Secretary Marco Rubio meets with Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot at the State Department, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026 in Washington. (AP Phoro/Kevin Wolf)
The Trump administration is nearly tripling the number of countries whose passport holders will be required to post bonds of up to $15,000 to apply to enter the United States.
Less than a week after adding seven countries to the list of nations subject to visa bonds, bringing the total to 13, the State Department on Tuesday added 25 more. The bond requirement for the latest additions will take effect Jan. 21, according to a notice posted on the travel.state.gov website.
The move means that 38 countries, most of them in Africa but some in Latin America and Asia, are now on the list, which makes the process of obtaining a U.S. visa unaffordable for many.
It’s the latest effort by the Trump administration to tighten requirements for entry to the U.S., including requiring citizens from all countries that require visas to sit for in-person interviews and disclose years of social media histories as well as detailed accounts of their and their families’ previous travel and living arrangements.
U.S. officials have defended the bonds, which can range from $5,000 up to $15,000, maintaining they are effective in ensuring that citizens of targeted countries do not overstay their visas.
Payment of the bond does not guarantee a visa will be granted, but the amount will be refunded if the visa is denied or when a visa holder demonstrates they have complied with the terms of visa.
The new countries covered by the visa bond requirement as of Jan. 21 are Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Benin, Burundi, Cape Verde, Cuba, Djibouti, Dominica, Fiji, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Nigeria, Senegal, Tajikistan, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
They join Bhutan, Botswana, the Central African Republic, the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, Mauritania, Namibia, Sao Tome and Principe, Tanzania, Turkmenistan and Zambia on the list.
Randy in a post asked the question I think many ask here. Why do I champion the trans community so forcefully? Nan asked me a few years ago if I was feeling like I was trans, and no I am a cis gay male and happy in it. Although if not for my past I would have liked to be free to explore a more feminine side of myself. Ron and I do have trans people in our family but I have never met them. The truth is in the page why I do this. I want to give a voice to those that have no voice and right now the most targeted unfairly groups are trans people / kids and brown skinned people ICE is going after. Why do I put so much effort in to giving them a voice? Because as an abused little boy people in my town knew I was being abuse but no one gave me a voice, no one spoke up for me. Hugs.
How Americans are manipulated by online misinformation and political rhetoric.
Joseph McConville’s first memory of being online was at 13 years old when he started playing Neopets, a virtual pet game, at his home in Boynton Beach, Fla. At the time, he had no clue that just months later, the internet would suck him into the alt-right.
As a young, white man, McConville says he was taught to believe that he’d have everything he wanted.
He started to realize this dream wouldn’t come to fruition when he was pulled out of private school as his parents struggled during the 2008 recession.
McConville quickly graduated from kids games to popular social media sites like Myspace and Facebook. But it was when he found FunnyJunk.com in ninth grade that he started being exposed to alt-right content.
The website gave users the ability to upload memes and upvote popular content. When McConville began using it, he was initially exposed to dark humor and edgy right-wing memes.
He then migrated to 4chan, a website known for hosting anonymous, fringe, right-wing communities, where he started engaging with content used to stoke extremist meaning —pushing us vs. them narratives that alienated McConville from his multicultural South Florida community.
“Everyone else is wrong. … These guys are right. These guys get it,” says McConville. The deeper he got, the more anger he felt—especially towards transgender people.
“It’s all a psyop … there’s a big trans psyop to destroy manhood,” McConville remembers believing for nearly a decade. “It’s all about making men hate themselves, to become women, to weaken the American hegemony.”
McConville, now 30, eventually found his way out of the alt-right world around 2018 when he was deradicalized by a friend who had previously been a part of the community.
But since then, the pervasiveness of this thinking has grown. What was once conspiratorial thinking on fringe websites has now become commonplace. “The [2016] Trump election changed a lot of things, it all became serious,” McConville told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “You feel like, ‘Wow, we’re actually being listened to—we’re changing the mainstream talking points.’”
Transgender Americans have been one of the biggest targets of this alt-right rhetoric, and it’s effective. Since 2022, Americans have increased their favorability towards laws limiting protections for trans people and have become less favorable towards policies safeguarding them.
