Fascism Watch for 22 May 2023: the Not Safe to Travel States edition

[solarbird]

Christ, where to start? A lot of states have wrapped up their legislative sessions – but by no means all of them. And that means a lot of catching up to do, so this is mostly about what they’ve done at the state level this week. Don’t ignore the states. They matter. A lot.

What Republicans have launched is a genocide. I’m begging people to realise that. They don’t start with murders in the streets – though violence against trans people is incredibly common, particularly now. At this point, we’re well on our way to that, but if you wait until then, it’s well and firmly too fucking late. Remember, it was only two months ago that Republicans were calling for trans people to be “eradicated” and the fashier Republicans were calling for Jews to be included in that too.

Erin the Morning has updated her map of safe-travel states.

But there’s still some Federal-level news I’m going to cover today. Let’s get started.

First, let’s be real clear about this story: “Andrew Yang, a former Democratic presidential candidate and now the co-chair of the Forward Party, is offering guidance to… Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy”

Ramaswarmy is a far-right candidate who is in his own words trying to out-trump Trump, who he says didn’t go far enough. He wants to disenfranchise millions of voters by raising the voting age. He’s in camp ‘woke is a mind virus that must be destroyed.’ He wants to massively increase carbon dioxide output, particularly coal. He wants to ban socially-conscious investing.

This is who Andrew Yang is trying to help, with advice.

What’s that say about Yang and his “Forward Party” project?

Also, quick reminder that Republican Paul Gozar is a straight-up nazi who hires straight-up nazis. Also, MTG is a white nationalist and don’t pretend otherwise.

Rolling Stone has an article on the armed left, something which has a real and durable tradition here in Cascadia. The right uses big displays of guns to intimidate and bully even more – far more – than they’re used for more overt violence – and they don’t like it at all when leftists show up armed the same way.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, likes Ted Cruz. But he can still start an investigation to punish Bud Light for supporting a trans woman’s tiktok, and so, he is.

Since this is a federal judge’s ruling, I’m putting it at the federal news level: A federal judge ruled late Friday evening that the Harrison County [Mississippi] School District can prohibit a 17-year-old transgender girl from attending her graduation Saturday unless she dresses in attire designated for boys. Because it’s all about hurting queers and other lesser people, and don’t you forget it.

In “yeah, that happened” news, “A Moscow-based immigration lawyer claims that a settlement for conservative American and Canadian immigrants seeking to leave the West “for ideological reasons” is being built in Russia.” Come visit us, Comrade Hostage! You will be most welcome!

Now, to the states. When you read all this, keep in mind that Republican lies about trans health care being “novel” or “experimental” is bullshit. There are decades of studies. What has been standard of care was already a compromise – the best result was appropriate hormonal replacement at the normal time. But since puberty blockers are well-understood and the outcomes are still good, using them to delay puberty combined with social transition was “good enough.”

Puberty blockers were the compromise, and a second-best process. Remember that.

Alabama:

Alabama lawmakers advanced anti-pornography legislation Tuesday that would require phones and tablets to automatically block sexually explicit content or pornography until the purchaser changes the device settings. We’ve seen variations on this a few places. No word on how this is supposed to work, mind you.

California:

Buckling to pressure from out-of-state, right-wing fundamentalists, the Dodgers caved to a religious minority that is perpetuating a false narrative about LGBTQ+ people. They have been fed lies about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and have therefore contributed to the ongoing, anti-LGBTQ smear campaign happening in this country. In a year where over 400 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation are on the books—many of them targeting freedom of speech, expression, and the bodily autonomy of our community—the fight for LGBTQ+ rights is as critical as ever, and unfortunately the Dodgers chose to bow to the religious right rather than stand with our LGBTQ community.

Colorado:

This is what happens when you let MAGAts take over a school board. They want to control all education. Don’t let them.

Florida:

Florida’s new anti-trans “bathroom bill” is the worst in the nation, and renders Florida a “no-go” zone for literally anyone not fully cis/gender compliant. Most of all, it ignores your legal gender in favour of their made-up bullshit definitions, and is a felony with up to one year in jail. If you’ve transitioned legally all the way up to the Federal level, it doesn’t matter and they don’t care. They’ll arrest your ass anyway.

The new bills also radically curtail adult trans health care, radically expands “Don’t Say Gay” banning LGBT content from most schools, and bans broadly-defined “drag” with the direct intent of both prosecuting trans people and banning Pride events. Many Pride events have already been shut down, including most parades.

This is a political crackdown and Florida is a no-travel state. Pride used to be illegal; they’ve made it illegal again.

And it’s not just us queers. The NAACP have issued a travel advisory against Florida as well. And Republican Florida is also making women carry dead and dying foetuses to full term, torturing parents who desperately want children and risking the health and lives of people who are pregnant. But that’s what they want. As those sick fucks used to say: better two tragedies than one murder.

Parents of trans kids are not going away without a fight: Florida parents sue to block enforcement of state’s gender-affirming care restrictions. This is specifically in response to SB 254, which allows the state to take away children involved in custody disputes if they are or even could be getting gender-affirming care. It makes said care a felony, with up to five years in prison.

Relatedly, PEN America are suing over Republican censorship, and Disney have cancelled a nearly $1B campus in the state, citing the new Republican-controlled “climate.”

Meanwhile, DeSantis is building a state army. This isn’t the National Guard, this is a military-police hybrid force answerable to the state alone, not the Federal government. Also, the already-long-emboldened Nazi movement in Florida is putting hacking signs to call for the extermination of gay people.

