Democrats: Get in the fight!

Our Democratic "leaders" are (one element) of what we the people have on our side as we rebuff Trump/Musk's authoritarian onslaught. The demand that lawmakers speak up and lead is a hardy perennial; it required years of citizen pressure to peel Party big shots off George W.'s misbegotten War on Terror. We knew they knew better, but they were chickenshit and too many Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans died.

Today, too many are not just overly cautious, but they seem to be living in a non-existent world. Want a prize example? Take a listen to this podcast by Ezra Klein with some Congresscritter named Auchincloss who, along with Klein, is so enamored of his imaginary future that he can't see the nose in front of his face.

There are some Democrats who are exceptions: I think offhand of AOC, Jasmine Crockett, among the older generation Elizabeth Warren. But most just don't seem up to the moment. And that goes especially for Chuck Shumer and Hakeem Jeffries.

Charlotte Clymer offers gentle, but serious, advice to our Democratic officeholders:

I need Democratic lawmakers to understand something: there is a profound disconnect among many of you between the world as it should be and the world as it is, and we are in a moment in which many of you, bless your hearts, don’t seem to get that.

In a political environment in which even a little complacency leads to unfair consequences, many of you are not only failing to have the energy required in this moment but more importantly: simply not reading the room.

If you don’t know how to message in this moment, it’s time to pass the torch. If you’re tired of all this, it’s time to give up your seat for someone who’s ready to fight. If you don’t get that we are no longer living in the American Politics of Yesteryear, it’s time to allow people to thank you for service and make room for someone else.

It doesn’t matter how old you are. I truly don’t care about your age. What I care about is having leaders, regardless of age, who understand what we’re facing right now and act like it.

That may come across as mean, but your constituents really no longer have the luxury of being nice about this.

Please, for the love of all that’s good, ask yourself honestly if you’re being an effective messenger, and if not, maybe it’s time to ask yourself if someone else could be and decide accordingly.

They've served their time, but if they can't fight fascism, they need to get out of the way.

We are appropriately alarmed

While one crowd on Presidents Day denounced Elon Musk in front of Tesla, a larger set of demonstrators gathered outside San Francisco City Hall.

It was gratifying to be among people who weren't mincing words.

 

Yes, many of us are frightened. Our fears are not misplaced.

If we have eyes to see, we can see.

The struggle for democracy with justice has always been hard and long. That's why they call it struggle.

Musk must go!

Hundreds of San Franciscans paid a visit to the Tesla showroom on Van Ness Avenue on Presidents Day.

We were not feeling friendly to the bullying billionaire baby.

 

I doubt the brand will recover from Elon's exploits in dictatorial deconstruction.

We know what to do.

Even the folks upstairs in the Tesla building have the right idea.

And this was only one of two anti-fascist, anti-Musk/Trump, anti-MAGA demonstrations on the holiday. I'll post photos from the concurrent crowd eight blocks away from Tesla at Civic Center tomorrow.

Learning from predecessors

Apparently these resisters have been written out of history to a large extent. But their ferocious protest is actually very interesting.

The Rebecca Riots: Why did Wales rise up & what lessons might that hold for the future? 

A sustained campaign of attacks blazed across the Welsh counties of Carmarthenshire, Cardiganshire, and Pembrokeshire from 1839. Tenant-farmers and labourers, infuriated by increased charges on road travel that made their working lives and finances even more burdensome, took matters into their own hands by destroying tollhouses, gates, and bars in what became known as the Rebecca riots.

Perhaps the movement’s most recognisable aspect was its enigmatic leader ‘Rebecca’, purported to be taken from Genesis, in which Rebecca is told: ‘Be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.’ She was represented during protests by a participant in costume that combined masculine and feminine signifiers: a gown or petticoat thrown on over work clothes, or an elaborate wig paired with a false beard.

As the unrest spread across South Wales, reaching its peak in summer 1843, it grew to encompass workhouses, formerly common land enclosed by private landowners, and the estates of the local gentry.

Just as the targets of Rebeccaism went beyond tollgates, so their tactics went beyond rioting. Protesters organised mass demonstrations, stormed workhouses, resisted evictions of tenants and auctions of seized property, wrote threatening letters in Rebecca’s name, and collected money for unwed mothers and children. At public meetings, they drew up resolutions to Parliament that echoed the Chartist demand for the secret ballot and the vote for working men.