The site of Charlie Kirk’s assassination after it took place. (KSL News Utah)
This change in public perception may be because of the growing claims that falsely link transgender people as perpetrators of mass violence and domestic terrorism. After Charlie Kirk’s death in September, these narratives reached a boiling point.
But how did Americans get taken to believe this anti-LGBTQ lie? And what does it say about how people can be brainwashed to hate?
Who’s Pushing the False Link Between Trans People and Domestic Terrorism?
One reason many Americans began to believe that trans people are more likely to be linked to terrorism is because trusted sources in mainstream conservative spaces are telling them it’s true. Even though the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are cisgender men, the Heritage Foundation, notably behind Project 2025, recommended the FBI create a category of domestic terrorism called Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism, which suggests transgender people pose an imminent threat.
“I think some people know that this is false, but push it,” Thekla Morgenroth, a professor of psychology at Purdue University, told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “It’s worth giving false information if you get people on your side and support your opinion, and I think that is malicious.”
Unlike when McConville was in the alt-right, many of the people behind the rhetoric today hold powerful positions in the government. After a shooting in August at a Minnesota Catholic school perpetrated by a transgender person, Rep. Lauren Boebert falsely said there was a “pattern of transgender violence in our country.” Trump officials and other members of Congress used this as an excuse to attack gender-affirming care. And Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice, has insisted that hormone replacement therapy played a role in the shooting, although officials do not believe the perpetrator was using hormones.
This narrative has bled into the mainstream media who are used to trusting government sources. Just a few hours after Kirk was pronounced dead, The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets picked up claims from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that the bullet case engravings pointed to a motive related to “transgender ideology,” a term coined by transphobic commentators. The bullet casings ultimately did not have any reference to transgender people.
Nevertheless, suspicions around this shooter being connected to the transgender community spread like wildfire.
Megyn Kelly in her video. (Megyn Kelly on YouTube)
Former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly posted a video titled “Megyn Kelly Reveals the Truth About the ‘Trans’ Phrases Found on Ammo of Gun Which Shot Charlie Kirk,” to YouTube on Sept. 11, 2025, where she falsely told over 4 million subscribers, “There’s a particularly high percentage [of transgender people] committing crimes these days and it is responsible and important to say so.” The video now has 2.1 million views and Kelly has not retracted these comments.
Her followers—who believed her false claims—began calling for extreme action in the video’s comment section. @WonkoTheDork wrote, “Trans insanity needs to end. I don’t care how, this has to stop.” And @kathleenbarton-m6c wrote, “As an American, I completely agree that this [Trans] movement needs to be completely eradicated.”
Referencing Kirk as a martyr, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took it a step further, writing in a press release that “corrupted ideologies like transgenderism and Antifa are a cancer on our culture and have unleashed their deranged and drugged-up foot soldiers on the American people.”
The Social Psychology of Transphobia
Morgenroth thinks many people who endorse rhetoric around transgender domestic terrorism are threatened or afraid of otherness and of the breaking of traditional gender norms.
“People are very attached to the way that they think about gender because it gives them a sense of certainty—it gives them a sense of who they are and who they’re not,” they say.
Morgenroth says people come up with justifications for their discomfort, even if they don’t make sense.
“‘Here’s an explanation for why I should be scared. I’m gonna endorse that and I’m gonna believe that regardless of whether that makes logical sense or not,’” they told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “I think that’s what’s happening and why people are so willing to endorse these conspiracy beliefs or theories about trans people.”
Joseph Vandello, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida, says that when influential figures ramp up a threat, it triggers an emotional response of fear or anger, which leads to a desire to punish or exclude people.
“This is the same playbook that people were using against gay people going back to the 1970s or against other kinds of marginalized or minority groups like Jews,” Vandello told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES, referencing the gay panic of that era. “I think there’s this idea that if you frame the issue in terms of a threat, then it becomes an issue of moral protection of the community.”
Another One Down the Rabbit Hole
Vandello says many young men fall for anti-trans narratives because they confirm their place of privilege in the world and validate their insecurities. He coined the term “precarious manhood,” which is the idea that manhood is a social status that has to be won and can be lost. His research indicates that threats to one’s sense of manhood—like trans and queer identities—provoke not only insecurity, but aggression.
