The document, titled âGuidance for Visa Adjudicators on Executive Order 14201: âKeeping Men Out of Womenâs Sports,ââ is ostensibly focused on preventing transgender athletes from traveling to the U.S. However, one section appears to apply far more broadly, targeting all transgender visa applicantsânot just athletes. It mandates that âall visas must reflect an applicantâs sex at birthâ and grants officials the authority to deny visas based on âreasonable suspicionâ of a personâs transgender identity.
âBoth immigrant and nonimmigrant visa applications request that an applicant identify their sex as either male or female. Moreover, all visas must reflect an applicantâs sex at birth,â the cable reads. When verifying an applicantâs sex assigned at birth, it states that the adjudicator can ârely on documents provided by the applicant,â but that âif other evidence casts reasonable doubt on the applicantâs sex, you should refuse the case under 221(g) and request additional evidence to demonstrate sex at birth.â
The memo goes on to state that applicants âmisrepresenting their purpose of travel or sexâ could be targeted for permanent ineligibility. It states that some common scenarios that would trigger this is if the misrepresentation is âmaterial,â which it states would be the case for transgender athletes entering for an athletic competition. However, even this section does not limit it to transgender athletes - many other reasons for entry may be considered âmaterialâ for transgender entrants⊠for instance, transgender activists, immigrants fleeing oppressive regimes, and more could be swept up under this provision.
United States (US)
Marco Rubio May Have Just Banned Trans Foreigners Seeking Visas From US Entry
"A woman is like a child": MAGA quickly turns its sights on stripping Republican women of power
in SalonFor ambitious women who wanted to climb the ranks of Republican politics, anti-feminism has long been the steadiest of ladders. The propaganda value of their gender outweighed their party's larger hostility to women in leadership.
But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Donald Trump is back in the White House, many on the right feel they no longer need to hide the naked sexism fueling their movement or put up with the annoyance of women in even token leadership positions. As Kiera Butler at Mother Jones reports, the anti-abortion movement is embroiled in an escalating civil war right now over these issues. Male leaders of the Christian right have been swarming Kristan Hawkins, the 39-year-old head of a "student" anti-abortion group, demanding her ejection from the movement. It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder, an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement. But mostly it was about growing male anger on the Christian right that women are allowed leadership positions at all.
"Removed [sic] this woman from public service," declared influential Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, part of the "TheoBros" movement that includes the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's church. Soon other TheoBros jumped in, declaring "We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion," arguing that women's suffrage was a mistake, and accusing Hawkins of emasculating her husband by being "busy jet-setting."
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Webbon and the TheoBros have been clamoring more loudly in recent months about their wish to strip women, especially their own wives, of the right to vote. "You won't let women vote? Well, our society doesn't let five-year-olds vote," Webbon explained in a May podcast. He added that "a woman is like a child" and that "God has appointed men to protect them." As Sarah Stankorb at the New Republic documented, there has been growing support in Christian nationalist circles "for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and support a 'household vote' system in which men vote on behalf of their families." Hegseth's former sister-in-law reports she heard him echo similar sentiments.
The Austerity Politics of White Supremacy
in Dissent MagazineWhile 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 Redeemersâ 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 Northernersâeven those who had been strongly anti-slaveryâbegan doubting the logic of universal male suffrage as it empowered the immigrant working class in their cities. The political identity of the âtaxpayerâ 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-Payersâ Convention of South Carolina met in Columbia in May 1871 and again in February 1874 to seek, âfor the holders of property and the payers of taxes, a voice and a representation in the councils of that State.â They had a duty to speak up, the Tax-Payers argued, because the state of South Carolina was suffering from âthe fearful and unnecessary increase of the public debtâ; âwild, reckless and profligateâ spending; and âexcessive taxation.â
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Emphatic color-blindness was, to say the least, a recent development in the public rhetoric of South Carolinaâs white elite. As recently as 1868, a number of Tax-Payers had signed a petition to the U.S. Congress, entitled a âRespectful Remonstrance on Behalf of the White People of South Carolina,â that opposed black male suffrage because âthe superior race is to be made subservient to the inferior.â Porter himself had argued that black people had âtraits, intellectual and moral,â and âcredulous naturesâ that left them with an âincapacityâ to rule.