… Authorities at the time, from local magistrates to the young Queen Victoria, took the riots more seriously than many subsequent historians have. … Victoria’s adviser Lord Melbourne worried that the conflict might spiral into a revolutionary ‘general rising against property’.

Robert Peel’s Tory government, already shaken by the rise of Chartism, Ireland’s independence campaign, the general strike of 1842, and, elsewhere in Wales, popular uprisings at Merthyr Tydfil and Newport, sent in thousands of police and soldiers to occupy the area. As resistance continued, the government was forced to take the more conciliatory step of asking the people to air their grievances directly in the 1843 Commission of Inquiry

… Far from being – as some radicals sneered at the time – ‘an affair of middle-class farmers’, the Rebecca movement drew poorer farmhands, domestic servants, artisans, industrial workers, and even the commercial middle classes into its ranks. Its cross-class makeup, initially a strength, led to fractures and divisions

… Rebeccaism’s demographics also played a part in its rocky relationship with Chartism, which was entrenched in the Welsh coal and iron towns further east. While some leading Chartists cautioned against the class alliances that shaped Rebeccaism, citing the failure of this strategy in the earlier Reform campaign, others welcomed Rebecca as a potential partner in a radical popular front.

… David J.V. Jones’ Rebecca’s Children (1989) was the first exploration of events that acknowledged them as ‘larger than we thought and less respectable’. Meanwhile, in broader histories dealing with the early Victorian age and its transition to industrial capitalism, Rebeccaism tends to remain a footnote or curio, dismissed as a confused or reactionary ‘peasant rebellion’

... Rebeccaism deserves a more significant place in British radical history – partly because of, not despite, its messier and more militant dimensions. The study of movements like Rebeccaism, with all their oddities and contradictions, can be useful in the context of post-industrial politics and protest. Many recent struggles – from Occupy to the gilets jaunes – seem to be turning towards autonomous, localised, and self-sustaining coalitions in which the traditional conduits of parliamentary democracy are, at best, incidental.

Could attention to pre-modern forms of protest offer a guide to the present and future as well as a deeper understanding of the past? [via Adam Tooze. The source he cites is paywalled.]

I have to admit, reliance on localized protest worries me in the current moment. We need to be build the broadest coalitions of resistance possible across the widest social forces possible to achieve democratic (small "d") resilience. But until we do, localized resistance is better than none.

The struggle will be to find leaders and leadership structures with broad legitimacy in a country undergoing both generational and technological change. I believe we will do that; the Rebecca's did, however they are minimized today. I wait in hope -- and am on my way to today's little protest ...

Religious values assaulted by Trump's hate-filled immigration policy

 

The preamble to the legal brief filed last week by religious groups against the Trump administration's decision to invade churches to enforce (contestable) immigration law is readable and short. I've stripped out a lot of citations and added some paragraphing for clarity, but here's the explanation of why they've gone to court.

Plaintiffs in this challenge are 12 national denominational bodies and representatives, 4 regional denominational bodies, and 11 denominational and interdenominational associations, all rooted in the Jewish and Christian faiths. Plaintiffs and their members are Baptist, Brethren, Conservative Jewish, Episcopalian, Evangelical, Mennonite, Quaker, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Reconstructionist Jewish, Reform Jewish, Unitarian Universalist, United Methodist, Zion Methodist, and more.

They bring this suit unified on a fundamental belief: Every human being, regardless of birthplace, is a child of God worthy of dignity, care, and love.

Welcoming the stranger, or immigrant, is thus a central precept of their faith practices.

The Torah lays out this tenet 36 times, more than any other teaching: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).

In the Gospels, Jesus Christ not only echoes this command, but self-identifies with the stranger: “For I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink, I was a stranger, and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35).

Plaintiffs’ religious scripture, teaching, and traditions offer clear, repeated, and irrefutable unanimity on their obligation to embrace, serve, and defend the refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants in their midst without regard to documentation or legal status.

