I’m about to hit you all with like four posts

I was determined to get through the backload of links and stuff, and I’ve done it. It’s not my best work but at least it’ll be out there.

So: incoming, starting tomorrow morning.

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Fascism Watch Catch-Up: Anti-LGBT activism and disinformation

Okay, so let’s catch up a little bit. Seems all I’m doing lately to be honest, but, well, it is what it is.

First, a quick update on our internal refugee situation:

• Elle: Gender Refugees Explained

Let’s move to disinformation. The fundamentalist movement, which forms the core of the MAGA fascist movement, has trafficked in it my entire life. I’ve written many, many times about how they redefine “truth” to mean “whatever serves the cause,” most recently in the Superbowl Jesus series. Until you understand this, you can understand nothing about how their movement works.

• Scientific American: Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People
• LGBTQ Nation: Right-wingers falsely blame Sunday’s megachurch shooting on a trans woman (It’s dogma in the right that literally every notable mass shooter of the last two years is secretly trans.)
• Assigned: Matt Walsh’s 2014 Iran Study Says Most Trans People Have Personality Disorders
• Daily Beast: J.K. Rowling Insinuates Nazis Did Not Burn Trans Books

Media need to stop cooperating with it. Media are still assigning good faith to bald-faced lies, and in some cases – such as the New York Times – it’s to the point where you have to ascribe motive.

• Assigned: Pamela Paul Shows NYT Opinion’s Lack of Accountability to the Truth
• Erin in the Morning: Debunked: Misleading NYT Anti-Trans Article By Pamela Paul Relies On Pseudoscience
• Sad Brown Girl: Detransition is a Mythology
• Julia Serano on Medium: Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Youth Is Neither New nor Experimental: A Timeline and Compilation of Studies
• Interview: Jess O’Thomson on Brianna Ghey and Anti-Trans Media Bias

So much of this is fuelled by media taking repeatedly disproven bullshit in good faith over again every single time they see it. The right know they do this. They rely on it.

And the American Psychological Association can post all of these things they want:

• APA Policy Statement on Affirming Evidence-Based Inclusive Care for Transgender, Gender Diverse, and Nonbinary Individuals, Addressing Misinformation, and the Role of Psychological Practice and Science

But it won’t matter because the right don’t care about reality until and unless they’re absolutely forced to. If you’re in a position within US media to go “We have to care about what’s actually real,” you need to be bloody well at it, while there’s still time.

Everything else can be a list, I guess. Gotta clear it out!

• TWIBS: Gender Crits Come Out AGAINST Nourishing New Life
• House Democrats question Johnson’s invitation of far-right preacher known for anti-LGBTQ views
• GOP official tells transgender people to defecate on public street corners
• Lawmaker vows to protect girl until he learns she’s trans & bolts
• The burgeoning anti-trans surveillance state
• Indiana posts form to rat out teachers talking about LGBT people and/or racism
• Advocacy group sues Texas AG following order to turn over documents on trans youth
• Orlando-based Spektrum Health closing Melbourne office, cites ‘anti-trans legislation’
• Police Bodycam Shows Sheriff Hunting for ‘Obscene’ Books at Library
• Anti-trans EHRC commissioner gives talk to anti trans Guardian staff network
• GOP bill would require teachers to register as sex offenders if they support trans students
• Ghana passes bill making identifying as LGBTQ+ illegal
• Fears of witch hunts over Utah ban on trans athletes in girls’ sports (nb: this is the intent, and has been what has happened in states where these things pass. See also: UT: Cisgender Student Under Police Protection as Trans Panic Rages On)
• Oklahoma students walk out after trans student’s death to protest bullying policies
• John Lewis axes LGBTQ+ exhibition after backlash to trans-inclusive staff magazine feature
• Republicans caught in released audio discussing the “endgame” is to ban trans care “for everyone”
• Utah passes a bathroom ban
• Republican Ohio debates requiring a birth certificate to use bathrooms in schools
• Law Dork: The Seventh Circuit allowed Indiana’s law banning gender-affirming medical care for minors to go into effect for the first time Tuesday in an unusual, questionable order

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Fascism Watch Catch-Up: Fundamentalist Fascism

This is going to be something akin to a list post, if not a true list post. Sorry, I’m not fond either.

I never know in these things – should I start low key and build up, or lead with an overhand smash and fill out details? Eh, I’m not even sure I have time for that. So here’s a bunch of stories on what the fundamentalist-dominated MAGAts and their Republican Party have been up to the last few weeks.