Jordan Peterson (right) being interviewed by Sean Hannity in 2025. (Fox News)
Ten years ago, Justin Brown-Ramsey became a case study of precarious manhood, lashing out when he began thinking that trans people were a threat. At 18 years old, and in search of an escape from his parents’ divorce, he started binge-watching YouTube lectures from Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist who’s best known as an outspoken anti-trans thought leader and has said that using someone’s preferred pronouns is the road to authoritarianism.
“He has a degree, he’s working at an institution, it seems like if that’s the kind of guy that has this opinion, I should probably also have that opinion,” Brown-Ramsey told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES.
This intellectualized version of transphobia appealed to the sense of insecurity Brown-Ramsey faced growing up in a household with strictly enforced gender roles.
Eventually, Brown-Ramsey became an active participant in anti-trans rhetoric. As an anonymous keyboard warrior, he’d fight in the YouTube comments against the #MeToo, feminist and trans rights movements.
Near the end of his senior year of high school, Brown-Ramsey brought this hatred into the real world against another classmate.
“They mentioned they were trans, and I recall always taking issue with that for seemingly no reason, and being just generally antagonistic about that,” says Brown-Ramsey, now 28.
He purposefully misgendered the student in class and started lashing out against friends, family and romantic partners until he was almost totally isolated.
“I think over time, the less acceptable my behavior was for people in person, the more it became acceptable to lean into the online version of that,” he says. “It went from those lecture videos to watching long rant videos about trans people and gay people, or seeking out stuff that was more 4chan-adjacent.”
Brown-Ramsey, who eventually left the alt-right after deeply engaging with U.S. history in college, believes he was manipulated to hate trans people because it helped him displace his anger about other elements of his life. “I think it was the fact that I was lower working class or lower middle class, and didn’t have an economic future ahead of me,” he says. “I was like, ‘Well if the world is that way then I just might as well be hateful and try to be more powerful than somebody.’”
Undercover in the Alt-Right
Anthony Siteman (Photo courtesy of Siteman, design by Sam Donndelinger)
This phenomenon of young men getting drawn in by alt-right algorithms fascinated 21-year-old Anthony Siteman, who started investigating online extremism ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
“My main goal was to understand how and why people became radicalized,” Siteman, a senior at Quinnipiac University, told Uncloseted Media.
Siteman immersed himself on right-wing sites like Rumble and Gab as well as encrypted messaging apps like Telegram where he joined channels that included Proud Boys. He noticed trends that draw people in: all caps text, red alarm emojis and inflammatory language, which all trigger a sense of urgency and concern.
He saw constant racist, sexist and transphobic language, but also violent videos and memes created from the livestreamed footage of the 2019 mosque shootings in New Zealand that left 51 people dead.
Even though he entered this project to learn about indoctrination, sometimes he felt his own views slipping. “ I was really questioning myself and what I believed,” he says, adding that he had to turn to his professor to keep him grounded. “They make you really question all of reality.”
“Social media companies are feeding people more extreme content, more emotional content,” Vandello says. He explained that emotionality is what has made the online alt-right successful at manipulating users against transgender people.
Siteman agrees: “ It’s always framed about fear, anger, and just some sense of belonging.”
The Way Out
Siteman believes that to exit these spaces, people outside the alt-right should use empathetic communication to help those in their network who have been radicalized.
For Brown-Ramsey, it was a professor that pulled him out.
“Unlike online spaces, where I curated the information that I wanted to see, and the algorithm fed me more of the same bigoted, hateful content, college was perhaps the first time I was required to engage with media outside of my usual diet,” Brown-Ramsey published in an essay about his experience.
Brown-Ramsey had to read books aloud in class like “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” which detailed the abolitionist’s experience being born into slavery. “The narrative turned a mirror onto me and, in upsetting detail, showed me that my inclinations toward antagonizing those who looked, acted, or believed differently than myself [were the same beliefs that] led to Douglass’ dehumanization,” he wrote.
“That trajectory is really just me learning, ‘Why should I be at odds with a trans person if both of us work crappy jobs and can’t pay our bills?’ Obviously, that’s not who I should be angry at, but it took a while to get around to that,” Brown-Ramsey says.