Georgia:

Georgia Republicans have banned trans health care for trans minors on a variety of axes, but adds some extra poison of their own: extra language against you if you’re autistic, operating under the assertion that autistic people clearly aren’t fully human and can’t know anything about themselves.

Hawai’i:

There’s no chance of these passing – the state passed protections just last year – but keep in mind: Republicans aren’t different anywhere, not even Hawai’i, where you’ve got everything from “Don’t Say Gay” to bills against trans health care.

Kansas:

Kansas Republicans passed their fake “Women’s Bill of Rights” bill that had absolutely nothing to do with women’s rights – we’ve talked about this before, remember, bill titles are lies – but has everything to do with laws against trans people. It bars trans and intersex women (hi) from women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and a zillion other spaces, in huge numbers of circumstances. IS people like myself aren’t allowed to use any bathroom without either separate facilities or a guard standing outside as an “accommodation.” I wish I was making this up, but I’m not.

Kansas and Missouri, Isn’t It Convenient They’re Alphabetically Close:

Hospitals in [Kansas and Missouri] denied an abortion to a miscarrying patient, even though the foetus was dying and killing her. Because that’s what Republicans want. Investigators say they broke federal law.

Missouri:

Ryan Utterback, a 29-year-old parent from a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, who sought to ban several LGBTQ books from schools for depicting sexual content is now facing a felony charge of second-degree child molestation. The “sexual content” was the existence of LGBT people, naturally, so that part of this is fucking terrible headline writing. But as for the rest: of course he was. Of course he was. This is who they are.

Nebraska:

Nebraska Republicans finally broke the Cavanaugh-Hunt filibuster and passed a 12-week abortion ban and bans on trans health care for youth – including Hunt’s own child. Cavanaugh says she’s still going to burn the rest of the session to the ground and I hope she does; here’s an interview with Hunt.

Oregon:

While Oregon managed to pass protective laws for abortion and trans people before this happened, so many Republicans have walked out on the legislature to deny working quorum that most of them are no longer eligible for office. This is a legal change made last year, after Oregon Republicans switched to the “our state to rule, or no state to rule” plan and just started denying quorum. It’s literally all but three Republican Senators, and they’re banking on a legal challenge to the popular initiative to stay in office.

Atkinson Elementary School in southeast Portland cancelled a pride event because of threats from anti-LGBT activists, punctuated by actual vandalism. Libs of TikTok is, naturally, involved.

Pennsylvania:

Republicans have continued doing the only thing they know how to do – double down – and have gone full in on election deniers, and in one case, a fake Trump elector, in primary elections.

Texas, because of course fucking Texas:

Texas Republicans have, naturally, banned gender-affirming health care for trans kids. (See also.) They’re also going after medical records, probably to search out opportunities for prosecution. People are changing medical records and diagnoses based on this; this one report obviously only scratches the surface.

Determined to end affirming care for youth in Texas by any means necessary, anti-trans activists have shared leaks of confidential patient documents and misleading videos from Project Veritas targeting specific doctors and hospitals and closing treatment programs.

Republican Texas is also following Florida’s anti-LGBT example hard, as are almost all other Republican states. The Texas Observer has the story.

Houston’s only lesbian bar was denied insurance for hosting drag shows, which is exactly the kind of outcome Republicans want. Remember: none of this stops at trans people. None of it. Every charge they level at trans people now, they levelled at gay and lesbian people in the recent past, and the goal is the same: making all of us illegal again.

Since Republicans don’t share power, they’ve taken “large domains of municipal governing — from payday lending laws to regulations on rest breaks for construction workers to laws determining whether women can be discriminated against based on their hair — out of the hands of the state’s largely Democratic-run cities and shifts them to its Republican-controlled legislature.” That’s what they’ll do at the national level too; their “federalism” was always horseshit, just like their pretences of caring about “fiscal responsibility” and “deficits.”

The Republican state takeover of the Houston school system is laser-focused on standardised test scores and cultlike demeaning of teachers: Lindsey Pollock, a former Houston ISD elementary school principal of 13 years and a current professor teaching in Sarasota University’s educational leadership graduate program, who participated in the training sessions, told the Observer: “I spent two days being demeaned by a presenter who had purposeful intentions to mislead and misrepresent the reasons we were all there. … They were only looking for people who were going to be agreeable.”

Musk Twitter:

Anti-semite Elon Musk farcically lies, insisting that there’s “no proof” the multiply-Nazi-tattooed Texas mass shooter recently was not a white supremacist action. He’s faced enough heat to back off his whole George Soros/Jews Hate Humanity libel – for now – but he’ll be back to it soon enough. Right now he’s still assaulting the Republic with false election fraud claims, and the Associated Press for saying the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. I wonder if he’ll ban them from Twitter?

Meanwhile, John Carmack, go-creator of Doom, turns out to be a real shithead and Musk massager. Not only is he paying for bluecheck twitter, he’s an attending professional at an “anti-woke” SF convention. (See also.) Romeo is not in agreement about… any of this, with Carmack. If you were wondering.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Comments

[mme_n_b]

OK, yes, but I'm not sure why you're upset about the Russia thing. The more Republicans go to Russia and rot there the better. In theory, ofc. In practice this is Russian internal propaganda and we aren't likely to get rid of any :(

[solarbird]

I'm not upset about that? It's funny. I mean, as in comedy gold. Hence being in the "Yeah, that happened" category. Also have fun being hostages, if any of them were fool enough to do it.

[conuly]

This really is a sucky timeline, and thank you for continuing to keep track of all of this.