Recognizing the importance of communal religious practices “to the well-being of people and the communities of which they are a part,” the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) for over 30 years substantially restricted immigration enforcement action in or near places of worship. Although DHS has statutory authority to conduct a variety of enforcement actions—such as conducting stops and interrogations, serving process and other orders, and executing immigration arrests and raids without judicial warrant—DHS’s longstanding “sensitive locations” (or “protected areas”) policy provided that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) and Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) would do so at or near places of worship only under exigent circumstances or with prior written, high-level supervisory approval.

On January 20, 2025, DHS abruptly reversed course and rescinded the sensitive locations policy. Disavowing the need for any “bright line rules regarding where our immigration laws are permitted to be enforced,” the Rescission Memo instead directs ICE and CBP officers to “use [their] discretion along with a healthy dose of common sense” in deciding whether to conduct immigration enforcement actions at places of worship, during religious ceremonies, and at other sensitive locations. DHS’s website features a news article stating that ICE agents understand the rescission “to free them up to go after more illegal immigrants.”

The rescission reflects President Donald Trump’s goal of deporting all immigrants in the United States without lawful status during his current four-year term. To accomplish this, President Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan explained, DHS will conduct immigration enforcement actions “across the country, uninhibited by any prior administration guidelines.”

Federal officials have confirmed that the target of these enforcement actions will include undocumented immigrants with no criminal record. Over the first week of the current Trump Administration, ICE arrested over 4,500 people, including nearly 1,000 people in a Sunday “immigration enforcement blitz.”

At least one of these enforcement actions occurred at a church in Georgia during worship service. According to news coverage, an usher standing in the church entrance saw a group of ICE agents outside and locked the door. The agents said that they were there to arrest Wilson Velásquez, who had traveled to the United States from Honduras with his wife and three children in 2022.

Immediately after crossing the border, they turned themselves in to U.S. authorities and requested asylum. They were given a court date and then released after federal agents cinched a GPS-tracking monitor on Velásquez’s ankle.

After settling in suburban Atlanta, the family joined a Pentecostal church where they worshipped several times a week and helped with music. They were listening to the pastor’s sermon when ICE agents arrived to arrest Velásquez. Although Velásquez had attended all his required check-ins at an Atlanta ICE office and had a court date scheduled to present his asylum case to a judge, ICE agents arrested him anyway, explaining that they were simply “looking for people with ankle bracelets.” The pastor, Luis Ortiz, tried to reassure his congregation, but he “could see the fear and tears on their faces.”

Plaintiffs’ congregations and members face an imminent risk of similar immigration enforcement actions at their places of worship. Consistent with their call to welcome and serve all people, many have undocumented congregants and many offer social service ministries— such as food and clothing pantries, English as a Second Language (“ESL”) classes, legal assistance, and job training services—at their churches and synagogues that serve undocumented people.

An immigration enforcement action during worship services, ministry work, or other congregational activities would be devastating to their religious practice. It would shatter the consecrated space of sanctuary, thwart communal worship, and undermine the social service outreach that is central to religious expression and spiritual practice for Plaintiffs’ congregations and members.

The rescission of the sensitive locations policy is already substantially burdening the religious exercise of Plaintiffs’ congregations and members. Congregations are experiencing decreases in worship attendance and social services participation due to fear of immigration enforcement action. For the vulnerable congregants who continue to attend worship services, congregations must choose between either exposing them to arrest or undertaking security measures that are in direct tension with their religious duties of welcome and hospitality.

Likewise, the choice that congregations currently face between discontinuing social service ministries or putting undocumented participants at risk of arrest is no choice at all: Either way, congregations are forced to violate their religious duty to serve and protect their immigrant neighbors.

The brief goes on to assert that the administration's declaration of intent and ICE's actions prevent their free exercise of the dictates of their religion under the under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) and the First Amendment.

The rightwing in the United States makes much of their devotion to freedom of religious belief and practice. Often this feels like an effort to impose unpopular values on non-believers, as when they seek to suppress neutral historical and scientific information and education. 

Here religious groups demand to be allowed to exercise and affirm their core values of welcome and broad inclusion of all humans as enjoined by their understanding of their religious traditions.

Sides have been drawn.