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The middle of the video shows the ICE thug not giving the woman time to do as ordered. She was told to move her car and leave she was trying but got cut off by another auto, the ICE thug grabbed the door handle as she was starting to pull out and he already had his gun out. He stuck the gun into the open window and shot her point blank. He was in no danger as he was beside the car not in front of it. When Ron saw the video as I was watching the show on the kitchen TV while doing dishes and he broke down in tears over it. I was also very upset. Gang thugs rampaging in cities with no restraint on what they are allowed to do. These are gang members, militia members, and Jan 6th insurrectionists. They are Stephen Millers brownshirts and Gestapo. You know Miller the guy who said on national TV that the president must never be questioned and is a white supremacist Jewish Nazi. He has claimed he doesn’t consider him self a Jew but I be the Nazi’s do. Hugs
Hi all. I hate to keep posting such negative awful stuff in the new year but what I always wanted to do with this blog is to give a voice to those that don’t have one. It is hard to read all these news articles but please remember while we sit comfortably in our homes there are others struggling to simply survive. The more we learn about these people the more we might be able to help. This shows how many of the Israeli population are complicit and simply don’t care about the suffering of the Palestinians. This is why I say it is not just the Israeli government but the countries media leading the population into compliance and hate for the Palestinian people. Remember they stormed the offices of the justice department of a judge trying to hold IDF soldiers to account for violently raping a Palestinian man causing life threatening injuries. Those IDF soldiers when on TV later to brag about what they did. Thanks for all who read / watch and add your voice to the conversation. Best wishes and hugs. Scottie
Israeli Influencer Uses Starving Gaza Children to Make Funny Video
Occupied Palestine (QNN)- An Israeli social media creator mocked Palestinian suffering by using footage of starving children lining up for a hot meal in Gaza during Israel’s blockade on aid in a funny video.
Morya Apple captioned the video: “Me on a normal day when I reach three in the afternoon without putting anything in my mouth” versus “Me on a fast day at 10 in the morning”.
Videos of Israeli content creators making fun of Palestinians suffering without water, food and electricity have gone viral over the past two years during the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza.
Last year, an Israeli Tiktok trend showed Israeli settlers prank-calling family members, pretending to seek donations for Palestinian children, to mock their suffering in Gaza.
The man was found with his hands and feet tied behind his back. That is what hog tied means. Please explain to me how he could then put a noose around his neck and hang himself? And it has happened more than once according to this? Some people are killing the detainees and ICE is covering up for it. Hugs
Chaofeng Ge died four days after entering ICE custody in Pennsylvania on August 5, with an agency report stating he was found by agents with “a cloth ligature around his neck”.
“I am devasted by the loss of my brother and by the knowledge that he was suffering so greatly in that detention center,” Yanfeng Ge, the brother of Chaofeng, said in a statement shared with Newsweek. “He did not deserve to be treated that way. I want justice for my brother, answers as to how this could have happened, and accountability for those responsible for his death.”
Chaofeng Ge, 32, died while in ICE detention in Pennsylvania in August 2025. | Ge family handout
What To Know
Ge, 32, arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border near Tecate, California, on November 22, 2023, and was arrested by the Border Patrol for unlawful entry. Officers released him into the U.S. with a Notice to Appear for a hearing at a later date.
The records from ICE went quiet for over a year before agents encountered Ge in Lower Paxton Township, Pennsylvania, in January 2025. He was accused of accessing a device issued to another who did not authorize its use, conspiracy – accessing a device issued to another who did not authorize use, theft by deception—false impression, conspiracy—theft by deception, criminal use of a communication facility, and unlawful use of a computer—access to disrupt function.
Ge, who lived in Queens, New York, was convicted of the first two of these charges by the Court of Common Pleas in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, on July 31, and he was sentenced to six to 12 months with credit for time served, so he was released from local custody and ICE agents detained him.
ICE is required to issue reports on all deaths within its custody, including Ge’s. The report states he was assessed with the help of a Mandarin interpreter on August 1, when he denied any past medical or mental health issues.
Four days later, on August 5 at around 5:20 a.m., officers at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center (MVPC) in Philipsburg say they found him in a shower stall with the cloth around his neck. Despite getting him onto the ground and attempting lifesaving measures, including CPR, Ge was pronounced dead roughly 40 minutes later.
