#Virtual Inauguration

[rightnewshindi]

11 अप्रैल को CM सुक्खू करेंगे कोल डैम वाटर स्पोर्ट्स, ग्रीन डीसी ऑफिस और आजीविका केंद्र का वर्चुअल शुभारंभ

Himachal News: हिमाचल प्रदेश के बिलासपुर जिले के लिए 11 अप्रैल का दिन खास होने जा रहा है। मुख्यमंत्री सुखविंद्र सिंह सुक्खू ��स दिन तीन बड़ी परियोजनाओं का वर्चुअल उद्घाटन करेंगे, जो न सिर्फ जिले की शक्ल बदलेंगी, बल्कि पर्यटन, पर्यावरण और रोजगार के नए दरवाजे भी खोलेंगी। कोल डैम में वाटर स्पोर्ट्स की शुरुआत, राज्य का पहला ग्रीन डीसी ऑफिस और 4.5 करोड़ रुपये की लागत से बना शहरी आजीविका केंद्र—ये तीनों…

[benkaben]

Hey USA friends, I love you 🫂

[hotnewsflash]

Hot Flash News

Musk being investigated. Will this hurt Tesla's stock?

what do you mean elon musk did a nazi salute on live tv at the united states presidential inauguration twice and is now erasing the evidence off the internet by replacing the footage with the crowd cheering instead?

would be a shame if people reblogged this, wouldn’t it?

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

Within weeks, the nation will deploy 9,000 people to begin restoring landscapes, erecting solar panels, and taking other steps to help guide the country toward a cleaner, greener future.

The first of those workers were inducted into the American Climate Corps on Tuesday during a virtual event from the White House. Their swearing-in marks another step forward for the Biden administration’s ambitious climate agenda. The program, which President Joe Biden announced within days of taking office in 2021, is a modern version of the Climate Conservation Corps, the New Deal-era project that put 3 million men to work planting trees and building national parks.

During the ceremony, the inaugural members of the corps promised to work “on behalf of our nation and planet, its people, and all its species, for the better future we hold within our sight.” 

The American Climate Corps was among the first things Biden announced as president, but it took a while to secure funding and get started. More than 20,000 young people are expected to join during the program’s first year, according to the White House, with new openings appearing on the American Climate Corps job site in the months ahead. The pay varies depending on the location and experience required, with open positions ranging from around $11 to $28 an hour.

The administration is promoting the corps as a way for young people to jump-start green careers. In April, the White House announced a partnership with TradesFutures, a nonprofit construction company, a sign that the program might help fill the country’s shortage of skilled workers who can help electrify everything. The White House will also place members in so-called “energy communities” like former coal-mining towns to help with environmental remediation and other projects.

“Whether it’s managing forests in the Pacific Northwest, deploying clean energy across the Southwest, or promoting sustainable farming practices throughout the heartland, the president’s American Climate Corps is providing thousands of young Americans with the skills and experience to advance a more sustainable, just tomorrow,” White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi said in a press release on Tuesday.

[mariacallous]

Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights

Full text of the podcast episode below for those who don't or can't go to the NYT page or listen

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

President Trump, in his inauguration speech, was perfectly clear about what he intended to do.

Archived clip of President Trump: As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.

Starting the day of that speech, Trump began an all-out effort to roll back trans rights, using every power the federal government had and some that it may not have.

Archived clip: President Trump has signed an executive order which declares the U.S. government will no longer recognize the concept of gender identity. Archived clip: President Trump directing the Secretary of Education to create a plan to cut funding for schools that teach what he calls gender ideology. Archived clip: This afternoon, Trump makes a move to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. Archived clip: Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender kids. Archived clip: Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in federal prisons. Archived clip: Ban on transgender troops serving in the military. Archived clip: These executive orders, many of them have not actually gone into effect yet, but when I look across the country, we’re already hearing stories of impact. Archived clip: In a time when we are struggling to find people to volunteer to do this, we are begging to be allowed to continue our service, and you’re just going to wash us away. So today I’m not OK. Archived clip: It’s a complete dehumanization of transgender people. Years and years and years into who I am, and I’m supposed to out myself? It’s about privacy and dignity for me to be able to change my passport to male.

A lot of the things Trump is doing in this term have put him on the wrong side of public opinion — but not this.

In a recent poll where Trump’s approval rating was around 40 percent, 52 percent of Americans approved of how he’s handling trans issues. Another poll showed that was more than approved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Far more than approved of his handling of tariffs. And if you look more deeply into polling on trans rights, the public has swung right on virtually every policy you can poll.

Trump didn’t just win the election. He and the movement and ideology behind him had been winning the argument.

Sarah McBride is a freshman congresswoman from Delaware, where she was formerly a state senator. She’s the first openly trans member of Congress, and her view is that the trans rights movement and the left more broadly have to grapple with why their strategy failed — how they lost not only power but hearts and minds, and what needs to be done differently to protect trans people and begin winning back the public starting right now.

I was struck, talking to McBride, by how much she was offering a theory that goes far beyond trans rights. What she’s offering is a counter to the dominant political style that emerged as algorithmic social media collided with politics — a style that is more about policing and pushing those who agree with you than it is about persuading those who don’t.

Ezra Klein: Sarah McBride, welcome to the show.

Sarah McBride: Thanks for having me.

I want to begin with some polling. Pew asked the same set of questions in 2022 and 2025, and what it found was this collapse in what I would call persuasion.

They polled the popularity of protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces. That had lost eight points in those three years. Requiring health insurance companies to cover gender transition lost five points. Requiring trans people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex gained eight points.

When you hear those results, what, to you, happened there?

By every objective metric, support for trans rights is worse now than it was six or seven years ago. And that’s not isolated to just trans issues. I think if you look across issues of gender right now, you have seen a regression. Marriage equality support is actually lower now than it was a couple of years ago in a recent poll. We also see a regression around support for whether women should have the same opportunities as men compared to five, 10, 15 years ago.

Editors’ Picks

Shining a Light on the World of Tiny ProteinsI Scream, You Scream. They Don’t Scream for Ice Cream.The ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ Star Mason Thames Is Still Freaking Out

So there’s a larger regression from a gender perspective that I think is impacting this regression on trans rights. But I think it has been more acute, more significant in the trans-rights space.

Candidly, I think we’ve lost the art of persuasion. We’ve lost the art of change-making over the last couple of years. We’re not in this position because of trans people. There was a very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds — rather than some of the areas where there’s more public support. We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.

I think a lot of it can be traced to a false sense of security that the L.G.B.T.Q. movement and the progressive movement writ large began to feel in the postmarriage world. There was a sense of cultural momentum that was this unending, cresting wave. There is this sense of a cultural victory that lulled us into a false sense of security and in many ways shut down needed conversations.

The support that we saw for trans rights in 2016, 2017 — it was a mirage of support in some ways. Because I think, in the postmarriage world, there was a transfer of support from the L.G.B. to the T. for two reasons.

One, I think people said: Well, the T. is part of the acronym. I support gay people, so I’ll support trans people — it’s all the same movement. Two, I think in those early days after marriage, a lot of people regretted having been wrong on marriage in the 1990s and 2000s. And they said: I didn’t understand what it meant to be gay, and therefore I didn’t support marriage, and I regret not supporting something because I didn’t understand it. So I’m going to, without understanding, support trans rights because I don’t want to make that same mistake again.

I think that resulted in a lot of us — a lot of our movement — stopping the conversation and ceasing doing the hard work of opening hearts and changing minds and telling stories that over 20 years had shifted and deepened understanding on gay identities that allowed for marriage equality to be built on solid ground.

And I think that allowed for the misinformation, the disinformation — that well-coordinated, well-funded campaign — to really take advantage of that lack of understanding. And the support for trans rights was a house built on sand.

I want to connect two things you said there, because I hadn’t thought about this exactly before. You made this point that there’s been a generalized gender regression — which is true. And you also made this point that people had this metaphor in their minds: I was wrong about gay marriage, I didn’t understand that experience, so maybe I’m wrong here, too.

But the one thing that’s maybe different here is there’s a set of narrow policies, like nondiscrimination, and then a broader cultural effort — everybody should put their pronouns in their bio or say them before they begin speaking at a meeting — that was more about destabilizing the gender binary.

And there people had a much stronger view. Like: I do know what it means. I’ve been a man all my life. I’ve been a woman all my life. How dare you tell me how I have to talk about myself or refer to myself!

And that made the metaphor break. Because if the gay marriage fight was about what other people do, there was a dimension to this that was about what you do and how you should see yourself or your kids or your society.

I think that’s an accurate reflection of the overplaying of the hand in some ways — that we as a coalition went to Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage.

I also think there were requests that people perceived as a cultural aggression, which then allowed the right to say: We’re punishing trans people because of their actions. Rather than: We’re going after innocent bystanders.

And I think some of the cultural mores and norms that started to develop around inclusion of trans people were probably premature for a lot of people. We became absolutist — not just on trans rights but across the progressive movement — and we forgot that in a democracy we have to grapple with where the public authentically is and actually engage with it. Part of this is fostered by social media.

We decided that we now have to say and fight for and push for every single perfect policy and cultural norm right now, regardless of whether the public is ready. And I think it misunderstands the role that politicians and, frankly, social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion, of walking people to a place.

We should be ahead of public opinion, but we have to be within arm’s reach. If we get too far out ahead, we lose our grip on public opinion, and we can no longer bring it with us. And I think a lot of the conversations around sports and also some of the cultural changes that we saw in expected workplace behavior, etc. was the byproduct of maybe just getting too far out ahead and not actually engaging in the art of social change-making.

The position for more maximalist demands is that you need to be in a hurry — trans people are dying now, suffering now — and that there isn’t time for decades of political organizing here. And also that maybe it works, or there’s a reason to believe it works.

You’ve been in more of those spaces than me. How would you describe how the more maximalist approach and culture evolved and why?

Well, first off, I think you’re right. It is understandable. This is a scary moment. I’m scared. As a trans person, I’m scared.

I recognize that when the house is on fire, when there are attacks that are dangerous, very dangerous, it can feel like we need to scream and we need to sound the alarm and we need everyone to be doing exactly that. I get that instinct. I understand that people would say: If you give a little bit here, they’ll take a mile.

We’re not negotiating with the other side, though. In this moment, we have to negotiate with public opinion. And we shouldn’t treat the public like they’re Republican politicians.

When you recognize that distinction, I think it allows for a pragmatic approach that has, in my mind, the best possible chance of shifting public opinion as quickly as possible. It would be one thing if screaming about how dangerous this is right now had the effect of stopping these attacks, but it won’t.

You call it an abandonment of persuasion that became true across a variety of issues for progressives. Also for people on the right. And sometimes I wonder how much that reflected the movement of politics to these very unusually designed platforms of speech, where what you do really is not talk to people you disagree with but talk about people you disagree with to people you do agree with — and then see whether or not they agree with what you said. There’s a way in which I think that breeds very different habits in people who do it.

I think that’s absolutely right. Again, we’re not in this place because of our community or our movement. Or because we weren’t shaming people enough, weren’t canceling people enough, weren’t yelling at people enough, weren’t denouncing anti-trans positions enough.

I think the dynamic with social media is that the most outrageous, the most extreme, the most condemnatory content is what gets amplified the most. It’s what gets liked and retweeted the most, and people mistake getting likes and retweets as a sign of effectiveness. Those are two fundamentally different things. And I think that, whether it’s subconscious or even conscious, the rewarding of unproductive conversations has completely undermined the capacity for us as individuals — or politically — to have conversations that persuade, that open people’s hearts and minds, that meet them where they are.

And I think the other dynamic that we have with social media is that there are two kinds of people on social media. The vast majority of people are doomscrollers: They just go on, and they scroll their social media. Twenty percent, maybe, are doomposters: 10 percent on the far right, 10 percent on the far left — the people who are so, so strident and angry that they’re compelled to post, and that content gets elevated. But what that has resulted in for the 80 percent who are just doomscrollers is this false perception of reality.

