United States (US)

While the opponents of Reconstruction were painting themselves as staid and respectable fiscal conservatives, they were simultaneously engaged in a radical plan to subvert democratic elections across the South. In principle, the Redeemers’ open campaign of voter suppression, political intimidation, and violence risked further federal intervention, but the North was losing the will to defend black political freedom. In fact, wealthy Northerners—even those who had been strongly anti-slavery—began doubting the logic of universal male suffrage as it empowered the immigrant working class in their cities. The political identity of the “taxpayer” was born in this reaction to black freedom and working-class political power, and it has existed ever since to oppose the specter of a multiracial working-class alliance.

Called together by the Charleston Chamber of Commerce and the Charleston Board of Trade, the Tax-Payers’ Convention of South Carolina met in Columbia in May 1871 and again in February 1874 to seek, “for the holders of property and the payers of taxes, a voice and a representation in the councils of that State.” They had a duty to speak up, the Tax-Payers argued, because the state of South Carolina was suffering from “the fearful and unnecessary increase of the public debt”; “wild, reckless and profligate” spending; and “excessive taxation.”

[…]

Emphatic color-blindness was, to say the least, a recent development in the public rhetoric of South Carolina’s white elite. As recently as 1868, a number of Tax-Payers had signed a petition to the U.S. Congress, entitled a “Respectful Remonstrance on Behalf of the White People of South Carolina,” that opposed black male suffrage because “the superior race is to be made subservient to the inferior.” Porter himself had argued that black people had “traits, intellectual and moral,” and “credulous natures” that left them with an “incapacity” to rule.

At their Tax-Payers’ Conventions, however, these same men, despite sporadic remarks on the “negro character,” no longer officially identified themselves as advocates on behalf of the white race; they were simply representatives of the “over-burthened tax-payers.” This self-appointed role was ironic: as slaveholders, the Southern elite had done everything in their power to cripple the tax capacity of both their states and the federal government. Now, the South Carolina Tax-Payers called into question the right of black people and poor whites to govern because they believed these voters did not pay a substantial amount of taxes. “They who lay the taxes do not pay them, and that they who are to pay them have no voice in the laying of them,” Porter asserted, wondering if “a greater wrong or greater tyranny in republican government” could be conceived.

[…]

It is no coincidence that when the Jim Crow laws were finally dismantled, the reaction to the civil rights movement once again featured paeans to “the taxpayer” and a new wave of tax limitations. The rhetoric of the taxpayer is readymade to call into question the right of black and poor Americans to participate in or benefit from their government. The taxpayer was the foil to Reagan’s welfare queen, who he claimed had a “tax-free cash income” of $150,000 a year. Reagan’s story was a fiction—he’d change the numbers from speech to speech—but that hardly mattered. Talking about taxes allowed voters to put a dollar figure on their resentments, and to experience the poverty of others as persecution.

You'll need a box of tissues or three.

West’s work at Uber and the Harris campaign illustrates his dedication to the people holding this worldview. He reduced his work in both places to simple games (find returns for Uber investors; raise more cash than the Republicans) where determining the “winner” was a simple matter of counting the money.

In both cases it was critical to complete control of funding and the narratives used to describe the game. No one at Uber had any real-world business accomplishments and no one had any idea how the business model could ever produce sustainable profits, but since they controlled the $13 billion in external funding neither repeated scandals or $32 billion in losses could threaten their control. Anyone who attacked them (or pointed to the huge losses) was denigrated as a unrepentant unionist set on fighting the inevitable tide of technological progress.

Democratic Party insiders fiercely controlled funding even though they no longer had the ability to develop candidates who could win competitive elections or messages and policies with appeal outside elite/PMC circles. Worsening election results were blamed on to Russian interference and the failure of media companies to aggressively censor “misinformation”.

Uber subverted the idea that corporations served the larger economy through risky investments that produced meaningful productivity/efficiency advances whose value was demonstrated in competitive markets. It successfully convinced capital markets to ignore their total lack of competitiveness and profitability, and to only pay attention to their narratives about powerful technological innovation and Amazon-like growth potential.

