Linkage

The criminalisation and repression of climate and environmental protest is problematic for at least two main reasons. First, it focuses state policy on punishing dissent against inaction on climate and environmental change instead of taking adequate action on these issues. In criminalising and repressing climate and environmental activists, states depoliticise them. Second, they represent authoritarian moves that are not consistent with the ideals of vibrant civil societies in liberal democracies.

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Governments, legislatures, courts and police forces should operate with a general presumption against criminalising climate and environmental protests. Instead, climate and environmental protest should be regarded as a reasonable response to the urgent and existential nature of the climate crisis, and activists engaged as stakeholders in a process of just transition.

A new study was released in recent days that should have been newsworthy, but it escaped the media's attention in Australia.

It showed Australian police are world leaders at arresting climate and environmental protesters.

According to the study, more than 20 per cent of all climate and environment protests in Australia involve arrests, which is more than three times the global average (6.3 per cent).

Australia's arrest rate was the highest of 14 countries in the global study.

It's higher than policing efforts in the United Kingdom (17.2 per cent), Norway (14.5 per cent), and the United States (10 per cent).

The research makes it clear that Australia's political leaders have joined the "rapid escalation" of efforts to criminalise and repress climate and environmental protest, while sovereign states globally fail to meet their international agreements and emissions targets.

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When you read the Bristol University study alongside the special rapporteur's position paper and the EDO paper, you get a pretty good sense of how the clampdown on climate and environmental activism actually works, and why it's occurring.

Collectively, the reports discuss an issue that links political donations and pressure from fossil fuel companies, governments writing new laws and harsher penalties for climate and environmental activists, federal and state policing agencies being put to work to enforce the new laws, and legal systems and courts being used to bed them down.

And hanging over the entire political problem is the question of the "pricing mechanism" and the role it plays in a society like ours.

When you look at this issue dispassionately, you'll see that we're witnessing a nasty global battle over the attempt to have the negative externalities of fossil fuels properly reflected in the market prices of the products of fossil fuel companies.

Trump sees the accreditation process as his “secret weapon” in his war on universities. In the USA, states have varying control of education, and universities have enjoyed a lot of autonomy. The practice of accreditation involves a “non-governmental, peer evaluation of educational institutions and programmes”.

However, eligibility for federal aid, grants, student loans and other funds that universities depend on is contingent on accreditation. And while the government does not control the process of accreditation itself, the Department of Education has the power to “recognise” accreditors, or withdraw this recognition.

With the new Republican Congress behind him, Trump wants to empower new accreditors with ideological standards such as “defending the American tradition and western civilisation, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, [and] removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats”.

Incoming Vice President JD Vance once proclaimed that “professors are the enemy”. This year, Vance introduced The Encampments or Endowments Bill in the US Senate which, if passed, would punish “campus disorder” by making federal funding contingent on universities removing campus protest encampments. Efforts to introduce what Pen America has called “educational gag orders” – laws, policies and bills that restrict teaching and training on certain topics such as racism, gender and American history – in colleges and universities are also “likely to disproportionately affect the free speech rights of students, educators, and trainers who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ+.” 

The MAGA-Tech alliance is rooted in a shared hierarchical worldview. This worldview concentrates power in the hands of wealthy and predominantly white men. Their job is to impose a strict social order based on their continuing supremacy.

Trump Republicans and tech authoritarians may frame their beliefs differently, but their actions reveal an alignment: maintaining hierarchy, resisting egalitarianism, and elevating profit, power, and their own desires above all else.

What the tech authoritarians describe as “gray” politics is a 21st century version of Strict Father Morality. It is a moral system that replaces God with technology and money – and with the moral supremacy of those who control both.

For the last few years, the GOP has coalesced around an idea that would short-circuit essentially all trans health care in America: banning federal funds from going to businesses that provide health care specific to changing one’s sex or gender identity, including hormones and surgeries. It would essentially signal to the private sector that if it wants federal dollars, it needs to stay away from sex- or gender-affirming care, and bow down to right-wing pundits who aim to, in their own words, “eradicate” and “erase” this form of health care. 