Take a person, let’s say they’re center left — it gives them a false perception that everyone on the left believes this, and it pulls them that way. And then it gives them a false perception that everyone on the right believes the most extreme version of the right.

It creates this false binary, extreme perception, availability bias. Because all of the content we’re seeing is reflective of just the 20 percent, and it has warped our perception of reality, of who people are and where the public is.

One of the best things about being an elected official is that I have to break out of that social media echo chamber — that social media extreme world — and interact with everyday people. And yes, there are real disagreements, but 80 percent of the doomscrollers or the people who aren’t even on social media are actually in a place where we can have a conversation with them.

When I ask this question, I don’t just mean on trans issues, but: You represent Delaware, which is a blue state — not Massachusetts blue — but blue. If you took your sense of what Democrats want or what the country wants from your experiences in social media versus your sense from traveling around your state, how would they differ?

I think they would differ in two ways. One, they would differ in the issues that we would focus on. What you hear on social media is a preoccupation with the most inflamed cultural war issues that you almost never hear when you’re out talking to voters in any part of the state. What you hear is an understandable catastrophizing around democracy, which you don’t hear nearly as much when you’re out talking to voters.

What you hear about when you’re talking to voters is the cost of living. You hear about the bread and butter issues that are keeping people up at night — people who aren’t on social media or aren’t posting on social media. And so you hear a difference in priorities, but then you also hear a difference in approach.

People are hungry for an approach that doesn’t treat our fellow citizens as enemies but rather treats our fellow citizens as neighbors, even if we disagree with them — an approach that’s filled with grace.

On social media we have come to this conclusion, rightfully so, that people’s grace has been abused in our society. That the grace and patience of marginalized people have been abused. And that is true.

But on social media, the course correction to that has been to eliminate all grace from our politics. It’s: How dare you have conversations with people who disagree with you? How dare you be willing to work with people who disagree with you? How dare you compromise? How dare you seek to find common ground with Republicans?

And when you go out into the real world — Democrats, independents and Republicans — there is a hunger for some level of grace for us to just not be so angry at one another and miserable. They want to see and know that we actually do have more in common. And therefore it gives you hope that persuasion is not only necessary but can actually still be effective.

What does grace in politics mean to you, and when have you either seen it or experienced it?

I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good intentions, assuming that the people who are on the other side of an issue from you aren’t automatically hateful, horrible people. I think it means creating some space for disagreement within your own coalition. I think it’s a kindness that just feels so missing from our body politic and our national dialogue.

I saw it in the Delaware State Senate on both sides of the aisle, whether it’s Republicans in Delaware joining on to be cosponsors on an L.G.B.T.Q. panic defense bill that I was the prime sponsor of. Whether it was the discourse being much kinder and more civil on a whole host of culture war issues — I saw that grace has the effect of lowering the temperature, removing some of the incentives to go after vulnerable people in this country, in our state.

I saw it with my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle, who didn’t vote for bills that were deeply personal to me, and yet we still found ways to work together. We still found ways to develop friendships.

And look, I know that places more of a burden on me than it does on them. I know that when you’re asking a marginalized person to extend grace in a conversation, you’re asking much more of that marginalized person. But change-making isn’t always easy, and it’s not always fair.

And why would we expect that the extra burdens and barriers of marginalization would cease at the point of overcoming the marginalization, of creating the change necessary to eliminate prejudice and create equal opportunity in our society?

No — that’s where the barriers are going to be greatest. That’s where the burdens are going to be greatest.

It reminds me of a line that I hear less now, but I used to see it a lot, which is: It’s not my job to educate you.

I always thought about that line because on one level, I understood it. It’s probably not your job to educate anyone.

But if you’re in politics, if what you’re trying to do is political change, I always found that line to be almost antipolitical.

Yes.

That if what you want to do is change a law, change a society, change a heart, and you’re the one who wants to do it — well then, whose job is it? And who are you expecting to do it?

It’s an understandable frustration, but it’s the only way forward.

I don’t believe that every person from an underrepresented or an unrepresented community needs to always bear the brunt and burden of public education. I don’t believe that every L.G.B.T.Q. person has to be out and sharing their story and doing all of that hard work. But for the folks who are willing to do it, we need to let them.

One of the problems we’ve had is that we’ve gone from: It’s not my job as an individual person who’s just trying to make it through the day to educate everyone — to: No one from that community should educate, and frankly, we should just stop having this conversation because the fact that we are having this conversation at all is hurtful and oppressive.

Maybe it is hurtful, but you can’t foster social change if you don’t have a conversation. You can’t change people if you exclude them. And I will just say, you can’t have absolutism on the left or the right without authoritarianism.

The fact that we have real disagreements, the fact that we have difficult conversations, the fact that we have painful conversations is not a bug of democracy. It’s a feature of democracy. And yes, that is hard and difficult — but again, how can we expect that the process of overcoming marginalization is going to be fair?

The discourse has taken this understandable critique of society and the way we operate and the burdens we place on marginalized people, and we’ve somehow said: Well, the one place that we have control over whether we allow for that marginalization is in the strategies we use to overcome it. So we’re not going to engage in that because it’s self-oppression.

And I think that is such a self-defeating and counterproductive approach.

We are in the most illiberal era of my lifetime in American politics. And I don’t mean liberalism in the sense of supporting or not supporting universal health care but in terms of due process, in terms of tolerance, in terms of the basic practice of politics and living amid each other.

It has also made me think about the need to clearly define what the practice of illiberalism itself is. What do you think it is?

I think it is the recognition that in a free society, we are going to live and think differently. It is the allowance of that disagreement in the public square and the tussle of that disagreement in the public square.

And that is uncomfortable. That is not easy. And yes, there are going to be people in that conversation for whom it’s going to be more difficult and more uncomfortable. But in the internet world, you can’t suppress diversity of thought. It will always bubble up. But it will bubble up, if suppressed, with an extra bitterness and an extremism fostered in that echo chamber that it’s been suppressed to. It will inevitably bubble up like a volcano. I think that’s what we’re seeing right now.

I will say, while the left made this mistake of fostering an illiberalism based on a false sense of cultural victory, the right is now making the exact same mistake. I think they’re overplaying their hand.

They’re interpreting the 2024 election to be a cultural mandate that is much greater than what it actually is. And if they continue to do that, there will be a backlash to the illiberalism — the cultural illiberalism, not just the legal illiberalism — of the right, in the same way that there’s been a backlash to the cultural illiberalism of the left.

I couldn’t agree with that more. We’re going to get to that.

I want to talk for a minute about the 2024 election and the aftermath. There’s been a lot of rethinking and self-recrimination among Democrats.

One of the comments that got a lot of attention came right after the election when your colleague Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, said: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

What did you think when you heard that?

One, that it wasn’t the language that I would use.

But I think it came from a larger belief that the Democratic Party needed to start to have an open conversation about our illiberalism. That we needed to recognize that we were talking to ourselves. We were fighting fights that felt viscerally comforting to our own base, or fighting fights in a way that felt viscerally comforting to our own base, rather than maintaining proximity to the public and being normal people. [Chuckle.]

The sports conversation is a good one because there is a big difference between banning trans young people from extracurricular programs consistent with their gender identity and recognizing that there’s room for nuance in this conversation. The notion that we created this “all-on” or “all-off” mentality, that you had to be perfect on trans rights across the board, use exactly the right language, and unless you do that, you are a bigot, you’re an enemy. When you create a binary all-on or all-off option for people, you’re going to have a lot of imperfect allies who are going to inevitably choose the all-off option.

What ends up happening is the left excommunicates someone who not only — Seth voted against the ban on trans athletes, but we would excommunicate someone who uses imperfect language — yes, again, not language I would use. But we would excommunicate someone who’s saying that there’s nuance in this conversation and use this language that we don’t approve of — yet still votes “the right way”? That’s exactly what’s wrong with our approach.

And look, Seth is not going anywhere, but for a lot of everyday folks, if they think how Seth thinks or if they think that there’s room for nuance in this conversation and we tell them: You’re a bigot, you’re not welcome here, you’re not part of our coalition, we will not consider you an ally? The right has done a very good job of saying: Listen, you have violated the illiberalism of the left, you have been cast aside for your common sense — welcome into our club.

And then once you get welcomed into that club, human nature is: Well, I was with the Democratic Party on 90 percent of things, maybe against them on 10 percent of things or sort of in the middle on 10 percent. Once you get welcomed into that other club, human psychology is that you start to adopt those positions. And instead of being with us on 90 percent of things and against us on 10 percent of things, that person, now welcomed into the far-right club, starts to be against us on 90 percent of things and with us on only 10 percent of things.

That dynamic is part of the regression that we have seen. Not only that, but the hardening of the opposition that we’ve seen on trans issues.

We have been an exclusionary tent that is shedding imperfect allies, which is great. We’re going to have a really, really miserable self-righteous, morally pure club in the gulag we’ve all been sent off to.

[Laughs.]

I think this goes to your point in a way. After Moulton made those comments, The Times reported that a local party official and an ally had compared him to a Nazi cooperator, that there were protests outside his office.

I was always struck by which part of his comments got all that attention. It was the part I just read to you, but he also said this: “Having reasonable restrictions for safety and competitive fairness in sports seems like, well, it’s very empirically a majority opinion.” He’s right on that. “But should we take civil rights away from trans people, so they can just get fired for being who they are? No.” He was expressing opposition to what was about to be Donald Trump’s agenda.

Yes.

And this space of his divergence, from an issue that had already been lost — the polling was terrible on it — that was where people on the left focused. And his expression of support and allyship, as I saw it, barely ever got reported or commented on. It struck me as telling.

I think it absolutely is telling. The best thing for trans people in this moment is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we have to grapple with the world as it is, that we have to grapple with where public opinion is right now, and that we need all of the allies that we can get.

Again, Seth voted against the bans. If we are going to defend some of the basic fundamental rights of trans people, we are going to need those individuals in our coalition. If you have to be perfect on every trans rights issue for us to say you can be an ally and part of our coalition, then we are going to have a cap of about 30 percent on our coalition. If we are going to have 50 percent plus one — or frankly, more, necessarily 60 percent or more — in support of nondiscrimination protections for trans people, in support of our ability to get the health care that we need, then by definition, it will have to include a portion of the 70 percent who oppose trans people’s participation in sports.

Right now, the message from so many is: You’re not welcome, and your support for 90 percent of these policies is irrelevant. The fact that you diverge on one thing makes you evil.

It also misunderstands the history of civil rights in this country. “You can’t compromise on civil rights” is a great tweet. But tell me: Which civil rights act delivered all progress and all civil rights for people of color in this country? The Civil Rights Act of 1957? The Civil Rights Act of 1960? The Civil Rights Act of 1964? The Voting Rights Act of 1965? The Civil Rights Act of 1968? Or any of the civil rights acts that have been passed since the 1960s?

That movement was disciplined, it was strategic, it picked its battles, it picked its fights, and it compromised to move the ball forward. And right now, that compromise would be deemed unprincipled, weak, and throwing everyone under the bus.

And that is so counterproductive. It is so harmful, and it completely betrays the lessons of every single social movement and civil rights movement in our country’s history.

We have an example of a very successful social movement in recent history with marriage equality. Where would we have been in 2007 and 2008 if not only we had not tolerated the fact that Barack Obama was ostensibly not for marriage equality then, but if we had said to voters: Even if you vote against the marriage ban, but aren’t quite comfortable with marriage yet, then you’re a bigot and you don’t belong in our coalition — where would that movement have been?

The most effective messengers were the people who had evolved themselves. We had grace personified in that movement, and it worked beyond even the advocate’s wildest expectations in terms of the speed of both legal progress and cultural progress. Because we created incentives for people to grow, we created space for people to grow, and we allowed people into our tent, into that conversation who weren’t already with us.