California Party insiders abandoned the belief that Democrats should serve the concrete interests of a broad range of voters and needed to assemble a broad coalition of interests in order to win elections. The Harris campaign raised a billion dollars from companies and investors who were openly working to capture political processes so they could personally profit from market rigging and directly harm the many Democrats who benefitted from Biden Administration antitrust enforcement.

[…]

The Harris-West decision to ignore elite/non-elite issues and center the campaign on fundraising also helped ensure that it would be impossible for the national Democratic Party to recover from a Trump victory and establish any meaningful opposition to Trump policies. Some billionaire/corporate donors might have had some preference for a Democratic win, believing that (as with Obama) a this would neutralize opposition to pro-oligarchic policies from the left and offered more stability than a Trump victory. But the interest of the donors who contributed $1.1 billion to Harris was always purely transactional and (as events have proven) they rapidly switched their allegiance to Trump. So the national Democrats have absolutely no one that can serve as a plausible opponent to any Trump policies, the Party’s historic pro-working class branding has been destroyed, and the Party totally lacks the money and infrastructure needed to move forward.

Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

No way this could rebound in bad ways…

At the Napa Institute’s conference panel on “Practical Steps for Dealing with DEI,” Holmes sat on a panel with former Trump administration official and current Heritage Foundation fellow Roger Severino.

[…]

Holmes said on the panel that the “mainstream kind of leftist approach to DEI presents us with a lot to push back against.”

“It is really inconsistent with our faith and I also think that this presents us with an opportunity to not only say why we’re against this, why we’re opposed to mainstream DEI initiatives, but it’s important for us to be part of the conservation and to use it to say what we are for and why we have a positive vision and positive solution of DEI in a way that is consistent with our values,” she said.

She said she advises employers to “move away from defining diversity exclusively focused on employees’ race, sex, or other protected category,” and to instead focus on “bringing together employees with diverse backgrounds, viewpoints, perspectives, and beliefs to achieve common workplace goals.” She said employers need to also be “reframing the term inclusion to incorporate that in a way that’s more aligned with our faith.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that would cancel visas and deport international students who have expressed support for Palestinians — the administration’s latest effort to both target immigrants and crack down on free speech, particularly on college campuses.

[…]

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” states the order, first obtained by Reuters.

The president said that he would also cancel the visas of students he considers “Hamas sympathizers,” describing college campuses as “infested with radicalism.”

[…]

Trump’s executive order is pulled directly from the “Project Esther” report created by the Heritage Foundation, the same group that put together the massive Project 2025 playbook. The former is also a blueprint for the Trump administration, focused on using the authority of the federal government to dismantle first the Palestine solidarity movement, and subsequently other progressive social movements.

Dr. Maggie Carpenter was indicted today on charges of “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs,” a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. If Dr. Carpenter’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she was also recently targeted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

[…]

But Louisiana district attorney Tony Clayton didn’t just bring charges against Carpenter—he also arrested and indicted the patient’s mother, who obtained the pills. Clayton claims the woman coerced her daughter into having an abortion, but as the Louisiana Illuminator points out, “coerced abortion” was not cited in the indictment.

[…]

This case really does have precisely what conservatives have been looking for—and everything I’ve warned about since Roe was overturned. I started raising the alarm over anti-abortion messaging around ‘coercion,’ for example, in 2023. That’s when the Charlotte Lozier Institute started to suggest Republicans use ‘coercion’ in their policies and cases because “no one is openly in favor of coerced abortions.” The tactic has only grown since.

Similarly, Republicans have been especially eager to restrict teenagers’ access to abortion: Both Tennessee and Idaho passed laws recently that made it a crime to help a teen obtain an abortion in any way. And when three Republican AGs brought their most recent case against the FDA over mifepristone, they focused in on revoking access for teens, out of supposed fear for their “developing reproductive systems.”

Finally, Republican AGs have been on the lookout for a case with an unsympathetic defendant. A mother who coerced her daughter into an abortion is a perfect victim for conservatives’ anti-abortion agenda. (Whether she actually coerced the teen or not.) We also saw this tactic in Idaho, when the state brought its first ‘abortion trafficking’ charges against a mother and son who had coerced the son’s girlfriend into an out-of-state abortion.

