Rep. Elise Stefanik with Donald TrumpPhoto: Office of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik
One of the top Republicans in Congress is calling Democrats “pedo grifters” because immigrant detention centers have baby formula.
House Republican Conference chairperson Elise Stefanik – the third-highest member of House GOP leadership – said that “pedo grifters” are sending food to immigrant babies as the right continues to use baseless accusations of pedophilia as insults against pretty much anyone who disagrees with them.
“The White House, House Dems, & usual pedo grifters are so out of touch with the American people that rather than present ANY PLAN or urgency to address the nationwide baby formula crisis, they double down on sending pallets of formula to the southern border,” she wrote. “Joe Biden has NO PLAN.”
Stefanik’s casual use of the word “pedo” shows just how mundane it has become for rightwingers to call anyone they disagree with a pedophile.
For years, the rightwing QAnon conspiracy theory has claimed that there is a secret cabal of pedophiles operating a Satanic international child sex ring led by Hollywood celebrities and Democratic elites. Effectively, the QAnon conspiracy theory allowed believers an intellectual shortcut: instead of trying to understand why people would disagree with their policy preferences – a process that requires listening to others and the ability to understand multiple ideas at once – they could just accuse anyone who disagreed with them of being a Satanic pedophile, and who really cares why Satanic pedophiles believe what they believe?
The casualization of accusing political opponents of pedophilia heightened over the last couple of months as conservatives started referring to LGBTQ people – especially teachers – as well as anyone who supports LGBTQ equality as pedophiles and groomers. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) accused Tyra Banks of grooming children because she produced a documentary about teen drag queens. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) press secretary accused anyone who opposes the Don’t Say Gay bill of being a groomer or supporting grooming.
Chaya Raichik of the anti-LGBTQ Twitter account“Libs of TikTok” regularly accuses LGBTQ teachers of “grooming” even though she has no evidence of sexual abuse occurring. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)said it was groomingfor a science camp to have non-binary counselors, and conservatives even called the anti-suicide organization The Trevor Project “a grooming organization.”
While Stefanik may have been saying that those who want babies in detention centers fed so that they can later be sexually abused, it’s more likely that she does not have any ability to engage her political opponents other than to accuse them of pedophilia. Actually presenting a plan for what to do about baby formula shortages in the U.S. – and then arguing why that plan is better than the Biden administration’s plan – is a lot harder than just calling people pedophiles.
And the baby formula shortage is real. Currently, 40% of formula is out of stock in the U.S., which has led parents to stockpile formula, exacerbating the shortage. The shortage follows the recall of a major formula producer’s products because deadly bacteria was found in a factory, the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on supply chains, and restrictive trade policies around formula.
Stefanik was echoing rightwing complaints that immigrants forced to live in processing centers near the U.S.-Mexico border.
“What is infuriating to me is that this is another example of the ‘America Last’ agenda the Biden administration continues to perpetuate,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) said last week, not presenting any alternative to immigrant access to formula other than letting babies in processing centers starve.
President Joe Biden announced a plan to address the crisis last week that included making it easier to use WIC benefits to buy formula of different sizes and types, increasing imports of formula, and cracking down on price gouging.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that the House will soon vote on a bill to grant emergency authority to WIC to address supply chain disruptions and relax certain regulations not related to the safety of baby formula.
In a later statement Stefanik’s office said that “pedo grifters” was referring to the Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans and former Republicans who advocated against the reelection of Donald Trump. They are not involved in the baby formula shortage and they aren’t in charge of presenting a plan to end the baby formula shortage, so it’s unclear how that statement explains what she said.
A Trump-appointed federal judge has blocked portions of Alabama’s so-called “Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act,” a law that punishes adults who help transgender children access gender-affirming healthcare.
Last Friday, Judge Liles C. Burke of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama temporarily blocked parts of the law that made it a felony to prescribe hormones and puberty blockers to trans youth, saying that the law is likely to cause irreparable harm if it goes into effect while the lawsuits works their way through the court system.
Burke’s decision said parents have a fundamental right to provide their children with medically-accepted treatments. Hormones and puberty blockers are used to treat various medical conditions in non-trans youth. But since Alabama’s law only sought to punish the drugs’ use by transgender youth, the lawsuit alleged that this part of the law was driven by unconstitutional sex-based discrimination.
Burke allowed other parts of the law to stand, including one requiring school teachers and nurses to out trans students to their parents and another forbidding doctors from performing gender-affirming surgical procedures on trans youth.
“Doctors had testified that such operations were not being performed on children in Alabama before the law had been enacted,”The New York Times noted.