You mentioned the period in 2008 when Barack Obama was running for president, and at the very least his public position — many of us suspected it was not his private position — was that he opposed gay marriage. That was the mainstream position at that point in the Democratic Party, and there was a compromise position they all supported, which was civil unions.

Is there an analogy to the civil unions debate for you now?

In the sports conversation, it’s local control. It’s allowing for individual athletic associations to make those individual determinations, and in some cases they’ll have policies that strike a right balance. In some cases, they’ll have policies that are too restrictive. And I think that is the equivalent to the civil union’s position in that debate.

By allowing for democratic voters, independent voters — even some elected officials — to take that civil unions position, one that met voters where they were, it gave some of our politicians who needed it an offramp so that they didn’t have to choose between being all-on or all-off. And it allowed that conversation to continue and prevented more harm from being inflicted.

I want to pick up on the polling. There’s this YouGov polling from January that looked at all these different issues. There are a lot of issues around trans rights that actually poll great. Protection for trans people against hate crimes: plus 36 net approval. Banning employers from firing trans people because of their identity: plus 33. Allowing transgender people to serve in the military, which Donald Trump is trying to rescind: plus 22. Requiring all new public buildings to include gender-neutral bathrooms: This surprised me — plus seven.

Then there’s the other side. Everybody knows that the sports issue is tough in the polling, but banning people under 18 from attending drag shows — that’s popular. Banning youth from accessing puberty blockers and hormones — that’s very popular. Banning public schools from teaching lessons on transgender issues — that’s popular. Requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex — that is popular.

When you look at these lists of issues, what do you see as dividing them? What cuts the issues that you could win on now from those that have heavy disapproval?

Well, I think that there’s very clearly a distinction that the public makes between young people and adults. There is a distinction that is made in many cases when it comes to what people feel like is government support of or funding of — versus just allowing trans people to live their lives, allowing trans troops who are qualified to continue to serve, allowing trans people who are doing great jobs in their workplace to continue to work.

It all goes back to this notion of: Get government out, let people live their lives, and let families and individuals make the best decisions for themselves. That should be the through line of our perspective, a libertarian approach to allowing trans people to live fully and freely. There are some complicated questions, but those questions shouldn’t be answered by politicians who are trying to exploit those issues for political gain.

I was struck by your use of the word “libertarian” there. Because when I look at this polling, what I see is something quite similar, which is: Americans, by and large, aren’t cruel. Their view here is pretty “Live and let live.”

Yes.

They have different views, which we can talk about in a minute, on minors. But where the question is whether the government coming in and bothering you — “you” being any trans person — they don’t really want that.

What they don’t want to do is change their lives, or think something is changing for them in their society. Maybe those two things are not in all ways possible, certainly over the long term, but there are a lot of places where they are possible.

It seems to me that in 2024 and over the last couple years, what Republicans did very well — their approach to persuasion — was to pick the right wedge issues.

You would think that the entire debate over trans policy in America was about N.C.A.A. swimmers. Like this was the biggest problem facing trans people, the biggest problem in some ways facing the country. When it’s a pretty edge-case issue, and questions like nondiscrimination and access to health care are much more widespread.

What they did was they used their wedge issue, and they’re now attacking those majority positions. Trump is attacking discrimination — he wants people discriminated against. He doesn’t want trans people to be able to put the identity they hold and present as on their passports. Which is not a huge winning issue for him.

So there’s this question of picking the right wedge issues. Is there a wedge issue for you that you wish Democrats would pick?

Listen, I think that we do much better when we keep the main thing. Defending Medicaid in this moment is the main thing.

For everybody.

For everyone, for everyone. And look, I think abortion to some degree had been a wedge issue that was to the Democrats’ advantage, not to the Republicans’ advantage.

But I think we have to reorient the public’s perception of what our priorities are as a party. When we lean into the culture wars and lean into culture war wedge issues, even if they benefit us, they reinforce a perception that the Democratic Party is unconcerned with the economic needs of the American people.

When you ask a voter: What are the top five priorities of the Democratic Party, what are the top five priorities of the Republican Party, and what are the top five priorities for them as a voter? Three out of the five issues that are the top issues for that voter appear in what their perception of the top five issues for the Republican Party is. Only one of their top five priorities appears in their perception of the top five priorities for the Democrats. That’s health care — and it was fifth out of five. The top two were abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. issues.

And I don’t care what your position is on those two issues, you are not going to win an election if voters think that those two issues are your top issues, rather than their ability to get a good wage and good benefits, get a house and live the American dream.

We have to, in this moment, reinforce our actual priority as a party — which is making sure that everyone can pursue the American dream, which has become increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible; that everyone should be able to get the health care they need; be able to buy a home; be able to send their child to child care without breaking the bank, if they can even get a spot. That needs to be our focus.

When we have this purity politics approach to L.G.B.T.Q. issues or abortion, what we communicate, even if we’re not talking about those issues, is those are threshold issues, and therefore the voter reads that as those are priority issues. The only way to convince the voter that those are not our priority issues, that that’s not what we’re spending our capital and time on — but rather on giving them health care and housing — is to make it abundantly clear to people that our tent can include diversity of thought on those issues.

Something that I notice in the broad coalition of groups and people and funders who identify as or support Democrats is that they all want the issue they care most about to be the issue that gets talked about the most. People who fund anything from climate to trans rights, to any of the hotter issues in American life — you could actually imagine a strategy where those groups and that money went to making every election about Medicaid, because Medicaid is just a killer issue for Democrats. And then the people who get elected are better on those other issues, too. But it doesn’t. That money, those groups that are organizing, what they often want Democrats to do is publicly take unpopular positions on their issues.

I think all the time about the A.C.L.U. questionnaire that asked candidates, and in this case Kamala Harris, whether she would support the government paying for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants in prison. Even if your whole position in life is to make that possible, the last thing you’d want is for anybody to claim it out in public. You would want nobody to ever think about that question ever at all.

And it’s something I’ve heard Democrats talking about more after the election — just rethinking on some level, this question of: Is the point of all this organizing to get politicians to commit to the most maximalist version of your issue set? Or is the point of this organizing to somehow figure out how to win Senate seats in Missouri and Kansas? So you have very moderate Democrats who nevertheless make Chuck Schumer the Senate majority leader rather than John Thune.

I think that there is an incentive from money and from social media — and those also go hand in hand sometimes with grass-roots donations — that incentivize the groups to want to show their influence and their effect by having politicians fight the fights that they want them to fight in ways that feel viscerally comforting to their own community that they’re representing.

I get that. I understand that. One, we have to be better as elected officials in saying no, in saying: Public opinion is everything. And if you want us to change, you need to help foster the change in public opinion before you’re asking these elected officials to betray the fact that they are, at the end of the day, representatives who have to represent in some form or fashion the views of the people that they represent.

At some point, you will represent the people’s positions — or they will find someone else who will. So it is just an unsustainable dynamic for the groups to continue to ask elected officials to take these maximalist positions, to ignore where their voters are. They have to do the hard work of persuasion.

There’s always going to be a tension between the groups and elected officials. Everyone has to do their own job, but there has to be some degree of understanding.

I always think this is such an interesting question for politicians to work with because there is the internal and the external push to authenticity.

Yes.

We don’t want these poll-tested politicians. And it’s also your job to represent.

Yes.

On issues personal to you, on issues not as personal to you, how do you think about balancing “They elected you” versus “You are their servant”?

Look, all of these decisions inevitably require a balancing of my own views, my own principles and the views of the people that I represent. But I think one thing you always have to do is you have to go: OK, here’s an issue that I feel very strongly about. If I vote against this, what are the second, third and fourth order consequences of voting against or voting in favor?

You might abstractly agree with something as an ideal, but if you were to pursue that or implement that policy, it would have, in the medium- to long-term, a regressive effect because there’s a backlash to pushing too hard or taking too maximalist of a position by the mainstream in our politics.

One of the problems we’ve had is that we have said: Not only do you have to vote the way we want you to vote, but you have to speak the way we want you to speak.

And I always have said, even when I was an advocate: If we can get the policy vote that we want and the compromise we are accepting is essentially a rhetorical compromise, that is a pretty darn good deal.

Again, we have to be willing to have these conversations out in the open. We have to recognize that there’s complexity, there’s nuance — and that means not just in the policy space but in the political space. That it’s authentic, to say: These are some really difficult conversations, and sometimes I’m going to get it right and sometimes I’m going to get it wrong, and sometimes I’m voting exclusively with what I think is the right thing to do, even if my voters disagree. But also, sometimes I’m going to have to take a balanced view of this. And that’s democracy.

I want to pick up on speech. It’s true on trans and gender issues — it’s also true on a bunch of other issues in the past couple of years — that a huge number of the fights that ended up defining the issue were not about legislation. They were about speech.

I’ve always myself thought this reflects social media, but the number of people who have talked to me about the term “birthing persons,” which I think virtually nobody has used, or “Latinx” was a big one like this — there is in general this extreme weighting of: Can you push changes of speech onto the people who agree with you and possibly onto society as a whole?

And the strategy worked backward from the speech outcome, not the legislative outcome. How do you think about that weighting of speech versus votes?

There is no question in my mind that the vote is much more important than the rhetoric that they use. We have discoursed our way into: If you talk about this issue in a way that’s suboptimal from my perspective, you’re actually laying the foundation for oppression and persecution.

Maybe academically that’s true, but welcome to the real world. We are prioritizing the wrong thing, and it’s an element of virtue signaling — like: I’m showing that I am the most radical, I’m the most progressive on this issue because I’m going to take this person who does everything right substantively and crucify this person for not being perfect in language.

It’s a way of demonstrating that you’re in the in-group, that you understand the language, that you understand the mores and the values of that group, and it’s a way of building capital and credibility with that in-group. I think that’s what it is.

It’s inherently exclusionary. And that’s part of the thing that’s wrong with our politics right now. All of our politics feel so exclusionary. The coalition that wins the argument about who is most welcoming will be the coalition that wins our politics.

I think that’s such an interesting point, and I think probably true.

I’d also be curious to hear your thoughts on this: I think there’s a very interesting way that speech and its political power confuse people because it’s two things at once. It’s extremely low cost and extremely high cost.

Pronouns, for instance, are a very easy thing. And basically, if you won’t use somebody’s preferred pronouns, I think you’re an [expletive]. That’s my personal view of it. But trying to execute a speech change where everybody lists their pronouns in their bio, where every meeting begins with people going around the circle and saying their name and their pronouns — that feels very different to people.

It seems small. You don’t have to pay anything out of pocket, you don’t have to go anywhere — and yet the language we use is very, very important to us.

Yes, I think you’re absolutely right there. And I think the thing with pronouns, too, is a prime example of where we’ve lost grace, though.

Me calling people [expletive] is not graceful? [Laughs.]

Well, no, no. I think there is a difference between someone who’s intentionally misgendering someone and people who make mistakes.

Yes, totally.

And I think that there has been, whether warranted or not, the perception that people are going to be shamed if they make mistakes.

But then I think you’re absolutely right, too, that there is a distinction between treating me the way I want to be treated, and everyone changing their behavior and requiring this sort of in-group language that exceeds just calling the person in front of you what they want to be called.

And I think it gets to something we were talking about earlier. There are two pieces to the politics of this. One is fairly popular, at least for now, and the other is a much tougher lift.

I think most people have that basic sense of politeness. If you want to be referred to in a certain way, yes, I might slip up. But if I’m being a decent person, I’m going to try.

Yes.

Versus the move from pronouns to the move for calling things cisgender — that was a much bigger effort that in some ways wasn’t described as such.

And I feel like there’s been a dimension to the politics here where things that were very academic arguments became political arguments, and then people were a little bit unclear on what the political win would be.

To destabilize the fundamental gender binary that people understand as operating is touching something very deep in society. Versus treating other people with respect and courtesy and decency and grace is a much easier sell. And I think it’s OK to want to do the former, but I think people kept mixing up which their actual project was.

