voluntary, and the state is minimally involved in health care. The government is slow to police racial discrimination in all but its most blatant expressions. Trans and LGBTQ people exist—­they always have—­but are encouraged to remain closeted. It is a vision that suggests Reagan was right: Freedom ­really is a fragile thing.

WTF? I don't get it.

Three federal lawmakers are calling on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop any initiatives involving cryptocurrency and the blockchain, saying the scantly regulated technologies should be kept far away from the agency’s work overseeing the nation’s housing sector.

[…]

The letter is a response to reporting by ProPublica that the housing agency recently discussed taking steps toward using cryptocurrency. The article described meetings in February in which officials discussed incorporating the blockchain — and possibly a type of cryptocurrency known as stablecoin — into the agency’s work. The discussion at one meeting centered on a pilot project involving one HUD grant, but a HUD finance official in attendance indicated the idea could be applied much more expansively across the agency.

“We are looking at this for the entire enterprise,” he said in that meeting, a recording of which was obtained by ProPublica. “We just wanted to start in CPD,” he added, referring to HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development. The office administers billions of dollars in grants to support low- and moderate-income people, including funding for affordable housing, homeless shelters and disaster recovery, raising the prospect that these forms of aid might one day be paid in an unstable currency.

[…]

The HUD official pushing the idea internally was Irving Dennis, the agency’s new principal deputy chief financial officer, a staffer said at one of the meetings. Dennis denied to ProPublica that HUD was considering any such experiment. He published a book in 2021 in which he wrote that HUD should use the blockchain.

The blockchain is a digital ledger most commonly used to record cryptocurrency transactions. Boosters of the technology depict it as a way to cut middlemen such as banks out of financial transactions and to make those transactions more transparent and secure. One such evangelist is Robert Judson, an executive at the consulting firm EY, who is listed in a document obtained by ProPublica as an attendee of one of the HUD meetings. Judson has written glowingly about the potential of blockchain to prevent aid money from being misused. (Dennis was previously a partner at EY.)

The headlines in the budget reconciliation bill that passed the House by one vote early Thursday morning are well known: massive tax cuts for the rich financed by crippling program cuts in Medicaid and food stamps, raising the federal debt by $3.3 trillion over a decade, and in turn spooking bond markets. But a lot of other mischief is buried in the fine print. Here are ten of the worst:

Crippling Courts. The bill, hiding behind the premise that it is an appropriations measure, prohibits any funds from being used to carry out court orders holding executive branch officials in contempt. This is designed to enable Trump and his officials to continue defying court orders. It is almost certainly unconstitutional—if courts have the nerve to say so.

[…]

More Savaging of Migrants. The bill adds $45 billion to build immigration jails—more than 13 times ICE’s current detention budget. The bill would allow indefinite detention of immigrant children. It also adds several fees intended to harass. The measure charges families $3,500 to reunite with a child who arrived alone at the border, and a person seeking asylum will have to pay an “application fee” of at least $1,000.

Terminating the Tax Status of Nonprofits. The reconciliation text gives the administration the power to define nonprofits as “terrorist-supporting organizations” and expedite the ending of their tax status. This is ostensibly directed against pro-Palestinian groups, but could be used to suppress the free speech and activism of climate organizations and others.

Blocking State Regulation of AI. The bill prohibits any state or subdivision from passing “any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.” It requires the repeal of any such laws already on the books. According to The Lever, the language could be stretched to block efforts by local governments to regulate private equity firms and other landlords using AI software to jack up rents.

During oral arguments in the Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti last December, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked then-Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar whether there has been a history of discrimination against transgender people. The answer seemed obvious. Anti-trans discrimination is well-documented. At least for trans people, the instinctive response to Justice Barrett’s question is, “Look around.”

But what Justice Barrett was asking specifically, is whether there is a history of de jure—meaning explicit, government sanctioned—discrimination against transgender people. “At least as far as I can think of, we don't have a history of de jure, or that I know of, we don't have a history of de jure discrimination against transgender people, right?” Justice Barrett asked.

[…]

As legal historian Kate Redburn has documented, throughout the twentieth century, local ordinances across the country threatened people who defied gender norms with prosecution and even prison sentences. Some even required people whose appearances did not match their sex assignment to wear badges visibly declaring their birth sex—a precursor to President Donald Trump’s own policy for transgender passport holders. These laws, in essence, made it a crime to be trans in public and equated trans existence with deviance in ways that legitimized decades of public and private discrimination.

Decades of criminalization harmed trans communities who were forced to the margins of society. Generations of trans elders died prematurely because of this history, which also now fuels the insidious myth that transgender people are “new.” The irony is that in order to avoid further discrimination, we must convince the Court that this discrimination occurred in the first place—and that it still occurs today. 

[…]

Let’s say the Supreme Court decides that transgender people have not suffered a sufficiently long or sufficiently clear history of discrimination to warrant heightened scrutiny. That would set a chilling precedent for when the government decides to target a small and politically unpopular group for discrimination.

We are getting dangerously close to making it a crime to exist as a transgender person in the United States. If that does not trigger scrutiny by the courts, then what will it signal to government leaders who are looking for groups of people to blame for social, political, and economic conditions?

As Justice Sotomayor noted at the Skrmetti arguments, “When you're 1% of the population, or less, [it’s] very hard to see how the democratic process is going to protect you.” That is abundantly clear right now.