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Bans like these can lead to the private sector discontinuing behaviors altogether — and once they are in place, they are hard to get rid of: The Hyde Amendment, enacted in the 1970s, led to most abortions no longer being performed in hospitals, and is continually renewed each year. 

Medical groups and civil rights advocates in D.C. tell Rolling Stone they believe that if a Hyde-level ban on federal funding were enacted, many hospitals will simply prioritize federal dollars over continuing this highly specialized form of medical care. So much medicine is performed through hospital systems and universities that this could mean ending access for many.  

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“I think if they had to make the choice of, ‘Do we provide this care and potentially have to close our doors to everybody,’ they probably won’t do it,” says Asa Radix, head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. “It’s very disturbing. Legislation like this — even if it hasn’t passed — creates an environment where people are incredibly afraid. This is the type of issue where people actually feel suicidal. Are we going to see folks dying by suicide because potentially of laws like this being passed?”

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Right now many in the LGBTQ+ advocacy community, as well as some Democratic lawmakers and staff, are quietly terrified the party might let Republicans enact it anyway, should they be forced to choose between funding the government or allowing the medical system to continue to provide this care unabated. 

At a minimum, anxious Democrats and advocates believe that party leaders will capitulate on trans health care coverage in federal funding negotiations on the margins, allowing language that bans government-backed insurance plans from covering these services. 

This conflict is actually playing out before Trump has taken office or the GOP controls the Senate. Democrats just this week compromised on a military authorization bill that will ban TRICARE and other Defense Department health plans from covering care for servicemembers’ trans children.

Erin Reed, a transgender rights activist and writer, tells Rolling Stone that it’s an absurd distinction. There is no difference between a ban on “transgenderism” and an attack on transgender people, she says: “They are one and the same, and there’s no separation between them.”

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 “I called to ban transgenderism entirely … They said that I was calling for the extermination of transgender people. They said I was calling for a genocide … One, I don’t know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology,” Knowles said, ahistorically.

“Nobody is calling to exterminate anybody, because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category — it’s not a legitimate category of being,” Knowles continued. “There are people who think that they are the wrong sex, but they are mistaken. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.” 

Carl Charles, a senior attorney at the LGBTQ rights group Lambda Legal, noted that Knowles’ goals are clear, even as he muddles the meaning of his words. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if by using the inflammatory term ‘eradicate’ Mr. Knowles specifically meant trans people should be killed. What does matter is the reality of what he is saying and the impact it is having and will have at this particular moment in history,” Charles says. “He is advocating that trans people should not be free to live their lives with dignity and autonomy like Mr. Knowles presumably does —  instead, they should be relegated to non-existence: carrying on in secret and shame and living a lie for the rest of their days, which, he must realize, will mean some trans people opt not to do.” 

Slimy git.

Streeting acknowledged that the decision would not be welcomed by everyone but sought to reassure young trans people. He had met many of them since taking up his post in July, he said, and listened to their concerns, fears and anxieties.

In a message directly to them, and referencing having come out as gay, he said: “I know it’s not easy being a trans kid in our country today, the trans community is at the wrong end of all of the statistics for mental ill health, self-harm and suicide.

“I can’t pretend to know what that’s like, but I do know what it’s like to feel you have to bury a secret about yourself, to be afraid of who you are, to be bullied for it and then to experience the liberating experience of coming out.

“I know it won’t feel like it based on the decisions I’m taking today, but I really do care about this and so does this government. I am determined to improve the quality of care and access to healthcare for all trans people.”

Decisions were being taken “based on the evidence and advice of clinicians, not politics or political pressure”, he added.

The BBC has published an article by Deborah Cohen on the NHS puberty blocker trial that is due to begin in 2025. In this article, Cohen quotes a member of conversion therapy activist parent organisation Bayswater Support Group as a neutral source.