At the end of the day, the thing that we lost is that we’re just talking about people trying to live their lives, trying to live the best lives they can.

We got into this rabbit hole of academic intellectual discourse that doesn’t actually matter in people’s lives. We got into this performative fighting to show our bona fides to our own in-group, and we lost the fundamental truth that all of those things are only even possible once you’ve done the basic legwork of allowing people to see trans people as people.

When you allow trans people to be seen as human beings who have the same hopes and dreams and fears as everyone else, once that basic conception of humanity exists, then all the other things, all the other conversations sort of fall into place. Language inevitably changes across society, across cultures, across time, but it is a byproduct of cultural change.

And I just think we started to have what maybe were conversations that were happening in academic institutions, or conversations that were happening in the community, and we started having those out in public on social media. And then we demanded that everyone else have that conversation with us and incorporate what the dominant position is in that conversation in the way they live their lives.

And that’s just not how this happens. Let’s just talk about human beings who want you to live by the golden rule. Let’s just talk about the fact that trans people are people who can be service members and doctors and lawyers and educators and elected officials, and do a damn good job at that.

That is the gateway to everything else, and it has always been in every social movement.

The place where not just the politics but also the answers are complicated is around children.

We talked about the N.C.A.A. swimmers and the edge-case nature of that. But schools are broader. And a lot of what the Trump administration is doing, a lot of what you see Republicans are doing in states, is around schools and minors. And that’s tougher.

Parents want to know what their kids are doing. On the one hand, if you’re a kid with gender dysphoria, taking puberty blockers early matters. On the other hand, there are a lot of things parents don’t let their kids do young because they’re not sure what they’re going to want in a couple years.

How do you think about that set of issues? The leave-them-alone approach makes a lot of sense for adults. But we don’t leave kids alone. Kids exist in a paternalistic system where their parents and schools have power over them. So the question of policy there becomes very profound.

Yes. First off, I think in that instance we rightfully acknowledge the important role that parents play in decisions for their children.

Look, you can recognize that there’s nuance here. You can say that there needs to be stronger standards of care, that maybe things got too lenient.

But ultimately politicians aren’t the people who should be making these decisions. The family should be making these decisions. The family, in consultation with a doctor, should be making these decisions.

And I think that is a fair balance in recognizing the need for every child to get medical care and also the right of parents to make decisions, including health care decisions for their children.

But in some European countries right now, you do see the government setting tighter standards. There have definitely been a lot of arguments about whether or not the research was good, whether or not the research was ideologically influenced.

So there’s some government role here, some role for professional associations, some context in which families and doctors make these decisions. What is that role?

I think you just hit on that distinction, which is that in many European countries, the distinction between the health care system and the government is fuzzier. In many cases, you have government-operated hospitals.

Here, you have health care systems. You have standards of care developed by providers in those medical associations. And that is where those decisions should be left up to, in terms of establishing the standards of care. And then when applying those standards of care, allowing the practical application of those standards of care to happen between patients, families and providers. Because it’s fundamentally a different kind of system.

I think the critique and the fear from the right that I hear is that some of these same dynamics — toward pushing out people who question the evidence, toward there being things you can say and things you cannot say — took hold. And that the results of that can’t be trusted — that everything you said is happening in politics is also happening in medicine and elsewhere.

We actually started to see a pretty difficult but important conversation within WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, about the standards of care for youth care before government started intervening. They started having a conversation about how to adjust the standards of care, recognizing perhaps that they needed to tighten them.

And that’s true across health care: Standards of care across different forms of care are constantly evolving.

That conversation was starting to happen. You cannot tell me that it’s the role of the government to pre-empt those conversations. Those conversations should not be settled in legislative bodies by politicians who aren’t looking at the data, don’t understand the data and certainly aren’t objectively interpreting the data.

And look, the conversation changes when people understand what it means to be trans. Because I think right now we think of it as a choice. We think of it as an intellectual decision. Like: I want to be a girl. I want to be a boy. And I want to do this because of these rewards, or I don’t want to do it because of these risks.

But that’s not what gender identity is. It is much more innate. It is a visceral feeling. It’s not the same as whether you get a tattoo or what you have for dinner. It’s not a decision. It’s a fact about who you are.

I think the challenge in the conversation around gender identity that differs from sexual orientation is that most people who are straight can understand what it feels like to love and to lust. And so they’re able to enter into conversations around sexual orientation with an analogous experience.

The challenge in the conversation around gender identity is that people who aren’t trans don’t know what it feels like to have a gender identity that differs from your sex assigned at birth.

For me, the closest thing that I can compare it to was a constant feeling of homesickness, just an unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed as myself.

And I think that because we stopped having that conversation, because we stopped creating space for people to ask questions, for people’s understandable — perhaps invasive, but understandable — curiosity to be met with an openness and a grace, not by everyone, but just the people who were willing to do it — we stopped people having an understanding of what it means to be trans. And it allowed them to start to see it. Or it allowed for their pre-existing perception that this is some sort of intellectual choice to manifest.

And in some cases, the perfect “discourse” started to reinforce that.

Say how.

We started to get to this place where you couldn’t be like: I’m born this way.

We policed the way even L.G.B.T.Q. people or trans people talked about their own identities — to be this perfect sort of academic —

Why can’t you say “I’m born this way”? I’m not saying you’re saying it, but this is a thing I’ve not been aware of.

There was sort of an academic perception that people should have agency over their sexual orientation and gender identity, even if it’s not “innate.” And there was this acceptance of a mainstream perception of sexual orientation and gender identity that was a one-size-fits-all narrative around L.G.B.T.Q. people that didn’t necessarily include people whose understanding was more fluid or whose understanding evolved over time or those who feel like they want to transgress gender norms because of a reason that’s not this innate sense of gender.

And when you take that capacity for us to authentically talk about our experience away from us — because it’s not academically the purest narrative that creates space and room for every single, different lived experience within that umbrella — you give people justification to say or think: This is a choice, and if it’s a choice, the threshold to allow for discrimination becomes lower.

I’ve known a number of people who have transitioned as adults.

The degree to which most of us avoid doing anything that would cause us any social discomfort at all times is so profound — how much we live our lives trying to not make anybody look at us for too long.

It must be such a profound need to make that decision — to come to your family, to your wife or your husband, to your kids, to your parents.

So the right-wing meme that emerged around it — that people are transitioning because they opportunistically want to be in another bathroom or in another locker room or get some kind of cultural affirmative action — always struck me as not just absurd but deeply unempathic. Not thinking for a moment what it must mean to want that that much. So then it’s interesting to hear you say that there was a pincer movement on that.

I’m sure there is agency, and people make decisions here. But the pull from inside of everybody I’ve known is really profound. Usually they’ve been trying to choose the other way for a long time — and eventually just can’t anymore.

That’s exactly what my experience was.

It’s funny because sometimes there’s discourse that the only reason I’m an elected official is because I’m trans. I see on the right this notion that I’m a diversity hire.

But it’s like: Well, voters chose me. It’s kind of an insult to voters that they didn’t choose me because they think that I’m the best candidate or reflective of what they want, but they just chose me because of my identity.

But it also just undersells such a larger truth, which is that my life would be so much easier if I weren’t trans.

I’m proud of who I am. I’m proud that this is my life experience for a whole host of reasons. But this is all a lot harder because I’m trans.

Are there moments where I get a microphone or — if I were a nontrans freshman Democrat, would I be sitting here? Maybe not. Maybe I would, but maybe not. We probably would be having a different conversation.

But navigating this world as a trans person has always been — and even more so now — it’s incredibly hard. And all any of us are asking — or at least all that most of us are asking — is to just let us live the best life we can. A life with as few regrets as possible. A life where we can be constructive, productive, contributing members of society.

You might not understand us. It is hard to step into the shoes of someone who is trans and to understand what that might feel like. But I spent 21 years of my life praying that this would go away.

And the only way that I was finally able to accept it was: One, realizing this was never going to go away. Two, becoming so consumed by it that it was the only thing I really was able to think about because the pain became too all-encompassing.

And three, the only way I was able to come out was because I was able to accept that I was losing any future. I had to go through stages of grief. And the only way I was able to come out was to finally get to that stage of acceptance over a loss of any future.

It’s really scary, and it’s really hard. And right now it is particularly scary and hard.

And to your point earlier, most people are good people, and they just want to treat other people with respect and kindness. But unfortunately, in this moment, in our politics — we were recently at something where someone gave us some information, and they said that when a voter was asked to describe the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, it was “crazy” for the Republican Party and “preachy” for the Democratic Party.

I think that undersells something that’s more true, which is that a voter will look and say: The Republican Party is [expletive] to other people. I don’t like that. But the Democratic Party is an [expletive] to me. And if I have to choose between the party that’s an [expletive] to me because I’m not perfect or a party that’s an [expletive] to someone else, even if I don’t like it, I’m going to choose the party that’s an [expletive] to someone else.

When you entered Congress, you were quite directly targeted by some of your Republican colleagues, led by Nancy Mace, on which bathrooms you could use — a thing that would not have happened if you were not a trans legislator.

This is the majority party in the House. You have to work with these people. You’re on committees with them. What has your experience been like both absorbing that and then trying to work with people whom you know may or may not have given you much grace in that moment?

The first thing I’d say is that the folks who were or are targeting me because of my gender identity in Congress are folks who, at this point, are really not working with any Democrats and can barely work with their own Republican colleagues.

I’ve introduced several bills. Almost all have been bipartisan. I’ve been developing relationships with colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Part of my responsibility in this moment is to show that when someone like me gets elected to public office, we can do the whole job. And that means working with people who disagree with me, including on issues that are deeply personal.

The folks who are coming after me — I mean, look, that’s been hard. But I know that they are coming after me not because they are deeply passionate about bathroom policy. They’re coming after me because they’re employing the strategies of reality TV. And the best way to get attention in a body of 435 people is to throw wine in someone’s face. That gets you a little attention. But if the person you’re throwing wine on, if they respond by throwing wine in your face, it creates a beef, which gets you a season-long story arc.

I knew that they were trying to bait me into a fight to get attention, and I refused to be used as a political pawn. I refuse to give them not only the power of derailing me but the incentive to continue to come after me.

And this was a prime example of fighting smart that is demonized on our own side. Because the grace that I didn’t get wasn’t just on the right. There was a lot of critique on the left.

I understand that, when you’re a first, people viscerally feel your highs, and they also viscerally feel your lows. But what would my fighting back in that moment have done? It wouldn’t have stopped the ban, and it would only have incentivized further attacks and continued behavior like that.

Sometimes we have to understand that not fighting, not taking the bait, is not a sign of weakness. It’s not unprincipled. Discipline and strategy are signs of strength.

And I think in the social media world, we have lulled ourselves into thinking the only way to fight is to fight. It’s to scream and it’s to yell and it’s to do it in every instance. And any time you don’t do it, you’re normalizing the behavior that’s coming your way.

It’s a ridiculously unfair burden to place on every single human being — to have to fight every single indignity.

But also by that logic, the young Black students who were walking into a school that was being integrated in the late ’50s and ’60s, who were walking forward calmly and with dignity and grace into that school as people screamed slurs at them — by that definition, that student was normalizing those slurs by not responding.

Instead, what that student was doing was providing the public with a very clear visual, a very clear contrast, between unhinged hatred and basic dignity and grace, which is fundamental to humanity.

And for me, one of the things that I struggled with after that was the lack of grace that I got from some in my own community, who said that I was reinforcing the behavior of the people who were coming after me, that I was not responding appropriately to the bullying that I was facing.

When the reality is: That behavior has diminished significantly because I removed the incentive for them to continue to do it. Because the incentive was so blatantly about attention, and I wasn’t going to let them get the attention that they wanted.

You’re reminding me of something I heard Barack Obama say many years ago when he was getting criticized for trying to negotiate, trying to reach out to people who, by that point, many on the left thought he was naive for trying to work with.