This is a test -- and it is no rehearsal

Maybe they thought she was a pushover because she has blonde hair that hangs down to her shoulders. Women in the Trump world tend to present such an appearance. They were wrong. The glasses might give her away.

They expected Danielle Sassoon, a thirty-eight-year-old conservative lawyer whom Trump had named acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to violate her understanding of her professional responsibility by dropping the federal corruption case against New York's Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams' aid to Trump's goons at rounding up migrants. She wouldn't accept the bargain; after all, her office had reason to believe Adams is crook. Instead she argued back and resigned/was fired. (I expect which to be a contested question.)

And then six or seven attorneys at the Department of Justice in Washington in the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division also refused to do the corrupt deed.

Then lawyer Hagan Scotten who was prosecuting the Adams case in New York joined the defectors. “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” he wrote. And he quit. 

Emil Bove, Trump's flunky at DOJ, eventually did find such a cooperative underling. He also made his corrupt reasons for dropping the case clear in a vituperative letter, as did Trump's new more tame blonde Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Former US Attorney Joyce Vance immediately highlighted the human cost of these dramatic events. The attorneys at the Public Integrity Section proved their legal and personal integrity.

Rather than violate the oaths they took by following orders they could not abide by, they gave up their jobs, their incomes, and their benefits. It’s no small thing to forgo medical insurance when you’ve been living on a prosecutor’s salary and have given up your job with scant warning on a Thursday afternoon in February.

That’s the kind of courage that inspires us, and we hope it will inspire you, too. We have to stand up for what we believe in and what is right. We have to maintain our fight for democracy. It is up to us.

Writing in the New York Times, Masha Gessen draws on experience of Putin's Russia to share lessons from this drama:

In a column published last weekend, I mentioned the concept of collective hostage taking, pioneered by the Russian sociologist Yuri Levada. He spent decades trying to understand the methods of enforcement used by totalitarian regimes and the accommodations people make in response. He identified collective hostage taking as one of the most important totalitarian tools. It functions by enforcing collective responsibility and threatening collective punishment. 

In Stalin’s time, if people were arrested for a (usually invented) political crime, suspicion would also fall on their family members, their co-workers and their children’s schoolteachers and classmates. In later Soviet years, if dissidents were arrested, their colleagues would be scrutinized; some could lose their jobs or be demoted for “failing to exercise sufficient vigilance.” It is remarkable that Bove, if the reports are accurate, enacted collective hostage taking literally, by putting attorneys in a room and tasking them — over a video call — with finding at least one person to take the fall.

Levada had compassion for people who folded under conditions of collective hostage taking. Normal people confronted with abnormal demands will just try to survive, he wrote. Nothing prepares ordinary people for extraordinary times.

In fact, though, many life experiences do prepare us for times such as these. Most American schools, for example, practice collective punishment: If half of the class is unruly, the entire class may be docked recess. When I heard about lawyers being put in a room, I thought, “This has happened to my kids in New York City public schools.” In this way, U.S. schools are almost indistinguishable from the old Soviet ones.

The legal officials involved in the Adams debacle ... are only some of the first people to confront a choice most of us will face, if we choose to recognize it: Do you act like a schoolchild, who can survive and succeed only by conforming, or do you insist on your dignity and adult agency? 

Even in situations where the end seems preordained, as it certainly seemed to be in this case, will you be able to say, “I won’t be the one to do it”? If enough people withhold their cooperation, the end is no longer preordained.

The paragraph I've highlighted is our test. Opposing creeping tyranny requires both individual courage and collective solidarity. Americans aren't used to this, but we have many models in our history to draw on: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Harvey Milk, Cesar Chavez, and so many more among the immigrants who made and are still making this land. The people who built this county weren't wimps and we needn't be either.

Stirrings

Kareem Abdul Jabbar, my generation's G.O.A.T. basketball star, breaks it down:

We All Want to Save the World

If headlines from the past week are any indication, the next four years will probably see more protest gatherings than in the sixties: “Protesters in cities across the US rally against Trump’s policies, Project 2025 and Elon Musk,” “Thousands across the U.S. protest Trump policies.” “Protesters denounce Trump immigration policies outside his Florida golf club.”