For Ge’s family, this does not answer all their questions, and they have filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in the Southern District of New York.
An autopsy report seen by Newsweek showed Ge was found tied with a bedsheet, with linens around his wrists and ankles in what the report described as a “hog-tied” position. The medical examiner noted that there had been other reported incidents of people who had hung themselves having done something similar, and that there were no obvious defense wounds.
These details were also laid out in the criminal complaint filed by the family’s attorney, David Rankin, a partner at Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP in New York City. The complaint alleges that ICE denied Ge the mental health care he needed and ignored requests for more details on the conditions at the MVPC.
Newsweek asked DHS whether Ge had been tied up and whether it was cooperating with the lawsuit filed in New York. Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin did not answer these questions, but repeated similar messaging on detention deaths: that ICE takes each one seriously and thoroughly investigates them all.
What People Are Saying
David B. Rankin, the family’s attorney, in a statement to Newsweek: “It is truly mystifying how any detention facility can let someone leave their room, create three nooses and then hang themselves without anyone knowing. What’s worse is the lack of mental health care which could have prevented this tragedy. Mr. Ge’s death represents a totally failure on the part of the GeoGroup and the DHS.”
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, in a statement to Newsweek: “Chaofeng Ge passed away at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center. All in-custody deaths are tragic, taken seriously, and are thoroughly investigated by law enforcement. ICE takes its commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in our custody very seriously.”
What’s Next
The lawsuit is asking for a judge to force DHS and ICE to release the details on Ge’s case.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text “988” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.
OK let’s discuss the hidden thing here. A 20 plus year old claims he has never had sex. I remember being a 16 yr old newly inducted into the SDA church. Any touching of your male members was a huge sin they constantly harped on. I did try, but seriously, a teen boy with my history but any normal teen boy is going to do the deed to get off. And for many of them it leaves them with after crippling guilt of not pleasing their god who watched them do it. God is a perv. I can’t tell you the number of boys in that church school I hugged with and they cuddled with me … but we never had sex. Two wanted to but if I got thrown out of the school I had to return to the brutal home I was using the school to escape from. But the idea of just ignoring one’s hormone driven sex drive is not healthy and the religious leaders pushing that all did it when they were teens. But the grift has to be kept up. Hugs
MAGA influencer Nick Shirley speaks during a roundtable discussion on antifa at the White House on Oct. 8, 2025. ( Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Nick Shirley really wants the world to know that he’s never had sex. The YouTuber who moved from “prank” videos to the more lucrative world of creating MAGA disinformation apparently believes that sexual inexperience is an armor against accusations that he’s a liar. “I’m a virgin. I don’t have sex with random girls. You’re not gonna catch me on those sexual allegation charges,” he rambled on “PBD Podcast,” insisting that he is “religious” and doesn’t “have any vices.”
A deeper dig shows even more how ridiculous this situation is. Shirley has a history of dishonesty, which includes paying immigrant laborers to hold pro-Biden signs, clearly hoping voters would think they were self-motivated. In another video, he claimed Portland had “fallen” and “antifa” had taken “control of the city,” an unvarnished lie.
CNN verified that children were being dropped off at a day care center Shirley had targeted. The Minnesota Star Tribune visited the day cares in question and found, when they were allowed access, children playing and napping peacefully. CBS News reviewed security footage showing kids being dropped off at one targeted center. Others were indeed empty; they had gone out of business before Shirley filmed outside the buildings.
Shirley stands accused of lying for racist reasons, so his “but I’m a virgin” defense is irrational — at least on the surface. But it makes more sense, in a psychosexual way, in light of the right’s long-standing fear and loathing of day cares.
Shirley stands accused of lying for racist reasons, so his “but I’m a virgin” defense is irrational — at least on the surface. But it makes more sense, in a psychosexual way, in light of the right’s long-standing fear and loathing of day cares. After all, the scandal Shirley is exploiting isn’t really about day cares. It’s about a larger case in Minnesota of Feeding Our Future, a fraudulent food pantry that was run by Aimee Bock, a white woman who was convicted in March of cheating taxpayers out of nearly $250 million of pandemic funds. While Bock was the mastermind, other defendants in the case are Somali American. On Dec. 30, a federal judge cleared the way for the government to seize $5.2 million in assets from Bock.