And he said something like: He had always felt that the American people could see better if the other side had clenched their fist, if he opened his hand.

I always thought there was a lot of wisdom in that.

Yes, absolutely. Early on in those first few weeks, I had some folks text me as I was responding the way that I was. And they said: You should watch “42,” which is the movie about Jackie Robinson.

I am not comparing my experience to Jackie Robinson’s at all. At all. But there’s a scene in that movie that’s so illustrative of these dynamics: He’s meeting with the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers is trying to provoke him into anger. And when he sort of succeeds, the owner basically says to him: You have to understand that when you are a first, if you respond to a slur with a slur, they’ll only hear yours. If you respond to a punch with a punch, they’ll say: You’re the aggressor.

If we go in and say to these folks: We’re never going to work with you, because you’re never going to work with us — then we get the blame for never working with them. Not them.

If we go in and we respond to their hatred with vitriol and anger, they’re going to blame us. And that’s the reality of the double standard in our politics. That’s the reality that a first always has to navigate.

Let them put their anger, their vitriol, on full display. Let us provide that contrast with our approach.

Look, it’s not going to always work out, and it’s not always going to create the outcome that you desire. But people need us to demonstrate that contrast to them, for them to truly see it.

I’ve been having a conversation in a very different context than this, but I’m curious to hear your answer to it.

I’ve been having this conversation about whether or not good politics always requires clear enemies. Do you believe it does?

No. I believe that you can tell a compelling story with an enemy. There’s no question. It sometimes is an easy out in our politics.

But I think that there’s something to be said about a politics that is rooted in opposition to an enemy that is fundamentally that regressive. That anger is fundamentally conservative in its political outcome.

Barack Obama — and Bill Clinton, for that matter — did a good job of putting forward an aspirational politics that wasn’t defined by who we are against but by what we are for and about who we can be.

And I think that is a more successful path for progressive politics than an enemies-based politics, which so often devolves to anger. And which, more often than not, facilitates in the medium- and long-term, a regressive politics.

Look, I’m not saying it can’t always be effective politics. But you can have effective politics and good politics and better outcomes with an aspirational politics. With a politics that isn’t just about what it’s opposed to, but about what it can build and about who we can be.

Because I think everyone has their own internal struggle between their own better selves and their better angels and their base instincts.

Much earlier in the conversation I had asked you about liberalism, which was a little bit of a weird question to drop in there.

I don’t really have a question here, it’s just something I’m thinking about. But you actually strike me as one of the most liberal as a temperament — liberal in the classical sense — politicians I’ve talked to in a long time.

And I’ve been starting to read a lot of older books about liberalism because it feels to me that it is an approach to politics that even liberals lost.

Yes.

And one of the reasons I think we lost it — and I very much count myself as a liberal — was a feeling that liberalism’s virtue was also its vice. That its openness to critique, its constant balancing, its movement toward incremental solutions and its skepticism of total solutions — that those had been conditions under which problems never truly got solved. Systemic racism and bigotry festered.

And as it began to absorb that critique, it lost a lot of confidence in itself.

In a way, Barack Obama was the apex of the liberal leaders, and he hadn’t brought about utopia. And so liberalism seemed exhausted.

And I think alongside that, there was some way in which I cannot — I still need to figure this out, but I’ll say it because I believe it’s true: I think there’s something about the social media platforms that is illiberal as a medium.

We now have X and Bluesky and Threads, and none of them are good. They all lead to bad habits of mind. Because simplifying your thoughts down to these little bumper stickers and then having other people who agree with you retweet them or mob you just doesn’t lend itself to the pluralistic balancing modes of thought that liberalism is built to prize. They’re illiberal in a fundamental way.

So I don’t think it’s an accident that as liberalism began to lose its own moorings, illiberalism roared back.

And just one experience I’ve had of this whole period with Donald Trump’s second term is realizing that the thing that we were trying to keep locked in the basement was really profoundly dangerous. Even compared to his first term.

The attacks on due process, the trying to break institutions, the disappearance machine — if you let that all out, things can go really badly.

And there’s something about liberalism that is so unsatisfying. The work you just described having to do sounds so unsatisfying and frustrating. And yet.

I guess just that — and yet.

And yet it is the approach and the system that, while imperfect, is the most likely and most proven to actually lead to the progress that I and so many others seek.

Look, people have one life. And it is completely understandable that a person would feel: I have one life, and when you ask me to wait, you are asking me to watch my one life pass by without the respect and fairness that I deserve. And that is too much to ask of anyone.

And that is. It is our job to demand “now,” in the face of people who say “never.” But it’s also our job to then not reject the possibility for a better tomorrow as that compromise.

I truly believe that liberalism, that our ability to have conversations across disagreement, that our ability to recognize that in a pluralistic, diverse democracy, there will inevitably be people and positions that hurt us. But when you’re siloed and when you suppress that opposition underground in that basement — to use your word — they’re alone in there. And not only does that sense of community loneliness breed bitterness, but it also breeds radicalization.

Liberalism is not only the best mechanism to move forward, but it is also the best mechanism to rein in the worst excesses of your opposition.

Yes, the compromise is that you don’t get to do everything you want to do. But that is a much better bet than the alternative, which is what we have developed now — an illiberal democracy in so many ways in our body politic.

One where, yes, we might have temporary victories, but as we are seeing right now, those victories can be fleeting, and the consequences can be deadly.

Was this always your political temperament, or was it forged?

I have grown and changed. There are things that I did and said five, 10, 15 years ago that I look back and regret, because I think that they were too illiberal. Because I bought into a culture online that didn’t always bring out the best in me.

But I do think that those were exceptions, and even when I was an advocate, I was always perceived as one of the more mainstream respectability advocates. I was always considered someone who was too willing to work across disagreement and engage in conversations that we shouldn’t be having. I was always considered someone who was too willing to work within the system.

And so I think I’ve fundamentally always had the same perspective and fundamentally have always believed that we cannot eliminate grace from our politics and our change-making. And that’s rooted in watching my parents grow and change after I came out.

My parents are progressive people. They embraced my older brother, who’s gay, without skipping a beat. But I knew when I shared that I was trans with them, it was going to be devastating — to use a word that my mother uses. And I knew that if I responded by shutting down the conversation, by refusing to walk with them, by refusing to give them grace and assume good intentions when they would inevitably say and do things that might be hurtful to me, I would stunt their capacity to take that walk with me.

I saw us as a family move forward with a degree of grace toward each other, that we were all going to inevitably say and do things that we would come to regret, that might hurt a little bit, but that if we assumed good intentions and walked forward, my parents would go from saying: What are the chances that I have a gay son and a trans child? — from a place of pity to a place of awe and the diversity of our family and the blessings that have come with that diversity. And that only came from grace.

And then I saw it working in Delaware, passing nondiscrimination protections. I’ve seen it time and time again. And so I have borne witness to change that once seemed so impossible to me as a kid that it was almost incomprehensible not only become possible but become a reality, in large part because of grace in our politics. And yes, because I was willing to extend that grace to others.

Grace, blessings, witness — are these, for you, religious concepts?

They tap into my religion. I’m Presbyterian. I’m an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church.

But I think they go to something for me that transcends religion and my faith, and tap into my sense of beauty toward the world and my sense of beauty at life and the joy that I get to live this life, that I get to be myself and that I get to live a life of purpose.

I know I’m lucky in that respect, and I want everyone to have that same opportunity. And I have seen that approach and that grace. It has allowed me to be a better version of myself, a happier version of myself, which I think has actually unlocked those opportunities.

That’s interesting. Is it a practice?

When you say that it has allowed you to be a better version of yourself, is that something that you cultivate intentionally? And if so, how?

Yes. I think it’s often an intentional choice.

So many of the problems that we face are rooted in the fact that hurt people hurt people.

And I think that we are in this place where we are in this fierce competition for pain. Where the left says to the right: What do you know about pain, white, straight, cis man? My pain is real as a queer, transgender person.

And then the right says to the left: What do you know about pain, college-educated, cosmopolitan elite? My pain is real in a postindustrial community ravaged by the opioid crisis.

We are in this competition for pain when there is plenty of pain to go around. And every therapist will tell you that the first step to healing is to have your pain seen and validated. While it requires intentionality and effort sometimes, I think we would all be better off if we recognized that we don’t have to believe that someone is right for what they’re facing to be wrong.

I also think that there’s one other aspect of this that I think we have lost, which is the intentionality of hope. We have fallen prey in our online discourse and our politics to a sense that cynicism is in vogue, that cynicism shows that we get it.

And I think one of the things that we have to recognize is sometimes hope is a conscious effort. And that sense of inevitability, that organic sense of hope that we felt in this post-1960s world, is the exception in our history.

And you have to step into the shoes of people in the 1950s, people in the 1930s, people in the 1850s, and to move past the history that we view with the hindsight of inevitability and go into those moments and recognize: Every previous generation of Americans had every reason to give up hope.

And you cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for hopelessness then.

So you’re saying there’s something audacious about hope?

There is something audacious —

Some audacity in it.

You have to summon it. You have to summon it.

Optimism is about circumstance. It’s about evaluating likelihood. Hope is something that transcends that.

And when we lull ourselves into this sense of cynicism and we give up on hope, that is when we lose.

My editor has this habit of sharing these very Delphic sayings that I have to then think about for a while afterward. A week ago, he said to me that cynicism is always stupidity. In the conversation we were having, I didn’t ask him about it.

He is not here to tell me I’m wrong, but I think that what he meant is that cynicism is the posture that we both know what is happening and we know what is going to happen — that we’ve seen through the performance into the real, grimy, pathetic backstage, and we know it’s rigged. We know it’s plotted and planned. And so it’s this knowing posture of idiocy.

It’s that. And it’s easy. It’s easy.

I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

To this conversation, I think one of the best books on political leadership and understanding how to foster public opinion change is “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s one of my favorite books.

Two, I’ve been reading over time — it’s not new — “These Truths” by Jill Lepore, a one-volume history of the United States that helps to reinforce that so many of the challenges and dynamics that we face in this moment are actually not unique, even if the specifics are, how cyclical our challenges are and our history is.

And then the final one that I’m actually rereading — I read it in the first term of Trump — is “The Final Days” the sequel to “All the President’s Men.” And you realize, reading that, how often it felt like Nixon was going to get away with everything. That he’d stay in office and it would be fine for him. And how many instances that it appeared to be done and that he had won — until Aug. 9, 1974, happened, and he resigned.

And I think for me, it’s a helpful reminder that it often seems impossible until it’s inevitable.

Congresswoman Sarah McBride, thank you very much.

Thank you.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sigal Samuel at Vox:

There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests. That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image. It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful. “It’s a sense of complete impunity — including impunity to the laws of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told me. “They reject constraint in all of its forms.” As Harrington has noted, Trump is the perfect avatar for that worldview. He’s a man who incited an attempted coup, who got convicted on 34 felony counts and still won reelection, who notoriously said in reference to sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” So, what is the “anything” that the broligarchs want to do? To understand their vision, we need to realize that their philosophy goes well beyond simple libertarianism. It’s not just that they want a government that won’t tread on them. They want absolutely zero limits on their power. Not those dictated by democratic governments, by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.

The broligarchs’ vision: Science fiction, transhumanism, and immortality

The broligarchs are not a monolith — their politics differ somewhat, and they’ve sometimes been at odds with each other. Remember when Zuck and Musk said they were going to fight each other in a cage match? But here’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors. Zuckerberg’s quest to build the Metaverse, a virtual reality so immersive and compelling that people would want to strap on bulky goggles to interact with each other, is seemingly inspired by the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. It was actually Stephenson who coined the term “metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash, where characters spend a lot of time interacting in a virtual world of that name. Zuckerberg seems not to have noticed that the book is depicting a dystopia; instead of viewing it as a warning, he’s viewing it as an instruction manual.

