Authoritarianism / Fascism

“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” reads President Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order.

He then declared that the accomplishments of trans people, and trans women in particular, must be removed from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum because they constitute an “improper ideology.”

The order condemns a planned exhibit at the Museum that would feature trans athletes. Now, Vice President J.D. Vance, alongside members of the presidential cabinet and staff, will lead the way in a sweeping overhaul of Museum exhibits, programming and leadership by blocking funding unless the Museum promises it will “not recognize men as women in any respect.” The language is a thinly veiled directive to remove trans women from the museum entirely.

Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement that the order was nothing less than “fascism” at work.

[…]

Meanwhile, in a troubling echo of Trump’s policies on trans people, the executive order condemns the Smithsonian for framing race as a “social construct” rather than what Trump thinks it is: a “biological reality.”

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’?

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.

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.

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.

Franz Kafka, himself legally qualified, would have appreciated one paragraph in a witness statement made on behalf of the US federal government during the ongoing case on the legality of forced deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.  

The deportations concern Venezuelans allegedly associated with the Tren de Aragua (TdA) criminal gang. And in paragraph nine of this statement, Robert L Cerna—the acting field office director of enforcement and removal operations within ICE—states:

"While it is true that many of the TdA members removed under the [Alien Enemies Act] do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile."

It is an extraordinary statement, which warrants careful reading and rereading. In essence, Cerna is contending that a person would be removed if there is information against them, and if there is no information against them, that is just as bad, and that person would still be removed. 

[…]

And the overall transaction—the forcible taking of individuals from one country and sending them under an agreement with a third country to perform forced labour—is indistinguishable in its essence from slavery. That the flow of cash is from the provider of the individuals to the recipients, rather than the other way round, is an incidental detail in this ghastly arrangement. 

In the early morning hours of January 28, as dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrived in New York to round up undocumented immigrants, a shimmering Kristi Noem appeared in the Bronx. She wore a bulletproof vest and a baseball cap, but also dramatic makeup and hair coiled to show off a set of pearl earrings. “We are getting the dirtbags off these streets,” the new Homeland Security secretary said in a three-second clip she posted to social media.

[…]

Noem’s anti-immigrant politics might have been familiar to South Dakotans. But did they recognize their former governor? Noem is one of several figures—a few men, but mostly women—in President Donald Trump’s orbit to undergo striking physical transformations as the boundaries that once delineated celebrity and political power fully disintegrate. The resulting look has since sparked satirical backlash online, with critics mocking “conservative girl makeup.”

But the most jarring aesthetic in this burgeoning MAGA stagecraft is the unbridled embrace of face-altering procedures: plastic surgery, veneers, and injectables like Botox and fillers. (As one Daily Mail headline declared, “Plastic surgery was [the] star of [the] show” at the Republican National Convention in 2024.) The overall look has since been disparagingly referred to as “Mar-a-Lago face.”

[…]

The lack of discretion within the current GOP might feel strange today when many—even Kim Kardashian—appear to prize confidentiality. But for the MAGA-verse, today’s tweaks seem intended to signal membership with Trump, a man notoriously obsessed with the literal pageantry of beauty, and his broader efforts to force strict gender norms onto the electorate. The aesthetic is, like Trump’s politics, ridiculously blunt.

“I read it as a sign of physical submission to Donald Trump, a statement of fealty to him and the idea that the surface of a policy is the only thing that matters,” says Anne Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College. “In a way, these women are performing a key part of Donald Trump’s whole political persona.”

[…]

At a time when the GOP is viciously exploiting transgender Americans as a cultural scapegoat, Schreiber notes, hyper-femininity also helps reinforce the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity.” In this way, women in Republican politics show their male counterparts that they are committed to the same conservative goals, but are not threatening. “It reaffirms the femininity of women,” she adds, “even if they have power.” Here is the gender-affirming care the right can celebrate.

 A new executive order from President Donald Trump aims to expand information-sharing across federal agencies as well as between federal and state governments, but civil libertarians and other experts are warning that the main purpose is to help normalize how the Department of Government Efficiency is handling government data.

The order, issued Thursday, directs all federal agency heads to modify or rescind any regulations preventing the sharing of unclassified data and records between federal agencies.

Agency heads also must ensure that the U.S. government has “unfettered access” to comprehensive data from all state programs that receive federal funding. The order extends to all such data even when stored in third-party databases. 

[…]

 While the new EO asserts that the removal of data “silos” is designed to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse, disturbing mission creep is very possible, said Elizabeth Laird, director of equity and civic technology at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.

There are no assurances that the data won’t be used for “targeting people who the administration has separately said are a priority for them,” Laird said. “That can include immigrants, it can include people who are transgender, it can include people that speak up” against the administration.

During his first presidency, Trump issued an EO attempting to compel state government agencies to share administrative data with the federal government for purposes of immigration enforcement. At least four states shared immigration data, Laird said.

“You’re laying the foundation for this data to be weaponized in ways never seen before in the country.” 

Anti-LGBTQ+ narratives are deployed by extremist groups with contrasting ideologies, from Jihadis to right-wing extremists and QAnon to Incels (involuntary celibates). Using these different movements as case studies, this article highlights the convergence of ideologically conflicting extremist organizations around antiqueer sentiment. Given the enhanced vulnerability of LGBTQ+ populations, fueled by politically charged rhetoric, this article makes an appeal for more research to explore and analyze narratives through a scholarly lens and link queer issues to current debates in the study of terrorism and political violence. Research should focus on the experiences of queer populations within conflicts abroad and experiences of domestic extremism in the United States. Without adequate attention given to the experiences of LGBTQ+ victims, it is impossible to develop protocols for trauma-informed care for vulnerable populations.