If Shirley was only interested in building his hoax on that existing and very real case, he could have targeted anti-hunger charities for his fake sting. Instead, he went after day cares, which are only tangentially related insofar as they are — along with churches, mosques, schools and community centers — sites that were supposed to get assistance from the fraudsters but never received it.
These businesses were picked almost certainly because Shirley and his colleagues have tapped into the long-standing tendency of paranoid reactionaries to make day cares the subject of conspiracy theories. Along with birth control and abortion — whose providers are also smeared constantly with right-wing lies — day care is loathed on the right for allowing women to work instead of being financially dependent on a husband. In the 1980s, day care workers were accused of being Satanists. Now, during the MAGA era, the scapegoat for men’s fears of female independence has shifted from imaginary devil-worshippers to real immigrants. White women are implicitly accused of using immigrant labor as a cheat to avoid their god-given duty to quit work to stay home and raise babies. Vice President JD Vance has been especially loud with his belief that day care is pushing women away from their supposedly inherent desire to be housewives.
Vance almost certainly doesn’t believe his own narrative. For one thing, it’s illogical to believe women would think, “Gosh, I want nothing more than to stay at home, but if there’s a day care down the street, I guess I have to use it.” His own wife has been outspoken about how much she loved working at her law firm that offered on-site childcare — and how much she misses it. But Vance has apparently decided that the bulk of support for his 2028 presidential bid will be rooted in the world of extremely online, sexually dysfunctional misogynists that love shady influencers like Shirley. The vice president’s messaging strategy has long been focused on this loose conglomerate known as the “manosphere”: bitter divorced men, “incels” (involuntarily celibates) and devotees of the “red pill,” an ideology that holds that dating and marriage aren’t about love but about men tricking or forcing women into submission.
The manosphere isn’t just deeply misogynist; it’s also incredibly racist. For liberals taking a cursory glance into that world, it can be very confusing how MAGA men can somehow blame immigrants for their own dating woes. But in the cesspool of incoherent resentment that Vance is clearly absorbing, the alleged evils of feminism and immigration are seen as part of a larger “woke” conspiracy against the white man. Before he died, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk often posted about how “who we actually can’t stand are angry, liberal, white women.” He would portray white women as idiots for not perceiving immigrants as a threat. “If woke is a mind virus,” he posted, “then white college indoctrinated women are the most susceptible hosts.” Influencers like LibsofTikTok hold up white women who resist mass deportations as selfish ninnies who just want to keep their babysitters.
Shirley has engaged in this rhetoric himself. “White liberal women tend to support the people that steal and rob from them,” he claimed in one post. Another was more ominous: “Liberal white womens [sic] logic and empathy will get them killed eventually.”
In this toxic stew of sexual resentment, misogyny and racism, it makes more sense that Shirley thinks his virginity is relevant. Anti-immigrant sentiment is woven into a larger MAGA narrative about expelling allegedly decadent and foreign influences. White male dominance, people like Shirley believe, can be restored by adhering to strict sexual and social mores prescribed by right-wing Christianity. Abstaining from sex until marriage is part of a larger program meant to produce male-dominated marriages, where wives are too busy with large broods of white children to hold jobs. Attacking Black immigrants at a day care center has powerful symbolic resonance; it’s seen as an important front in a war both to make America whiter and to restore white women to a submissive role in the home.
The irony is that Shirley’s diatribe about his sexual status only underscores how much the attack on the day cares is not, contrary to his claims, driven by a nonpartisan, disinterested desire to end fraud. That much was always obvious. Shirley loves Donald Trump, who is himself a convicted fraudster who continues to use his office to enrich himself in blatantly corrupt ways. Shirley has followed the president’s lead — he, too, has a long history of posting racist vitriol about immigrants.
But bringing his sexuality and views on gender relations into the discussion — when no one else has done so — suggests that those issues aren’t far from mind, either. The fixation on “purity” is a common fascist obsession, manifesting in backwards fantasies of racial and sexual purity. None of this has any relation to the real world where people of all races and genders are just trying to do their jobs, raise their children and live their lives.
Scottie's Playtime 