Alabama lawmakers said that the transphobic law is meant to protect kids from “irreversible” and “experimental” medical treatments “aggressively push[ed]” by doctors and “ideological interest groups,” state lawyers said in court documents. But Burke said Alabama failed to provide “credible evidence to show that transitioning medications are ‘experimental,’” adding that hormones and puberty blockers are “well-established, evidence-based treatments for gender dysphoria in minors.”
“Parents, pediatricians and psychologists — not the state or this court — are best qualified to determine whether transitioning medications are in a child’s best interest on a case-by-case basis,” Burke wrote in his decision.
When signing the bill into law, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) said, “I believe very strongly that if the Good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl. We should especially protect our children from these radical, life-altering drugs and surgeries when they are at such a vulnerable stage in life.”
However, her religion-based opinion goes against the best practices of trans-related pediatrics outlined by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association. The organizations find that gender-affirming medical care is medically necessary and reduces suicide and depression among trans youth.
Comedian John Oliver mentioned the state’s law on the Sunday night installment of his cable news program Last Week Tonight.
In the program, Oliver interviewed 15-year-old transgender girl Harleigh Walker, who said, “If I did stop my gender-affirming care, my physical outside wouldn’t reflect who I was inside, and that would, like, completely destroy me mentally and physically.”
Oliver said, “If you can look at Harleigh, or any child, and comfortably say, ‘Take away their care that gives them peace and a sense of self,’ you are a bad person.”
During a hearing in front of the Alabama legislature last year, Dr. Morissa Ladinsky explained that surgery and hormonal therapy for trans youth both involve “lengthy informed consent [and] lengthy mental health oversight.”
Oliver quipped, “Of course, doctors are going to be thoughtful and rigorous when caring for their patients because, unlike the Alabama Legislature, they actually care about kids’ well-being,”
“To trans children in Alabama right now… you are important,” Oliver added. “Your lives are important. I cannot imagine trying to build self-esteem in childhood as your own government attempts to undermine your very existence, but you should know: You are profoundly valuable and you are irreplaceable.”
As of May, 15 Republican-led states have either passed bans on medical care for trans youth or are considering similar laws. Some of the bans have equated gender-affirming care with child abuse and threatened to arrest parents of trans youth, de-transitioning their kids and placing them in state care. Others attack doctors and threaten them with jail time for providing gender-affirming care to trans youth.
These laws are part of a larger nationwide push by Republicans to pass laws targeting LGBTQ youth. Other such laws have attempted to ban trans youth from playing sports or to ban any LGBTQ content from classrooms. These bills’ supporters have said that anyone who opposes the laws are pedophilic “groomers”, language which encourages violence against LGBTQ people and allies.
Ivey also recently signed a transphobic “bathroom bill” requiring students to use changing and restroom facilities matching the gender listed on their original birth certificates, as well as a “Don’t Say Gay” bill limiting discussion of LGBTQ topics in state classrooms.
A white supremacist teenager recently shot and killed 10 people, almost all of them Black, in a Buffalo, New York supermarket. The gunman provides insights into his motivations from a self-published manifesto that was posted online days before he committed the shooting.
“A teenage gunman entranced by a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday, methodically shooting and killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black, in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.”
The white supremacist gunman who just killed 10 people, almost all of them Black, provides insights into his motivations from a self-published manifesto that was posted online just before he committed the shooting. He cited 4Chan and the Internet for his rapid white nationalist radicalization, the infamous ‘white replacement theory’, as well as anti-semitic and racist propaganda as reasons for why he wanted to commit the shooting.
“Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the No. 3 House Republican, and other GOP lawmakers came under scrutiny Sunday for previously echoing the racist “great replacement” theory that apparently inspired an 18-year-old who allegedly killed 10 people while targeting Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo. The baseless conspiracy theory claims that politicians are attempting to wipe out White Americans and their influence by replacing them with non-White immigrants. The theory was cited repeatedly by 18-year-old shooting suspect Payton Gendron in an online document that appeared to have outlined his intention to carry out his planned attack in Buffalo because of its significant population of Black people. Eleven of the 13 people shot at a Tops Friendly Markets store on Saturday were Black, according to police.”
After the Buffalo, New York mass shooting left 10 dead at the hands of the white supremacist shooter, right-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald tried to distract from the event and provide cover for his hate-mongering buddies like Tucker Carlson. Greenwald wrote an entire Substack rant defending how Tucker has made the “white replacement theory” mainstream and more digestible for regular TV viewers by completely ignoring it.