Heritage Foundation: Make Recreational Sex Banned Again. No, really. Yes, they mean it. They always have.

North Carolina Republican nominee for governor: ‘I Absolutely Want To Go Back To The America Where Women Couldn’t Vote’

I talk a lot about how the fundamentalist doesn’t give a single fuck about objective reality and how they define truth to be whatever furthers the movement. Katie Britt’s false linkage of a sex-trafficking case to Joe Biden is a great example. (The trafficking happened in Mexico City, not in the US; it happened during the Bush II administration, not the Biden administration.) (See also: The Fundie Baby Voice.)

Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 again: “Department of Life”: Trump allies plot abortion crackdown for second term (and please tell me you don’t think it’s just them: 145 GOP Members of Congress Ask Supreme Court to Slash Access to the Abortion Pill, Republicans’ Absurdist Reproductive Policies Are Coming for Us All, Remember The Stem Cell Research Controversy?, The GOP’s Next Target? Prenatal Tests, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson rallies with anti-abortion advocates at March for Life)

The GOP Is Too Scared to Let South Dakota Vote on Abortion – Gov. Kristi Noem’s new “emergency” law is meant to kneecap a pro-choice referendum. Red state after red state, the GOP changes laws to stop the people from overturning their fundamentalist-backed abortion and birth-control bans. As you hear a lot these days, “that’s because they want to rule you, not to represent you.”

Law Dork: This week, we faced all that the Dobbs justices unleashed. I wouldn’t agree with him on “all” but he talks about some.

Here’s a rundown on the Society for American Civic Renewal, an organisation of very wealthy Dominionists whose goal for the US isn’t the American 1950s, but the South African 1950s. (see also Inside A Secret Society Of Prominent Right-Wing Christian Men Prepping For A ‘National Divorce’) See also: Donald Trump may not believe in God, but he still plans to turn America into a Christian theocracy, mostly to take and maintain power.

Project 2025 talks about how they’re going to largely end biomedical research, particularly when it comes to “leftist” science.

Anti-abortion centers raked in $1.4bn in year Roe fell, including federal money. These “pregnancy crisis centres” have always been scams and always in the hunt for Federal bucks. Now they’re getting more of it.

‘We are losing our kids to a satanic cult,’ Sen. Tommy Tuberville warns during Utah campaign stop, mostly because this refers really to a generation where more are LGBTQ than Republican and they’ll do literally anything to stop it.

I went to CPAC as an anthropologist to understand Trump’s base − they believe, more than ever, he is a savior. It’s pretty lightweight if you know much about them and their movement, but if you don’t, give it a glance.

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Fascism Watch Catch-Up: Authoritarianism Edition

What’s there to say?

Trump says some migrants are ‘not people’, and warns of ‘bloodbath’ if he loses. He means the former, he hopes for the latter. He said years ago that the way you get “real change” is when there’s riots in the streets, and he wants those riots.

Dictator Trump says he will give cops immunity to look at names and “take out” the “bad ones” (video). Remember: the oh-so-clever “trick” of being a “dictator” on “day one” means that you can make everything you do after day one “legal.” He’s promising to send red-state national guard forces into blue states to “round up” the “bad guys.” What do you think that will look like?

Trump asks for donations in ads that run next to Rumble videos that praise Hitler as a “hero”. They blame “algorithms.” Rumble is a specifically pro-Nazi video streaming platform. Fascism is what it’s for. If you’re advertising there at all, you want the Nazis on your side. (See also: Twitter, also now a fascist platform, hosting literal neo-Nazi organising workshops. This is what Twitter users fund with their continued usage of the platform. See also also: The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism)

I mean, come on. Donald Trump had dinner with a Nazi. How is advertising to Nazis a reach?

Trump – and the MAGA GOP – love dictators like Putin and Orban. That meeting with Orban should be a red-alert end-of-campaign for him, but it’s not, because it’s what his backers want. I mean, the Russian imperialists – self-described, I note – love it, and look forward to Trump the the Republican Party abandoning Ukraine and handing a US ally over to them. (See also: Putin interview with Tucker Carlson shows Kremlin outreach to Trump’s GOP, and see also Russian propaganda painting Trump as an oppressed political enemy of the state. He absolutely eats that up, as we all know.)

The Trump Effort to Infiltrate Voting Systems Was Worse Than We Knew. Because of course it was.