Jeff Bezos is inspired by Star Trek, which led him to found a commercial spaceflight venture called Blue Origin, and The High Frontier by physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill, which informs his plan for space colonization (it involves millions of people living in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars as an undergraduate at Princeton. Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said. And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.” All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or übermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.

[...]

The broligarchs — because they are in 21st-century Silicon Valley and not 19th-century Germany — have updated and melded this idea with transhumanism, the idea that we can and should use technology to alter human biology and proactively evolve our species.

Transhumanism spread in the mid-1900s thanks to its main popularizer, Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and president of the British Eugenics Society. Huxley influenced the contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted that we’re approaching a time when human intelligence can merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably powerful. “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote in 1999. Kurzweil, in turn, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, whose company Neuralink explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence. For many transhumanists, part of what it means to transcend our human condition is transcending death. And so you find that the broligarchs are very interested in longevity research. Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Thiel have all reportedly invested in startups that are trying to make it possible to live forever. That makes perfect sense when you consider that death currently imposes a limit on us all, and the goal of the broligarchs is to have zero limits.

Vox has an insightful article on the disastrous vision that broligarchs like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg subscribe to.

[herpsandbirds]

A new issue of Sonoran Herpetologist is ready for download by clicking on the link below.

Cover photo of Texas Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum) by Connor D. M. Pogue (Instagram: @colubridconnor | Flickr: connordpogue) in the Apachian Valleys and Low Hills of Pima County, Arizona. As the sun nestled into the horizon, this horned lizard hastened for its nocturnal refuge. Fortunately, we persuaded it to pause briefly for a photo session before releasing it to continue its crepuscular wanderings. 8 July 2023.

.....................................................................................

Please be sure to read for information about the upcoming THS election at our annual meeting where, among other goodies, Thomas Weaver - Curator of Herpetological, Ichthyological, and Invertebrate Zoology at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum - will present about the recent expedition inaugurating a project to protect the New Mexico Ridge-nosed Rattlesnake. Additionally, you will find information about this month's virtual presentation from John Measey in South Africa who is studying African Clawed Frogs as a globally introduced species.

https://tucsonherpsociety.org/publ.../sonoran-herpetologist/

[bromantically]

Transcript:

"Thanks very much for joining me. We are living in a dangerous and unprecedented moment in American history, and I'm getting a lot of calls from people who are not only upset about what's happening, but are wondering how we best go forward. Well let me tell you, we've got to be smart. We've got to be organized and we've got to fight back. This is not a time for wallowing in despair and hiding under the covers. The stakes are just too high. We are not just fighting for ourselves. We're fighting for our kids, for future generations. We're fighting for the future of this planet. In the first two weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump defied the Constitution by ending birthright citizenship, fired government watchdogs, allowed drilling along our coastlines, pen violent insurrectionist, suspended all foreign aid, and tried to cut off virtually all federal funding. So how do we go forward? First to be effective, we've got to understand what in fact is happening around us right now. Second, we need a short-term strategy. What do we do tomorrow and the next day and the day after that? Third we need a long-term strategy. How do we build a movement that gains political power?

Here is, in my view, a brief overview as to what is happening under Trump. Most importantly, the move toward oligarchy in our country, government run by the rich and the powerful is proceeding rapidly. And it's not being done secretly. A little over a week ago, Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, standing right behind them with the three richest men in the world, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Men who have become over 200 billion dollars richer since Trump was elected, and who now are worth almost a trillion dollars more money than the bottom half of American society, 170 million people.

But it's not just oligarchy that we should worry about. This country under Trump is moving rapidly toward authoritarianism. Just a few examples: In violation of the Constitution and federal law, Trump attempted the other day to suspend all federal grants and loans. That means he blocked funding for Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, homeless veterans, etc., etc.. Tens of millions of Americans, some of the most vulnerable people in our country, were impacted by that decision. Fortunately, Americans all across the country stood up in outrage and said, no, no. And with the help of the courts, much, but not all of that freeze and funding was rescinded. You may have noticed that Trump is intimidating the media with lawsuits against ABC, CBS, Meta, and the Des Moines Register. If Trump does not like what media reports, he is threatening them with lawsuits, undermining the First Amendment. That is a direct movement toward authoritarianism.

Now, that's a very broad overview of where we are today. In terms of short-term strategy, we've got to mobilize as strongly as we can against Trump's dangerous proposals. And let me just say this, importantly, yes, the Republicans control the House and the Senate. But do not forget, their majorities are small. In the House, a body of 435 members, they have a four vote majority. That is a razor thin margin. And their legislation can be defeated. There are a number of Republicans out there who won in Democratic districts by small margins. So let me tell you, these guys do respond to phone calls and emails. So if there's a piece of legislation you disagree with, get on the phone and call the capital switchboard at 202-224-2131. And what is some of that legislation that we should be concerned about? Republicans right now are working on what's called a budget reconciliation bill. The most important element, which would be a massive tax break for the wealthy to be paid for by large cuts in Medicaid and other programs that working families and low income people desperately need. At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, when so many of our people are struggling to put food on the table, we must not savage programs for working families to provide huge tax breaks for billionaires. We must vigorously oppose Trump's efforts at mass deportation. Yes, we must strengthen our borders. Yes, we should deport people who have been convicted of serious crimes. But no, no, we cannot destroy families who have lived and worked in this country peacefully for decades.

Not only is Trump's Mass deportation program immoral, it will have a severely negative impact on our economy. As all of you know, we are seeing extreme weather disturbances and devastation in our country and all over the world related to climate change. Think about LA. Think about North Carolina. We must vigorously oppose this absurd drill baby drill doctrine, which will only make an incredibly dangerous climate situation even worse. And those are just a few of the issues that are coming down the pipe. But we cannot just play defense. We have got to be on the offense. Please never forget that the agenda that we are fighting for is widely supported, widely supported by working families all across this country, and we must continue to fight for that agenda. The American people do not want cuts to Medicaid and the privatization of Medicare. They understand that healthcare is a human right, not a privilege. We must continue the struggle for Medicare for All so that every American has the health care that he or she needs. That's not a radical idea. That's what Americans want. Federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage. We must raise that minimum wage to a living wage. At least $17 an hour. If you work 40 hours a week in America, you should not be living in poverty.

All over this country, we have a major housing crisis. And it's not just 800,000 who are homeless. It is millions of working families who are spending 40, 50, 60% of their limited incomes on housing. Instead of spending almost a trillion dollars a year on a wasteful and bloated Pentagon budget, we have got to build millions of units of low income and affordable housing. And when we do that, we put large numbers of people to work at good paying union jobs. I could go on and on, but let me conclude by saying this: The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. If we stand together and oppose right-wing efforts to divide us up by our race, by our religion, our sexual orientation, or where we were born, if we stand together, there is nothing that we cannot accomplish. Bottom line, let us go forward and fight for a government and an economy that works for all, not just a few. We simply do not have the luxury of moaning and groaning. We have got to stand up and fight back. We can do it. Let's go forward together. Thank you very much."

[katrotica]

In my inaugural Anna Ioannova poster I spoke about iconic tumblr photos that repeat on my dash and always make me go “oh wow, her again… must reblog!” In my research of Anna for the last poster I found this pic which is another iconic one and I honestly hadn’t realized they were of the same girl. I’d seen both but hadn’t made the connection. Now I have. That’s part of the process of making these posters: cementing these girls into my brain. Once I’ve made a poster of a girl I don’t forget her. I also feel like she’s a little bit mine. Not like I own her or anything, just like, part of my harem. No, that came out wrong. Harems are generally unwilling. Not my vibe at all. Willing participants only for me! Club. Let’s go with club. The existence of a Katrotica or girlcrush poster is a virtual invitation to join my club, if they do choose. It’s a fun club. Promise!

[kvetchlandia]

OK...

I'm more or less back. I can't say I've recovered from the shock of the hell the people of the United States have inflicted upon themselves and and upon the rest of the world. I mean, who recovers from the knowledge that people actually chose to put themselves under the governance of a bloated pig who promises to use the military to go after his political rivals (including, for fuck sake, Liz Cheney, an arch conservative); who's been responsible for the removal of women's legal right to control their own bodies, already resulting in completely preventable deaths; who in no uncertain terms has made public his desire to be a dictator; who is a man that has been convicted of multiple felonies and has been found civilly liable for sexually assaulting one woman and who bragged on television, in a tape seen by virtually everyone on the planet, of assaulting others; and on and on and on. I could detail so much more about the planned assaults on civil liberties, on civil society and on the environment by this repugnant shmuck but there's little point to that. All I'll accomplish should I do that is another night of bashing my head against the wall or of sticking my head in the electric oven and yet again singeing my poor eyebrows. So, I guess I'll return to my lame posts. They're a way of killing a bit of time and some of you guys even occasionally like the crap I put up on my page, which always thrills me and for which I'm eternally grateful.

I'm ancient by Bumblr standards. I am what's known in the jargon as a "red diaper baby," the child of parents who had been in the Communist Party. Because of this, I've been going to demonstrations quite literally since before I was born. I've continued the family tradition of being politically active and over many years have taken part in more demos than I care to count. All I can say is that, come the inauguration of this monster in January, quite possibly the last inauguration of a president in this country, if Trump is to be believed, I'll be back in the streets once again, wearing my red union tee shirt and carrying one sign or another. We have the capacity to make the streets ours and to use that power to change things for the better. Will we develop the leadership and the organization necessary to accomplish that? I don't want to be pessimistic (or honest, as the case may be), so I'll just say, that remains to be seen. Meanwhile, back to silliness.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Davies :: @MatttDavies :: Sharp Contrast. http://Newsday.com/matt

* * * *

Call it by its name: A coup (redux)

April 15, 2025

Robert B. Hubbell

On a day that saw Trump and his senior cabinet members desecrate the Oval Office by mocking the Supreme Court and claiming the power to deport American citizens as punishment for crimes, Harvard University stood up for democracy and academic freedom. Harvard's strong showing should embolden other universities to resist the hostile takeover of education by cultural warriors who correctly view education as the antidote to tyranny. Harvard's resistance is an important watershed in the effort to stop Trump's reign of lawlessness.

Trump's meeting in the Oval Office with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was so shocking that many commentators described the meeting as “crossing the Rubicon,” i.e., Trump's point of no return toward dictatorship. Commentators are correct that Trump and his advisors openly defied and ridiculed the Supreme Court as never before. But Trump “crossed the Rubicon” long ago—but the media has somehow forgotten or minimized prior actions by Trump that qualify as a “constitutional crises.” See Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, The Constitutional Crisis Is Here.

I do not mean to minimize what happened in the Oval Office on Monday and I address it below. But what happened on Monday is merely the next logical step in an ongoing coup—and our failure to call it such at every opportunity allows it to fester and spread, even as tens of millions of Americans look away or are frightened by the chaos inflicted by Trump's wholesale assault on the federal government.

A week after Trump's inauguration, I titled my January 31 newsletter, Call it by its name: A coup. Only a week into his administration, Trump unilaterally “canceled” all federal loans and grants—a gross breach of the constitutional grant of authority in Article I to Congress to appropriate funds. The withholding of lawfully appropriated funds also violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

From and after January 31, virtually every action by DOGE to cut and withhold funds or to shutter agencies created by Congress has been a facial violation of the separation of powers embedded by the Framers in Articles I and II of the Constitution.

Defying Congress and subverting the Constitution’s separation of powers was “crossing the Rubicon” and should have resulted in Trump's impeachment and removal from office. But somehow, the press defaulted to reporting merely about the size and number of cuts imposed by DOGE while skipping over the part where they violate the Constitution.

Defying Congress is no less a transgression of the Constitution than defying the courts. And although Monday was the first time that Trump and his advisers suggested that they would flout the Supreme Court’s order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the administration has violated multiple court orders on dozens of previous occasions. See my newsletter dated March 17, 2025, The moment of crisis: Trump intentionally violates multiple court orders.