Temperatures in parts of India and Pakistan have reached record levels, putting the lives of millions at risk as the effects of the climate crisis are felt across the subcontinent.
The average maximum temperature for northwest and central India in April was the highest since records began 122 years ago, reaching 35.9 and 37.78 degrees Celsius (96.62 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit) respectively, according to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD).
Last month, New Delhi saw seven consecutive days over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), three degrees above the average temperature for the month of April, according to CNN meteorologists. In some states, the heat closed schools, damaged crops and put pressure on energy supplies, as officials warned residents to remain indoors and keep hydrated.
The heatwave has also been felt by India’s neighbor Pakistan, where the cities of Jacobabad and Sibi in the country’s southeastern Sindh province recorded highs of 47 degrees Celsius (116.6 Fahrenheit) on Friday, according to data shared with CNN by Pakistan’s Meteorological Department (PMD). According to the PMD, this was the highest temperature recorded in any city in the Northern Hemisphere on that day.
People cool themselves in a canal in Lahore, Pakistan, on April 29
“This is the first time in decades that Pakistan is experiencing what many call a ‘spring-less year,” Pakistan’s Minister of Climate Change, Sherry Rehman said in a statement.
Temperatures in India are expected to improve slightly this week with maximum temperatures across northwest India expected to drop by 3 to 4 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit), the IMD said. Temperatures in Pakistan are also expected to be closer to average — about 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) — later this week.
But experts say the climate crisis will cause more frequent and longer heatwaves, affecting more than a billion people across the two countries.
India is among the countries expected to be worst affected by the impacts of the climate crisis, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“This heatwave is definitely unprecedented,” said Dr. Chandni Singh, IPCC Lead Author and Senior Researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. “We have seen a change in its intensity, its arrival time, and duration. This is what climate experts predicted and it will have cascading impacts on health.”
Loss of crops
India often experiences heatwaves during the summer months of May and June, but this year temperatures started rising in March and April.
In the northern state of Punjab, known as “India’s bread basket,” that’s causing heat stress, not only for millions of agricultural workers, but for fields of wheat they rely on to feed their families and sell across the country.
Gurvinder Singh, director of agriculture in Punjab, said an average increase of up to 7 degrees Celsius (12.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in April had reduced wheat yields.
“Because of the heatwave we’ve had a loss of more than 5 quintal (500 kilograms) per hectare of our April yield,” Singh told CNN Monday.
Chandni Singh, from the IPCC and no relation to Gurvinder Singh, said agricultural workers were more likely to suffer from the oppressive heat.
“People who work outdoors — farmers, those in construction, manual labor — will suffer more. They have less options to cool down and can’t stay away from the heat,” she said.
The Yamuna River on May 1 in New Delhi, India.
School closures and power cuts
In some parts of India, demand for electricity has led to a coal shortage, leaving millions without power for up to nine hours a day.
Last week, coal stocks at three out of the five power plants Delhi relies on to supply its power reached critically low levels, dropping below 25%, according to Delhi’s Power Ministry.
India canceled more than 650 passenger trains through the end of May to clear tracks for more cargo trains as the country scrambles to replenish coal stocks at power plants, a senior official from the country’s Railways Ministry told CNN.
Indian Railways is a key supplier of coal to power plants across the country.
Some Indian states, including West Bengal and Odisha, have announced school closures to deal with the rising temperatures.
“Children who have to traveled to school, many of them are getting nosebleeds, they can’t tolerate this heatwave,” West Bengal’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee told reporters last week.
In recent years, both the federal and state governments have implemented a number of measures to mitigate the effects of heatwaves, including shutting down schools and issuing health advisories for the public.
But according to Chandni Singh, more should be done to prepare for future heatwaves.
“We don’t have a heat action plan and there are gaps in planning,” Singh said. “You can only adapt so much. This heatwave is testing the limits of human survivability.”
Correction: This story has been updated to correct a conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
I watch a lot of videos. But this is one of the most important ones on racism and bigotry I want people to watch. It is short, but powerful. This is what really is being taught to young white kids by maga / racist parents. Notice that when the black guy with damage to his door and car tries to talk to the racist white farther of the child, the white man discharges a gun. Can you imagine living next door to them? Notice the open threatening hostility of a child’s birthday cake with a political message that drums into them violence if they don’t get their way even while they are too young to understand it. The cake was for a ten year old. This is happening in the US. This is happening as the Republicans champion racism while decrying that democrats and teacher are grooming / indoctrinating kids because they teach the real racist history of the US and are tolerant of the LGBTQ+ kids who are different from the mainstream. This the part of the US we need to understand has had a real resurgence since tRump an dnow supported activly by the Republican party. Hugs
Class president and first openly LGBTQ student at his school Zander Moricz is taking on his school for censorship. Jayar Jackson and Jessica Burbank break it down on The Watchlist.