At their Tax-Payersâ Conventions, however, these same men, despite sporadic remarks on the ânegro character,â no longer officially identified themselves as advocates on behalf of the white race; they were simply representatives of the âover-burthened tax-payers.â 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. âThey who lay the taxes do not pay them, and that they who are to pay them have no voice in the laying of them,â Porter asserted, wondering if âa greater wrong or greater tyranny in republican governmentâ could be conceived.
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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 âthe taxpayerâ 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 Reaganâs welfare queen, who he claimed had a âtax-free cash incomeâ of $150,000 a year. Reaganâs story was a fictionâheâd change the numbers from speech to speechâbut 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.
Defending Trans Lives In a Deep-Red State | "Seat 31" (Oscar Shortlisted)
in The New Yorker for YouTubeYou'll need a box of tissues or three.
Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Thirty-Four â Tony Westâs Calamitous Legacy at Uber and with the Kamala Harris Campaign
in Naked CapitalismWestâs 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 âwinnerâ 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 âmisinformationâ.
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.
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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 Partyâs historic pro-working class branding has been destroyed, and the Party totally lacks the money and infrastructure needed to move forward.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
for Cambridge University PressEach of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politicsâwhich can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralismâoffers 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.
The US Govt Spread Anti-Vaxx COVID Disinformation
for YouTubeNo way this could rebound in bad waysâŠ
Muskâs DOGE Brings in HR Consultant Focused on âNon-Wokeâ DEI 'Aligned With Our Faithâ
in 404 MediaAt the Napa Instituteâs conference panel on âPractical Steps for Dealing with DEI,â Holmes sat on a panel with former Trump administration official and current Heritage Foundation fellow Roger Severino.
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Holmes said on the panel that the âmainstream kind of leftist approach to DEI presents us with a lot to push back against.â
âIt is really inconsistent with our faith and I also think that this presents us with an opportunity to not only say why weâre against this, why weâre opposed to mainstream DEI initiatives, but itâs 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,â she said.
She said she advises employers to âmove away from defining diversity exclusively focused on employeesâ race, sex, or other protected category,â and to instead focus on âbringing together employees with diverse backgrounds, viewpoints, perspectives, and beliefs to achieve common workplace goals.â She said employers need to also be âreframing the term inclusion to incorporate that in a way thatâs more aligned with our faith.â
Trump Signs Order To Deport Foreign Students Who Support Palestinian Freedom
in HuffPostPresident Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that would cancel visas and deport international students who have expressed support for Palestinians â the administrationâs latest effort to both target immigrants and crack down on free speech, particularly on college campuses.
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âTo 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,â states the order, first obtained by Reuters.
The president said that he would also cancel the visas of students he considers âHamas sympathizers,â describing college campuses as âinfested with radicalism.â
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Trumpâs executive order is pulled directly from the âProject Estherâ 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.
Louisiana Indicts New York Abortion Provider, Arrests Mother
Dr. Maggie Carpenter was indicted today on charges of âcriminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs,â a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. If Dr. Carpenterâs name sounds familiar, itâs because she was also recently targeted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
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But Louisiana district attorney Tony Clayton didnât just bring charges against Carpenterâhe also arrested and indicted the patientâs mother, who obtained the pills. Clayton claims the woman coerced her daughter into having an abortion, but as the Louisiana Illuminator points out, âcoerced abortionâ was not cited in the indictment.
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This case really does have precisely what conservatives have been looking forâand everything Iâve warned about since Roe was overturned. I started raising the alarm over anti-abortion messaging around âcoercion,â for example, in 2023. Thatâs when the Charlotte Lozier Institute started to suggest Republicans use âcoercionâ in their policies and cases because âno one is openly in favor of coerced abortions.â The tactic has only grown since.
Similarly, Republicans have been especially eager to restrict teenagersâ 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 âdeveloping reproductive systems.â
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 conservativesâ anti-abortion agenda. (Whether she actually coerced the teen or not.) We also saw this tactic in Idaho, when the state brought its first âabortion traffickingâ charges against a mother and son who had coerced the sonâs 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, weâll find that it isnât just Murrill behind this moveâbut a national anti-abortion strategy backed by extremist billionaire dollars.