The GOP can’t leave MAGA — “Americans must electorally mercy-kill the Republican Party”
An ex-MAGA activist warns “no civic savior is coming” as Donald Trump’s cognitive decline becomes undeniable

This guy used to be my Federal Representative until he retired: Why an ex-congressman is living in a ‘safe house’ from Trump. And what happened in Arizona last month felt a lot like a little dress rehearsal.

Strongly agreed here: Voters don’t have a clue about how much worse Trump’s second term would be: Many voters seem fooled that Trump 47 would be a bland replay of Trump 45, not the authoritarian nightmare he actually plans. Even as he takes credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, you’re seeing uninformed/low-information voters blaming it on Joe Biden, because he was president at the time.

For the love of the gods, get your people informed. Whoever they are. Get them informed. Because We must start urgently talking about the dangers of a second Trump presidency isn’t the half of it.

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Related:

Cat Valente: Take My Life, Please: The Media’s Will They/Won’t They Love Affair with American Fascism Prepares For Its Terrible Wedding Night – Our media, mainstream and otherwise, is about to sell us all out because fascism makes them feel alive.

Newly released messages detail roots of the ‘fake electors’ scheme, and how much more extensive it was than discussed for so long.

How Republicans successfully “both sided” January 6 (They got a lot of help from the mainstream press.)

Trump’s Defense: He Intended to Steal Boxes and Boxes of Classified Documents

More Bullshit from the NYT: Ken Vogel Covers Up Rudy Giuliani and His Alleged Russian Spies

Mother Jones: It Can Happen Here – A new project tracking creeping authoritarianism

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Fascism Watch: Pot-pourri Edition

Here we go. This is clearing everything else off the deck. At least it’s sorted.

Climate first:

• MAGA Republicans Have a 920-Page Plan to Make Climate Change Worse. Here’s What It Says. You know how one of Trump’s “Day One Dictator” plan is “Drill, drill, drill?” The US is producing more oil than it has at any point in history. It’s bullshit, and about feeding their main backers, the oil industry.
• ‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show
• A new kind of climate denial has taken over on YouTube

Elon Musk’s disinformation and fascist propaganda fountain next:

• Musk’s X asks judge to penalize nonprofit researchers tracking rise of hate speech on platform, because it doesn’t work as well if people are aware of it
• Elon Musk Keeps Spreading a Very Specific Kind of Racism
• After inviting Don Lemon to host his show on X, Don Lemon does a critical interview with Elon Musk. If you see any clips of this, Elon’s absolute shock at receiving the most lightly non-softballed question is strikingly evident. He made the decision to fire Lemon right then and there.

Racism:

• How Charlie Kirk Plans to Discredit Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act – Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk is preparing to launch a campaign against MLK and the landmark civil rights law he helped enact. Will the media go along and both-sides this too? I kid, I kid, of course they fucking will, having learned nothing from this:
• Activist who led ouster of Harvard president linked to ‘scientific racism’ journal
• Texas judge rules that school can punish Black student for having long natural hair
• Jim Crow Still Lingers in Bonham, Civil Rights Lawyers Say
• Abbott Appointee Slams Brakes on American Indian/ Native Studies Course
• GOP Senator Reveals the Sick Truth About the Trump-MAGA Border Scam – It’s not just that a deal might help Biden. It’s that a compromise bill now could prevent Trump and Stephen Miller from doing a much harsher bill later.

Clarence Thomas:

• Clarence Thomas to decide if Trump has immunity for the coup attempt his own wife planned
• The case of Clarence Thomas’s new clerk taints the entire judiciary

Cartoon supervillain evil:

• The Kansas Attorney General Doesn’t Want To Replace Lead Pipes
• Still the Party of Plague: DeSantis makes baseless claim at NH town hall: “Every booster you take, you’re more likely to get COVID as a result.”
• Still the Party of Plague, Part 2: Rand Paul says Fauci should ‘go to prison’ over COVID-19 ‘dishonesty’

Disinformation:

• Fake U.S. local news network exposed as Russia-linked propaganda front: report
• The Russian Disinformation Attack and the Disappearing Rabbit Trick
• Catching Empathy, and How Bots Made You Hate Amber Heard
• AI Audio Deepfakes Are Quickly Outpacing Detection
• Trump demonstrates why ‘Artificial Intelligence’ will be so useful to him

Misc, even within misc:

• Republicans Are Planning to Totally Privatize Medicare — And Fast
• Amazon and SpaceX are quietly trying to demolish national labor law

This is what you get when Republicans have any level of power, anywhere. “Both sides” my shiny metal ass.

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