“Florida high school senior Zander Moricz was called into his principal’s office last week. As class president his whole high school career — and his school’s first openly LGBTQ student to hold the title — this was a fairly routine request. But once he entered the administrator’s office, he said, he immediately knew “this wasn’t a typical meeting.” ***
A new Alabama law that targets trans youth went into effect on May 8 and is causing concern for LGBTQ+ people, their families, and allies. Signed into law by Governor Kay Ivey on April 8, the “Alabama Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act” makes it a felony for doctors to prescribe hormones and puberty blockers for those under age 19, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The law is part of a wider swath of anti-trans youth legislation cropping up across Republican-controlled states, but this bill is uniquely extreme in targeting health care providers with potential felony charges. Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, an Alabama pediatrician who treats gender dysphoria in children, testified during the bill’s federal court hearing: “This will force us into a place of risking a felony conviction for providing evidence-based care.”
As of this writing, the law is in effect, meaning that providing gender-affirming medical care for trans youth in Alabama is a felony. According to AL.com, the law is being challenged by a lawsuit filed by parents of four transgender youth who argue the law will “deprive their children of access to established medical care that is safe, effective, and necessary.” Also party to the suit are a child psychologist who works with trans youth, a pediatrician, and a pastor. In the meantime, plaintiffs are asking for a temporary hold on the law.
Trans advocates and experts are sounding the alarm. As Chase Strangio, deputy director for trans justice with the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman during a May 9 appearance on the program, this “[creates] an absolutely terrifying sea change in the reality on the ground for trans people, their families, and their doctors in Alabama — and not just in Alabama, but across the Southeast.”
I have been working in trans legal advocacy for 18 years and today is probably the most upsetting day with a felony ban on health care going into effect in Alabama. Not much noise nationally from our “allies” either.
“The University of Alabama has a gender clinic that is serving trans adolescents and their families, not just in Alabama, but in Georgia and Florida and Tennessee and Mississippi,” Strangio continued. “And in a matter of hours, all of that care is becoming a felony, which means families are uprooting their lives. They’re trying to figure out what, when, and whether they can get life-saving care for their adolescent children.”
In other states, legislators are pushing to adopt “trans refuge” policies that would welcome trans people and their families from hostile states. California senator Scott Wiener, who sponsored a bill in his home state as part of this effort, publicly criticized Alabama’s law. “At midnight, Alabama’s vile law criminalizing trans youth accessing gender-affirming care — threatening parents & doctors with 10 years in prison — went into effect. We’re working in coalition w/19 other states to pass laws granting refuge to impacted families. We have your backs,” Wiener wrote on Twitter.
According to Bay City News, the proposed California bill would stop other states from subpoenaing medical records from California in order to separate trans children from their parents or to penalize families for seeking gender-affirming care, and would bar law enforcement from, as reported by the outlet, “making or intentionally participating in the arrest of an individual with an out-of-state warrant for allowing a child to receive gender-affirming health care.”
Twenty-one LGBTQ lawmakers in 16 states have committed to introducing similar legislation, according to the Victory Institute, an organization that promotes LGBTQ politicians.
Republican lawmakers are echoing the anti-immigrant rhetoric. An MSNBC political panel joined American Voices with Alicia Menendez to discuss the danger of touting lies about immigrants.
Rep. Elise Stefanik with Donald TrumpPhoto: Office of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik
Photo: Shutterstock
People cool themselves in a canal in Lahore, Pakistan, on April 29“This is the first time in decades that Pakistan is experiencing what many call a ‘spring-less year,” Pakistan’s Minister of Climate Change, Sherry Rehman said in a statement.Temperatures in India are expected to improve slightly this week with maximum temperatures across northwest India expected to drop by 3 to 4 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit), the IMD said. Temperatures in Pakistan are also expected to be closer to average — about 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) — later this week.But experts say the climate crisis will cause more frequent and longer heatwaves, affecting more than a billion people across the two countries.India is among the countries expected to be worst affected by the impacts of the climate crisis, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).“This heatwave is definitely unprecedented,” said Dr. Chandni Singh, IPCC Lead Author and Senior Researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. “We have seen a change in its intensity, its arrival time, and duration. This is what climate experts predicted and it will have cascading impacts on health.”
The Yamuna River on May 1 in New Delhi, India.
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