The same Heritage Foundation judicial organization funded by wealthy Christion dominionists billionaires that also are funding the rabid right wing groups attacking the trans kids and drag queens. All in an attempt to stop the US from joining every other industrial advanced nation in the world in advancing civil rights and social understanding. These people are demanding the US retreat into a world they think existed long ago written about 2,500 years ago by people who did not understand anything about germs, the earth being round, space itself, or biology because they thought / wrote that striped sticks seen while animals bred would cause the color of the offspring. Think of that last alone. The people the fundamentalists are basing their anti-trans idea on comes from people who thought striped sticks (some versions say just sticks or branches) caused a difference in the color of the birthed offspring if the animals seen them while fucking. Really that is the level of understanding these people are basing their anti-trans, they’re there is no such thing as a different gender ID than the one identified at birth? I am tired of trying to play nice on this with these assholes. These are the same people that bankrolled a bunch of ideologs on to the SCOTUS who rushed to help trump because he was promoting their god and a future theocracy and are doing everything they can to deny Biden the same presidential powers because they want to enforce racism and religion. Let those with eyes see the truth of it. Hugs
Arizona v. Mayorkas, the Court’s new Title 42 decision, appears to be the latest act of gamesmanship by a Republican Supreme Court.
Former President Donald Trump shakes hands with Justice Brett Kavanaugh before delivering the State of the Union address on February 5, 2019. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court handed down a one-page, 5-4 decision extending the life of a Trump-era border policy known as Title 42, which expels numerous immigrants seeking to enter the United States using an expedited process.
That decision came in Arizona v. Mayorkas, and is typical behavior from the Supreme Court — or, at least, is reflective of this Court’s behavior since a Democrat moved into the White House at the beginning of 2021. It’s the latest example of the Court dragging its feet after a GOP-appointed lower court judge overrides the Biden administration’s policy judgments, often letting that one judge decide the nation’s policy for nearly an entire year.
The Title 42 program, which the Biden administration determined must be terminated last May, will now likely remain in effect for several more months due to the Court’s decision. Indeed, even if the Court ultimately decides that the administration should prevail in this case, the Court is unlikely to lift its order extending this Trump-era program until June. And that delay may be the best-case scenario for the Biden administration — and for the general principle that unelected judges aren’t supposed to decide the nation’s border policy.
A brief history of the Supreme Court’s politicized scheduling
In August 2021, a Trump-appointed judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk handed down a poorly reasoned opinion ordering the Biden administration to reinstate a program, known as “Remain in Mexico,” that required many asylum seekers to stay on the Mexican side of the US southern border while they awaited a hearing. Although the Supreme Court eventually reversed Kacsmaryk, it sat on the case for more than 10 months — effectively letting Kacsmaryk exercise the homeland security secretary’s authority over the border during that entire period.
Worse, when the Court did eventually decide this case, known as Biden v. Texas, it left one looming issue in the lawsuit unresolved and sent the case back to Kacsmaryk. The Supreme Court determined that Kacsmaryk misread federal immigration law to only give the federal government two alternatives when an asylum seeker arrives at the Mexican border, when in fact the government has many options. It left open the question of whether the Biden administration properly completed the appropriate paperwork when it terminated Remain in Mexico.
When the case returned to Kacsmaryk, a former Christian right activist with a record of granting legally dubious victories to conservative litigants, he handed down a second order indicating that the administration must reinstate the Remain in Mexico program. It could be a year or more before the Supreme Court gets around to reviewing Kacsmaryk’s new attempt to impose Trump’s immigration policies on the country.
Similarly, last July, a Trump judge named Drew Tipton effectively seized control of much of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s authority over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that enforces immigration law within US borders. Tipton’s opinion is exceedingly weak and cannot be squared with more than a century of Supreme Court precedents, and a majority of the justices appeared likely to reverse Tipton during oral arguments on the case in November.