So, I will skip to the end and make my point: Question: What should we do about the fact that Trump has said he will defy the Supreme Court’s order in the Abrego Garcia case? Answer: Exactly what we have been doing, only more of it, with greater urgency and volume.

The one thing that will stop Trump is the American people taking to the streets to revoke “the consent of the governed” and take back our control of the government.

Massive, sustained protests are the key to bringing Congress to heel and reinforcing the legitimacy of court rulings. Trump is currently defying Congress and the courts because he believes he can get away with it! If his advisers and Republican members of Congress were begging him to relent (as they did on January 6, 2021), he would do so. Reluctantly, sullenly, and with a thumb in the eye to the American people, but he would relent.

While we have made incredible progress in taking to the streets in the last two months, we must redouble our efforts and then redouble them again. The protests must be so large and sustained that the NYTimes and Fox News cannot ignore them.

Yes, something shifted in the firmament on Monday when the president laughed about deporting American citizens to El Salvadoran prisons. But the defiance of Congress and the courts is not new. Trump continues to defy the co-equal branches of government because he does not yet fear the political repercussions of mass protests.

Let’s do all we can to hasten the day when Trump no longer believes he can act with impunity and once again fears impeachment, conviction, and removal from office.

Trump plays “rope-a-dope” with Supreme Court in Oval Office meeting

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a tepid invitation to Trump to “facilitate” the return of wrongly deported El Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia. In the intervening four days, the administration has refused to comply with the Court’s order. Despite its overly deferential language, the import of the order was to return Abrego Garcia to the US.

In an Oval Office meeting with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Trump could have easily asked Bukele to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. The leaders of both nations were sitting face to face and had the mutual authority to agree to Abrego Garcia’s return.

Instead, Trump and Bukele played a ghoulish game of “Who’s on First?” Trump said he couldn’t ask Bukele to return Abrego Garcia because El Salvador was a sovereign nation, and Bukele said he couldn’t “smuggle” Abrego Garcia into the US.

Trump and Bukele assume we are fools.

Trump carefully stage-managed the fantasy that both El Salvador and the US are under overlapping and insoluble disabilities that prevent the return of Abrego Garcia. No sentient being with an IQ higher than a potato believes the badly acted grade-school play performed by Trump and Bukele.

As explained by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic article cited above,

This rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.

But the meaning of the telenovela in the Oval Office was clear: Trump and Bukele were tag teaming the Supreme Court to let the justices know that Abrego Garcia would not be returned to the US. See NYTimes, U.S. and El Salvador Won’t Return Wrongly Deported Man. (This article is accessible to all.)

Per the NYTimes,

“Of course I’m not going to do it,” Mr. Bukele said when reporters asked if he was willing to help return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three who was deported last month. The Trump administration has acknowledged that his deportation was the result of an “administrative error.” The message from the meeting was clear: Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Bukele had any intention of returning Mr. Abrego Garcia, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that he should come back to the United States. The case has come to symbolize Mr. Trump’s defiance of the courts and his willingness to deport people without due process.

Trump's comments were framed by blatantly false descriptions of the Supreme Court’s ruling by Stephen Miller.

Miller said,

Yes, it was a 9-0, in our favor against the district court ruling, saying that no district court has the power to compel the foreign policy function of the United States.

The Supreme Court said exactly the opposite, telling the administration that it must “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia to the US.

And then things got really weird in the Oval Office.

Trump and Bukele held a stage-whispered conversation in which Trump proposed sending American citizens convicted for crimes to El Salvadoran maximum security prisons. Trump then repeated those comments in response to a reporter’s questions, adding that Attorney General Pam Bondi was “looking at the law” and “researching it.”

Per the NYTimes article, above,

Mr. Trump also mused about the possibility of sending American citizens convicted of violent crimes to prison in El Salvador, although he said Attorney General Pam Bondi was still studying the legality of the proposal.

“If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem, no,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m talking about violent people. I’m talking about really bad people.” Before the full group of reporters was allowed into the Oval Office for the meeting, television cameras captured Mr. Trump telling Mr. Bukele to build more prisons.

Let’s pause here for a moment. The president cannot deport American citizens—“homegrown criminals”—to a foreign nation as part of a criminal punishment. Such a “musing” is worse than “lawless” and “unconstitutional”—because we know that the Trump administration claims that after it has relinquished a detainee to a foreign nation, it has no ability to obtain the citizen’s return if, for example, the conviction is overturned on appeal or in a habeas corpus proceeding.

Trump cannot lawfully implement such a plan. But the fact that he is even musing about it suggests that he is a danger to democracy and should be impeached, convicted, and removed from office immediately.

I have twice suggested in this newsletter that Trump be impeached, convicted, and removed. Is that possible? Let me turn the question around. Is it possible for 50 million Americans to engage in a work stoppage, general strike, and tax strike? What would Trump's corporate overlords and congressional vassals do in the face of such an overwhelming demand that Congress perform its constitutional duty?

Trump has plainly committed multiple impeachable offenses in his first three months in office. Asking Congress to do its job of enforcing the Constitution is the duty of every law abiding citizen. Even the Trump-boosting WSJ is publishing op-eds suggesting that Trump is begging to be impeached. See Holman W. Jenkins op-ed in WSJ, Trump Wants to Be Impeached Again.

Other less drastic remedies are being floated, such as four Republicans in the House and Senate switching sides to give Democrats control of the House and Senate. What would take for that sea-change to occur? At this rate, we may find out sooner rather than later.

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

[redpillfuturist215]

This is a multi-part post. Recently some guy criticized one of my reblogs and in rare form I actually typed up a response but before I could that Tumblr account was apparently deleted so the comment and post lost forever. Well, turns out I took a screenshot so since I took the time to retort I might as well share it and make an example out of him so here we go…

1st off, a few small things I don’t have the time to research every single thing, event or whatever. People who got rich in the 20th century are not “old money”. I don't care to know but Trump and Musk are probably only 2nd generation wealthy, one thing for sure is they are not elites and certainly not cabal members. In the age of false accusations and going after political opponents with the entire mainstream media in tow, so called convictions mean nothing. Let’s say Trump did rape someone though … there are far more criminals in or aligned with the democratic party including sex predators and pedophiles, along with the elites who’ve been raping and sacrificing children for decades if not centuries so GTFOH! Democrats and the left do nothing but project, accusing others of what they are guilty for, a tactic straight out of the Marxist and Nazi playbooks. I’m pretty sure they admitted seeking to tie him up and drain his finances in attempt to keep him from getting back in the white house.

Now let’s address the main topic, the long history of US democrat racism which is very well documented so therefore not propaganda or “far right” because the real truth has no agenda and how they’ll destroy anything from the environment to an entire nation in pursuit of the continued subjugation of my people and others they hate. That said I’ve criticized republicans too because so many of them are cowards, esp. since the so called compromise of 1877.

Black women are the reason 90% of us vote democrat, because they are financial sellouts aiding in our own oppression and genocide, they are a joke. This is why black men more or less spearhead the red pill movement, we were the first to get fucked over by feminism and gynocentrism, so much so that it gave rise to IBMOR – introspective black men of reform as well as SYSBM – save yourselves black men. I’ve dealt with it and have heard accounts of several others, virtually all attempts to educate them are futile, it’s like talking to a wall. Aside from the desire for “free” resources and mental slavery, they are just simply too emotional to accept reality. Moving on… Nothing brings out emotionally driven leftists or whatever the fuck like a black person, esp. a man, reminding others he is not a US democrat supporter. The US republican party was established to stop slavery and other democrat violations of human rights, terrorism. Almost immediately after the civil war they were helping blacks become congressman and representatives. Decades would pass before any democrats did. It doesn’t matter what faults republicans have or how cowardly they have become more or less since the 1877 compromise, democrats have always hated blacks. Founded to defend, expand slavery Created the Confederacy, started a civil war Refused to attend Lincoln’s inauguration for the “radical” idea of freeing the slaves and ultimately shot him in the head over it Rapes, beatings, lynchings Circumcising male slaves to “prevent them from raping white women” Not only were white women raping black slaves, some white male slave owners (again, all democrats) were also raping them in the open as a form of humiliation and dominance. The practice was called breaking the buck or something like that Created the KKK While the KKK lynching blacks is pretty well known, most don’t know that at least 1,300 white republicans were also lynched by them roughly between 1880 and 1970 for helping blacks to do things like get a proper education, register to vote The KKK also in turn assisting with the Negro Project which would become Planned Parenthood, designed to target blacks and other “undesirables” for genocide through abortion, yet again with black women being willing participants because feminism and hypergamy Jim Crow, segregation LBJ – “I’ll have those niggas voting democrat for 200 years” The above corrected on 2-6-2025 Thanks for pointing out my typo @mtnman451 I knew it was LBJ, have no idea why I put FDR up there haha but I've now corrected it. Getting us hooked on crack and other hard drugs The welfare state to financially enslave the black community and destroy the family unit, along with abortion having black women being complicit in it The above leading to black children, esp. boys, having the highest abuse rates Poverty and crime skyrocketing as well Mental health issues and suicide rates too Other financial policies meant to keep blacks poor and living in ghettos Democrats aligned with muslims, the only ones still enslaving Africans today which liberals never talk about Saying we’re too stupid to get an ID Calling us Uncle Tom’s and the likes for not supporting the actual party of slavery, a shaming tactic trying to get us back on the mental plantation Biden was against integration of schools and sponsored legislation that led to the mass incarceration of blacks He also sought to prevent blacks from getting high level positions in the government, particularly if they were republican Having the audacity to say if we don’t vote for him then we ain’t black Real quick side note, before covid hit Trump’s policies led to record setting economic achievements for blacks – the greatest combined wealth and lowest unemployment rates on record … but of course the democrats just couldn’t have that in addition to canceling the legacy of successful black people in the past This is just for African Americans

[shypotatoes013-blog]

I'm not sure what the proper CW/TW for this would be, kindly inform me and I will add it! Not proofread.

I don't want to be political on the TL, but I think this has to be said because for Americans, we are about to be entering even darker times.

Alongside the ban of TikTok yesterday, apps like Capcut and Lemon8 have also been banned. Gaming apps and companies are being banned as well, but I do not have a list as of yet.

This is not the beginning of censorship, but it is worsening now more than before.

About Tiktok:

This ban is not about TikTok but our freedom of speech. Even if you do not use TikTok or like it, this affects you too! They label the app as a national security threat and instill the idea that millions of American's data is being collected and used by the chinese government.

This is a fear based propaganda tactic that they weaponize against Americans for essentially anything they do not like. The false claims, surrounding China and communism that they conditioned American citizens believe, makes it easy for them to do this.

Do not fall for these tactics, henceforth, and become informed on your own. Using your own discernment, instead of basing your opinions from what you hear, is important in these times.

We will likely be seeing more of these things happening from this point forward and, especially, when Trump is inaugurated on January 20th (Tomorrow)

Why they are doing this:

There are many reasons our Congress and government officials are applying these unjust policies.

1: Unification with other nations.

They do not want us to be individual thinkers and to be able to think critically. TikTok has been a way, for many around the world, to connect and share their experiences. This is worrying to our government because people are awakening to how corrupt our power system is.

The rest of the world is not like this. We are given the illusion of choice and freedom, but we do not have a say in anything at the end of the day. And the saddest part is that the rest of the world already knows this.

We realize that we do not have universal healthcare, we have poor food and water quality, lack of education outside of our own country, the highest disease/crime/obesity rates, and overall poor standard of living. We are trillions in debt as a nation and 2% of the nations wealth is shared between the middle and lower class.

Americans have to work multiple jobs to pay for rent, taxes and groceries. We have no paid maternity leave, childcare and staggering homelessness rates. Gun violence is prevalent in schools where elementary aged children are risking their lives to get a subpar education that teaches no real life skills and our government is heavily militarized making it virtually impossible to protest these things without fear of being killed.

2: Money. America is a corporation. Not a country.

We live in an Oligarchy. Which means the people are controlled by the 1% who own most of the nations wealth. People like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, Black Rock, Vanguard, JP Morgan.... Etc.