In short: The Louisiana AG clearly thinks she has found a winner of a case that she can bring to the Supreme Court to target out-of-state abortion providers. And I think if we do a little bit of digging, we’ll find that it isn’t just Murrill behind this move—but a national anti-abortion strategy backed by extremist billionaire dollars. 

I have had the notable displeasure of witnessing the evolution of anti-trans bills and the relentless attacks on transgender rights over the past five years. For much of that time, Republicans, buoyed by anti-trans organizations funded by billionaires and amplified by media outlets like The New York Times, have operated under the guise that their efforts were not “anti-trans.” Instead, they claimed to be “just asking questions,” “questioning the science,” or “engaging in a debate” about transgender people—as if these debates were somehow divorced from the rampant anti-trans animus that is undeniably pervasive in those circles.

They never truly were, of course, but to gain a foothold in American politics, they maintained a façade of concern for the welfare of transgender people. This is why, when reading the original Arkansas trans care ban, you won’t find overt charges that transgender people are lesser human beings who deserve to be erased in the purpose section. Instead, you’ll encounter pseudo-scientific statements like “the risks of gender transition procedures far outweigh any benefits” and “the majority come to identify with their biological sex.” Both are demonstrably false, but carefully crafted to carry a veneer of scientific credibility—providing a shield against accusations that such bans are rooted in hatred toward transgender people.

That all changed yesterday. President Trump, in justifying his transgender military ban, leaned on a new argument for why such an action restricting the rights of transgender people was necessary: that transgender people are lesser human beings, dishonorable liars, and worse.

[…]

This marks a chilling and undeniable shift. The attacks on transgender people are no longer cloaked in the faux respectability of “evidence,” “science,” or “protecting kids.” They never truly were, but now even the pretense has been abandoned. The thin veneer provided by New York Times op-eds, SEGM’s pseudo-scientific “reviews,” and the disingenuous claims of debate is no longer required. Instead, the justification is laid bare in black and white: transgender people are “dishonorable,” “liars,” “false.” The language is stark, deliberate, and unmistakable—it dehumanizes us. This is the very rhetoric historically used to justify atrocity.

So how would anyone know whether an embryo belongs to a sex that produces eggs or sperm at conception?

Anti-abortion rhetoric defines conception as happening at fertilization. [The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading US authority on reproductive health, defines “conception” as happening when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus.] We’re not even a multicelled embryo yet at fertilization. At that moment, does an embryo have sexed chromosomes? Yes. Are they knowable with our current technology? No. In IVF, for people who do pre-implantation genetic testing, we typically wait until at least day three, if not day five, until the sex chromosomes are even measurable. And is it a point at which the embryo is even producing gametes? No. That’s still months away.

But the executive order says these definitions should be used to determine which sex marker should go on a passport or whether a prisoner should be incarcerated in a men’s or a women’s prison.

This is what’s so stupid about it, but also what’s so dangerous. What is the enforcement plan? Are we going to test people’s gonads to see what type of gametes they produce? Because if the obsession is at the level of gametes, the tests are much more invasive than a sex chromosome test.

Nor will there be an actual way to logically enforce it, because it’s an illogical order. I think what will happen is it will be basically about punishing people in the worst way possible, treating people as poorly as possible, and creating as much discord and mayhem as possible.

This is mostly going to be around one sex category: the female sex category. They will only be doing this toward anybody who might fall into the woman category or might self-report as being in the woman category. I think Trump, in whatever terrible language is available to him, is trying to control women and control people he perceives to be in the woman category. A lot of this is keeping the category of women “pure”—and also, obviously, about doing immense harm to trans people.

There’s also a very racial, white supremacist thing going on here with this “defending women.” It’s a very old idea—it appears in travelogues, early writings of Europeans, as well as in the United States when they started encountering North American Indigenous folks, and the way that they thought about enslaved peoples. There was this belief that in the “lower races,” men and women were less different, and that in the “higher races,” there were more differences between women and men. This was about saying men and women are differentiated, clear, nonoverlapping categories because that makes us a more evolved people.