If history is any guide, the demonstrations will begin at the grassroots level, among students and the disenfranchised. Mainstream America will be resistant at first, dismissing protestors as malcontents. But as our rights continue to diminish, and as the economic, social, and political impact of Trump’s implementing the Christian nationalist agenda of Project 2025 hits mainstream Americans, they will join the protests in vast numbers.

Or they won’t do anything at all.

We’ll see.

He's written a history of his times and ours. This will be out May 13, as well as a graphic novel about his life to come out this the fall.  I'll be interested to see them.

Musk's government now

It's all graft -- theft from us all -- all the way down.

New York Times

What is up with these people?

John Della Volpe is the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics's polling guru. He's been doing this a long time and is insistent that young men who are drifting to Trump have a consistent beef with American society and Democrats:

President Trump is winning their attention. Not because they love him, but because he talks about the things they care about.  Jobs. Inflation. Crime. Fairness. And most of all? Strength.

But this is about more than just politics. This is about confidence.

... Trump is winning young men not because they trust him—but because he fights.

Young men respect confidence. We respect leaders who stand for something, who don’t back down, who don’t flinch when challenged. Right now, Democrats don’t look like that. They look hesitant. They look unsure of themselves. They look like they’re waiting for permission to lead.

Obviously not all our young men are wired for this condition of insecurity veiling its fear of weakness. From that divide between aspirational identity and perceived fragility come preening and boasting. But I'm able to accept that this describes a large fraction of white young men; many young men of color might describe their grievances differently -- or perhaps not. 

Many of these young men of all races and ethnicities presumably have sisters or partners who are women; I'd be very surprised if most of those young women see the world quite the same way. (The gender gap in November's vote remains a complex phenomenon; in general, racial identities proved more powerful in determining voter choice than gender.)

But Della Volpe's account does seem plausible for characterizing Elon Musk's Muskrats who are ignorantly tearing up the U.S. government. Evidence keeps turning up about their sexist and racist enthusiasms. They are the kind of juvenile twits who don't know that complex systems -- superficially often less than rational systems -- sometimes got that way for good historical reasons that had to do with respecting the agency and diversity of citizens. They can believe that, in order to count, everybody should be smart hot shots like them. 

All of us who remember being young may remember feeling that way about our stodgy elders. 

People who acted as the Muskrats are acting in any normal context should be in jail or an insane asylum until they get over their delusions -- for the sake of the greater society. That goes for their ketamine addled billionaire leader too.

Yale historian and indispensable commentator on our descent into autocracy, Timothy Snyder, reports on his attempts last fall to warn mid-western voters about where Trump would take us.

Trump voters saw their guy as the outsider, even though he has already been president once, and has been very present in media for forty years. For Harris voters, the fact that she is Black and a woman make her an outsider; for Trump voters, or at least for many of the ones with whom I spoke, they make her an insider. And that notion that women and Blacks direct a deep state is a cultural construct.

For Trump voters, or at least many of the ones with whom I spoke this fall, Trump's (supposed) wealth also made him the change candidate. Anyone who is wealthy is seen as a daredevil who broke the rules. The image of Trump as a trailblazer was created by the man himself, not by actual earnings. More deeply, though, the notion of the wealthy person as a hero is an American cultural construct. It makes of voting a cultural act: I want to feel like I am a part of that.

... You never say: "hey, I am Elon Musk, and I care about you, therefore I am writing every American family a check for $5,000." You stay away from numbers and math. You tell a story about how the wealth of the wealthy somehow benefits everyone. And you reinforce the idea that the people who threaten the prosperity of your voters are those who threaten their culture. And so Blacks or immigrants or transexuals (or whoever) are always presented as threaten[ing] both prosperity and identity.

... The most powerful form of identity politics is Trump's, and it goes something like this: "I am a rich white guy who breaks all the rules and who therefore gets to make them, and so you should enjoy the feel of my hand in your pocket as I pick it."...

...Trump succeeded because of his identity politics, which brings race and class together in a certain way. By connecting the desire for change with emotions that make it impossible, he (and many others) generate, in the end, sadopopulism: a politics that works not because all benefit but because some learn to take pleasure in the greater suffering of others.