This also means that these people are capable of swaying political decisions and people in power with money. Often lobbying their interests to push bills against the will of the people and without the consent of.

All of our Congress have stocks in Meta. Meta is owned by Mark Zuckerberg and the apps that he controls are Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Which, by the way, if you read the privacy policy they are doing the same thing that they are claiming China is doing. TikTok is banned in China and has been! This is another tactic to shift blame.TikTok is owned by Mr. Shou Chew, a Singaporean man.

Stocks in Meta are not valuable if people are not using the apps. This makes TikTok a competitor app. Since it is not American owned, they cannot control the narrative or the revenue and these stocks are becoming worthless. Mr. Chew would not sell the app to American corporations.

As a side note, on TikTok, the day before the ban, I was getting ads for Facebook and Instagram and there is now a link to Tiktok on facebook. I fear that Mr. Chew has caved as he said in his last video that he has been negotiating with Trump to have the app reinstated. This is NOT a victory. This means our government won and it should be avoided at all costs along with all Meta apps. Please delete them and leave 1 star reviews. Tank their ratings and crash their stocks.

3: Project 2025

I am sure some of you have heard of this by now. I've been trying to inform people about this since last year when the heritage foundation was making their agenda to pass far, right wing religious laws to suit their narrative. They are a Christian nationalist group against the rights of all humans who do not follow their ideology.

If you haven't heard of Project 2025, you can read online what the project entails. That means banning of media such as games, pornography, women's right to healthcare and safe abortion and strict laws imposed within the lgbtqia+ community. Dousing religious freedom and mandating Bibles in schools. This is just a quick snippet from my memory, but you should look into it when you can.

A silver lining:

If you have not heard of Rednote or Little Red Book, it is a completely Chinese owned app that is similar to Pinterest, Tumblr, and TikTok all in one format.

This app has been wonderful and the Chinese are overjoyed to have us there. Their government even warmly invited us to take refuge. I've personally observed instead of interacting so far.

BUT

There are many who share their thoughts on their social media platform being overrun by foreigners and diluting their carefully curated experience on the app.

Do take note that IF you decide to go there, it is NOT your home. You must abide by their laws and be kind.

1. Be courteous and use translations in both English and Traditional Chinese if you pose. DEEPL is the most accurate for translation.

2. They do NOT have to accommodate to you and your needs. Do not go in acting entitled and causing drama.

3. There will be major cultural differences and trying to understand them rather than being offended is best. We all live by different standards and they are generally curious about you and your life! So be nice.

4. TikTok slang and Brainrot is not acceptable. They think we're funny, but people are already commenting inappropriate things under videos of attractive people (and there are many attractive people there.) Brainrot will actually get you banned.

5. Observe for a little to see what kind of content they post. You can even make friends. Most of them want to learn English and are willing to teach you Mandarin.

Anyway, that's all I have to say for now.

[cherrylng]

Muse Special Interview - Matt Bellamy [THE BIG ISSUE (JP) (September 2022)]

“‘The will of the people’ is an amazing thing that should be honoured,and democracy should be something we try to protect. But sometimes it can be something to be frightened of.” MATT BELLAMY - MUSE

Special interview Muse Matt Bellamy

Blending reality and fiction, the latest album from his stay in the US after two full years of a heart-breaking pandemic

On January 6, 2021, the US Capitol was attacked. A crowd of more than 2,000 people, waving stars and stripes, guns and placards in support of then-President Donald Trump, rushed into the federal seat of power. Matt Bellamy was watching the mayhem from his home in Los Angeles, far from the capital Washington, where the attack took place. He had been away from his hometown of the UK for a long time due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and had just begun work on the ninth album for his rock band Muse.

The numerous political upheavals in the United States that had a major impact on the production

“It was a pretty special creative period,” Bellamy recalls of the last two years. “If you’re going to make something good, you have to take what’s happening a bit more seriously.”

When the new coronavirus began to hit the US, Bellamy was at home in Los Angeles with his wife Elle Evans and their dogs. The assumption that he could return home whenever he wanted was now a thing of the past, and Bellamy was no exception. Recalling London’s walkable streets and lush parks where dogs could play freely, he felt shocked, as if he had been banished from his home. “I missed the UK so much, more than I expected,” he says. The album that came to fruition during this period, Will of the People, is Muse’s most ‘American’ album, both musically and thematically. “During the two-year pandemic in Los Angeles, I was immersed in the American way of life, the politics of the country and the events that were happening at the same time. The many turmoil that occurred between the presidential election and Biden's inauguration certainly had a big impact on the production.”

This album was born amidst the pandemic and political unrest. The album, a song about people's will for the future, expresses Bellamy’s feelings about the duality of the crowd. “Democracy must be protected,” he says. “On the other hand, the out-of-control popular will can lead to horrific events, such as the attack on the US Capitol. We should be wary of populism that loudly proclaims the rights of the masses. In chaotic situations, popular will can do good or be abused.”

Muse has maintained a brilliant rock‘n’roll spirit with a “flamboyant is good” aesthetic. That's why the band’s fans have been able to listen to their hard-hitting songs that get to the heart of things without feeling self-conscious. The band’s style, which takes place in a dystopian virtual world, remains unchanged, but the album also has a geopolitical essence that links it to the problems that infest the world today. “By blending reality and fiction, we have the potential for timeless, evocative expression.”

“The album is packed with songs from all the genres Muse has worked with,” says Bellamy. “We had a proposal from the record company about doing a greatest hits album, but we didn't want to do that as a band. So we decided to make a ‘greatest hits’ album with only our best new songs on it.”

In May of this year, Muse held a charity concert in the UK in collaboration with The Big Issue

Muse performed for charity in Hammersmith, west London, for two consecutive days in May this year. The venue chosen was the Eventim Apollo, where iconic British bands such as The Beatles and Queen once played.

The last time they held a live show was back in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. They felt that their performance in front of an audience after about two and a half years had great meaning. So they decided to raise money through their performance for an organisation that works to support people living in difficult situations.

The hall, which can hold around 5,000 people, was filled with fans on both days, and on the second day a special night was held to celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Big Issue UK Edition. Three sellers were in front of the venue selling the issue with Muse on the cover, which reportedly sold fantastically well. Bellamy, who says he has been reading the magazine for more than 25 years, was inspired to work with The Big Issue by an experience in Los Angeles.

“We did most of 'Will of the People' in our studio in Los Angeles,” says Bellamy. “The homeless problem in the city was quite severe and every time we passed downtown on the way to the studio, we had to pass by people sleeping on the streets. This experience definitely influenced the album. The Big Issue also came to mind when we were discussing how we as a band should be involved in the world’s problems. So it was a natural progression for us to collaborate on a show in our home country for the first time in a long time.”

“I first came to London in the mid to late 90s. I used to buy the Big Issue just outside the tube station. When I think back, I always had either The Big Issue or Time Out [a London magazine] in my hand when I got on the tube in London.”

It's the 21st century! Tragedy in Ukraine Recalling the Northern Ireland conflict

Muse are also raising money for both Doctors Without Borders and War Child, which support victims of the war in Ukraine, at a live performance the day before their charity performance for The Big Issue.

“There is a terrible tragedy happening in Ukraine right now. Families are being separated, many people are injured and losing their lives. My heart breaks for the women and children who had to leave their husbands behind and evacuate,” says Bellamy. “I can't believe we are seeing this in the 21st century. The whole world is in crisis.”

The war in Ukraine broke out after a long period of political unrest around the world. Democracy in the US is in dire straits, many countries are grappling with the threat of the new coronavirus, while in the UK the social and economic impact of leaving the EU is becoming more serious. This has led Bellamy to turn his attention to Ireland, where he has his roots. As his mother was born in Ireland, Bellamy is eligible for an Irish passport. He says that the dual citizenship he can acquire by virtue of his roots in an EU member state is a valuable asset for a handful of lucky Britons.

“I'll probably end up applying for an Irish passport too. My mother probably already has one,” says Bellamy. “I was surprised when my mother, who saw the film ‘Belfast※’ with me, said, ‘That's exactly how it was when I was a child’. I was moved by the scenery in the film because my mother grew up in Belfast city.”

There is a key scene in the film where a mother and her young sons hide under a dining table to escape the mob outside. This scene illustrates the fact that the global upheaval we are facing is not so unusual historically. The film reminded Bellamy of his childhood memories.

“Every summer,” he recalls, “I would visit Belfast and the town of Ballymena a little further afield with my mother. At the time, we were still in the middle of the Northern Ireland conflict. I remember there were riots in the streets. My mother and I would sometimes close the front door and hide under the dining room table. The history of my mother's life, the reality she went through, and the memories of what I experienced in that place in the mid-1990s. Thanks to this film, I remember all of that.”

We find meaning in chaos through the means of art and expression.

(Laura Kelly, The Big Issue UK/Editor)

※An autobiographical film directed by Northern Ireland-born Kenneth Branagh about his childhood.

Translator's Note: Given that this is interview was translated from English to Japanese, and then using machine translation to translate it from Japanese back to English, the article may not appear the same as its original English version.

Seeing the difference in the UK cover and JP cover for Muse by The Big Issue, I actually like the JP version more in how they didn't cover it with too many words. It gives off a nice minimalist design.

Also, this article has new information that gave a lot more context to explain Matt's Irish roots. It is sadder than I have expected.

Please do support me via my ko-fi! ☕

[the-sassy-composer]

If you're an audio drama fan and have some free time this weekend, come check the @podcast-bookclub's inaugural Audio Fiction Convention. This free and virtual convention was created to celebrate all things audio fiction. Plus, I'm going to be speaking on the music, horror, and sound design panels!

[mariacallous]

The longtime owner of a distillery and taproom in Virginia did something new last month: He emailed employees detailed instructions on what to do if immigration agents show up at the business.

Call the business owners immediately. Insist to the agents that they must speak to your employer. Ask them if they have a judicial warrant — signed by a judge. Remember, everyone has a right to remain silent in interactions with law enforcement. And, finally, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have the right to enter public facilities, employees who hear about immigration agents nearby should “feel free to move the tasting room sign to CLOSED and lock the door. EVEN IF WE HAVE CUSTOMERS HERE.”

Speaking about the new policy, the distillery owner, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation, told HuffPost he was focused on making his employees and customers feel welcome.

“I sensed there was some fear and apprehension about this topic, and so I wanted to assuage that and basically be proactive and say, ‘Here’s how we’ll handle it if it happens,’” he said.

The company-wide email is part of a growing trend since President Donald Trump’s inauguration. While presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama largely prioritized the arrest and deportation of undocumented people deemed public safety threats, under Trump, federal agents arrest any undocumented person they can get their hands on, regardless of their criminal record or employment status.

Often, that takes place at workplaces — including a Baltimore pizza shop, Philadelphia meat market, New Jersey kebab restaurant, Mississippi concrete contractor and countless others over the past two months.

In response, immigrant rights and legal groups have seen a surge in demand for “know-your-rights” material, which explains how to interact with law enforcement including immigration agents. Demand is notably high from workers and business owners, they told HuffPost.

“We’ve seen an immense uptick” in demand for know-your-rights training, said Wennie Chin, senior director of community & civic engagement at the New York Immigration Coalition. The coalition includes groups that serve farm workers, domestic workers, taxi drivers, street vendors and a variety of other professions. One recent training was held for restaurant owners who wanted to prepare their own workplaces for potential law enforcement encounters, she said.

“Our team’s now doing at minimum three [trainings] a day, in person and virtual,” Chin added. “The volume has more than tripled. There’s not a day where our members are not doing know-your-rights work in the community.”

“The trainings are often hundreds of people in attendance,” said Jessie Hahn, senior counsel for labor and employment policy at the National Immigration Law Center. “A lot of those trainings have been specifically about worksite immigration enforcement and helping people understand their rights with regard to encounters with ICE at job sites.”