The article is heavily weighted with those opposing trans healthcare for children and young people. It quotes WPATH, yet all of the other medical opinions are from those opposing the use of hormonal treatments. The section on parent opinions includes an academic whose research involves parents of young trans people, but no quotes from supportive parents themselves.

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Bayswater Support Group are a conversion therapy parent group operating under the guise of a support group for parents of trans children. The organisation's internal forums were exposed earlier this year which uncovered evidence of parents preventing their children from accessing Childline, mental health resources and rape crisis centres for fear of those services affirming their children's gender identity. Parents in the forum openly admitted to destroying or damaging their children's belongings, such as accessories and clothing, behaviour that constitutes domestic abuse. Bayswater support group still link to a DIY conversion therapy manual on their website.

Some world-class hand-wringing going on in Washington. Take that, fascism! We are resolute in our misgivings about supporting you every step of the way!

The 2025 NDAA, which authorizes an astronomical military budget of $895 billion, contains numerous policy items including a 4.5% pay raise across the board, a more substantial 14.5% raise for junior service members, and over $600 million in military funding for Israel. It also includes multiple sections that would place new restrictions on gender-affirming medical care for military families on government TRICARE health plans, the military’s health insurance program for active duty members. Under Sections 708 and 709 of the bill, no Department of Defense funds or facilities may be used to “perform or facilitate sex change surgeries,” and TRICARE plans may not provide hormone therapy, puberty blockers, or “other medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” to anyone under 18. (Right-wing sources have increasingly pushed false and misleading claims that puberty blockers and hormones lead to sterilization.) Another section would prohibit the Department of Defense from establishing any new positions “relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or from adding those responsibilities to existing DoD positions.

On Wednesday, members of the House approved the NDAA in a 281-140 vote, CBS reported. 81 Democrats voted in favor of the budget, while 16 Republicans voted against it. The bill will now be sent to the Senate for another vote.

Normally, party leaders “whip” members into voting one way or another based on their party’s collective goals — but House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he would not whip Democratic votes for or against the NDAA on Wednesday, even though the bill contains overtly anti-trans policy (for the second year in a row). “We’re not whipping on the National Defense Authorization Act. It’s a member-to-member, case-by-case analysis in terms of people making decisions as to what is the right thing to do,” Jeffries told reporters ahead of the vote, according to The Hill. Jeffries added that the bill contains “a lot of positive things” but “some troubling provisions in a few areas, as well.” The New York representative slammed Republican extremism in a press conference on Wednesday, but also told reporters that he and his party “are ready, willing and able to find bipartisan common ground with the incoming administration on any issue.” Jeffries was among the 81 Democrats who voted in favor of the NDAA on Wednesday.

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In a series of Bluesky posts on Wednesday, Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott called the gender-affirming care ban “reprehensible” and called on Republicans to “prioritize national security and servicemembers, not culture wars,” but voted in favor of the bill that day. As The Hill reporter Brooke Migdon observed, 50 other Democrats who signed a September letter denouncing the NDAA’s anti-LGBTQ+ provisions voted to advance it this week.

Late last year, the company introduced a new framework to enforce an efficiency rate for picking of 100%. Workers who weren’t meeting the standard would be put into a coaching program. Some were directed to “stop all time wasting and non-productive behaviors”, according to warning letters seen by Guardian Australia. Failure to improve could lead to disciplinary action and even loss of employment. One worker described it as a “bullying” tactic.

Tim, who is over 60, said he was pushed to improve his rating. He got it to more than 80%, then 90%, then 100%, he said, but in his effort to work harder, faster, he was injured.

“You might get someone that’s … 20 years old and goes to the gym every day. And someone like me. I’m getting the average between him and me,” Tim said. “Obviously, I can’t keep up with him.”

“We’re going down the same path as Amazon,” said another worker, Ross*. “We’re not robots, we’re humans.”