Agonizing over why some people might be eager to tell tear the country down is not going to get us out of this shit show. Those of us who want something better have to grasp whatever weak levers of power we have access to and meet the power grab with our power, skipping the agonizing for later.

The Trumpies, and Elon, and too many voters place their faith in nihilism; those of us defending the American experiment must keep faith with our history of striving toward justice, with generosity, with solidarity, with reality. Reality is a stubborn thing which has derailed the dreams of many an autocrat who thought they were invincible. 

A morning pick-me-up

Only one of the Super Bowl ads (yay Eagles!) caught my attention, but this one is a doozy.

Enjoy and take heart. When we fight, we win!

The 27 dirty words of Trumplandia

Once upon a time, not really that long ago (1972), the comedian George Carlin made a routine out of reciting "7 dirty words" barred from broadcast TV. The comedian Lenny Bruce had pioneered the schtick in the sixites with "9 dirty words." Bruce was arrested more than once, charged with obscenity.

The Trumpies (Christian nationalist and Project 2025 branch) have selected 27 words they are excising from federal websites. Judd Legum provides the list as imposed on the National Security Agency:

• Anti-Racism
• 
Racism

• Allyship

• Bias

• DEI

• Diversity

• Diverse

• Confirmation Bias

• Equity
• 
Equitableness

• Feminism
• 
Gender

• Gender 
• Identity
• 
Inclusion
• 
Inclusive

• All-Inclusive
• 
Inclusivity
• 
Injustice

• Intersectionality
• 
Prejudice

• Privilege
• 
Racial Identity
• 
Sexuality

• Stereotypes

• Pronouns

• Transgender
 Equality

Without language to describe reality, we cannot think clearly about the nature of the society in which we live.

Or so they hope. I trust in human creativity to enable us to find ways to speak what must be spoken. It's never "just words."

Trump's gender hate fest will get people killed and attacks us all

I sure didn't expect to be passing along a part of a New York Times editorial [gift] but the old Gray Lady is a nice pink and blue today.

... the chaos of these past few weeks shouldn’t mask that in this period, [Trump] has also waged as direct a campaign against a single, vulnerable minority as we’ve seen in generations.

... It should be recognized that society is still grappling with the cultural and policy implications of the rapidly shifting understanding of gender. There are some issues — such as participation in sports and appropriate medical care for minors — that remain fiercely debated, even by those who broadly support trans rights. There should be room for those conversations. But what shouldn’t be debated is whether the government should target a group of Americans to be stripped of their freedom and dignity to move through the world as they choose. This is a campaign in which cruelty and humiliation seem to be the fundamental point.

... It’s true that Americans are divided by the new and shifting politics around gender identity. But most, regardless of party, have a shared respect for their fellow citizens who put on a uniform, pick up a rifle and travel around the world in defense of the nation.

Mr. Trump’s targeting of transgender Americans will go far beyond the military. And his instinct for demonization, his habit of dividing the public into those worthy of protection and those who should be cast aside, his habitual cruelty to those who can be pushed around without others speaking up will go far beyond a campaign against this one small, vulnerable group. ...

The emphasis on the first sentence here is my addition. When government turns to demonizing a tiny vulnerable segment of the people, terrible subsequent acts have been incited. We've seen how this works. Push unpopular people outside the protection of society and humans become capable of atrocity. 

Adam Serwer of The Atlantic puts the MAGA campaign to make transpeople Other in its scary historical context. All freedoms won and made real in the last century are put at risk by this assault on law and human decency.

Over the past century, many groups have successfully sought to have their rights recognized, winning, at least on paper, the same rights as white, Christian, heterosexual men. The right-wing project today, which Trumpist justices support, is to reestablish by state force the hierarchies of race, gender, and religion they deem moral and foundational.

Whether that’s forcing LGBTQ people back into the closet, compelling women to remain in loveless marriages, or confining Black and Hispanic people to the drudgery of—as Trump once put it—“Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” in which they are meant to toil, the purpose of this ideological project is the same: to put the broader mass of people back in their “proper places.”

To those who see the world this way, freedom means the freedom of the majority to oppress the minority. Attacking trans people first was simply their plan for getting the American people on board with taking many other freedoms away.

That's the MAGA menu, whether they all know it or not.