But the Court has also sat on this case for months, rejecting the Justice Department’s request to immediately restore Secretary Mayorkas’s lawful authority over ICE in July. The Supreme Court may not rule on the case, known as United States v. Texas, until next June — at which point Tipton will have unlawfully usurped Mayorkas’s authority for 11 months.
The Court’s tendency to manipulate its own calendar isn’t restricted to immigration cases. One of the most high-profile examples of the Court delaying resolution of a case brought by left-leaning litigants occurred in September 2021, before the Court’s 2022 decision overruling Roe v. Wade. A 5-4 Court refused to decide a case challenging Texas’s strict anti-abortion law known as SB 8, effectively allowing Texas to ban many abortions while Roe remained good law. (In fairness, the Court did eventually rule on SB 8 the next December, but that decision established that SB 8 is immune from any meaningful constitutional challenge.)
The Court, which currently has a Republican supermajority, did not behave this way when a Republican occupied the White House. In Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary(2019), for example, a lower court blocked a Trump administration policy that effectively locked virtually all Central American migrants out of the asylum process. The Trump administration asked the justices to reinstate this policy in late August 2019, and the Court agreed to do so about two weeks later.
Similarly, in Wolf v. Cook County(2020), the Court reinstated a Trump administration policy targeting low-income immigrants — and it did so just eight days after Trump’s lawyers asked the Court to do so.
Indeed, under Trump, the Court was so quick to intervene when a lower court blocked one of the Republican administration’s policies that Justice Sonia Sotomayor complained in dissent that her GOP-appointed colleagues were “putting a thumb on the scale in favor of” the Trump administration.
As these cases show, the Supreme Court can wield tremendous power not just by handing down substantive rulings that determine what federal law requires. It can often reshape federal policy for months or even longer by manipulating how quickly it attends to the cases on its docket.
Although the Court has historically discouraged litigants of all kinds from seeking relief on its so-called “shadow docket,” cases that are decided using an expedited process and without full briefing or oral argument, these longstanding norms faded away when Trump was president. When lower courts blocked Trump policies, the Court frequently raced to reinstate those polices.
Judicial partisanship, in other words, is often much more subtle than a Supreme Court opinion definitively ruling that the law must be read to implement Republican policies. Sometimes, locking GOP policies in place, at least temporarily, can be accomplished with little more than creative scheduling.
The winding road that brought Title 42 to the Supreme Court
Setting aside the question of when the Court will determine if the Title 42 program should continue to exist, it should be noted that the Court’s decision in Arizona is difficult to defend on the merits. As Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee who normally behaves like a doctrinaire conservative, writes in his Arizona dissent, the Title 42 program was justified by a public health emergency — the acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic — which has “long since lapsed.”
Federal law permits the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “prohibit, in whole or in part, the introduction of persons and property from such countries or places as [it] shall designate in order to avert” the spread of a “communicable disease” that is present in a foreign country. Beginning in late 2020, when the Covid pandemic was raging, the Trump administration used this authority to order large numbers of noncitizens arriving at the Canadian and Mexican borders to be immediately expelled from the United States.
The program is called “Title 42” because the statute permitting it to exist is part of Title 42 of the United States Code.
The Biden administration, for its part, decided to leave this policy in place for more than a year after President Biden took office — Title 42 is both a useful tool for officials seeking to limit immigration at the southern border and an increasingly difficult-to-justify tool because its only legal basis is a statute permitting temporary immigration restrictions to prevent the spread of disease.
Eventually, the Biden administration determined that the program could no longer be called necessary. On April 1, the CDC concluded that “the cross-border spread of COVID-19 due to covered noncitizens does not present the serious danger to public health that it once did, given the range of mitigation measures now available.” Accordingly, the CDC announced that it would terminate the Title 42 policy as of May 23, 2022.
But that order never took effect. Shortly after CDC announced that the Title 42 program would end, a group of Republican state officials filed a lawsuit claiming that the program must continue in order to maintain what they described as “the abrupt elimination of the only safety valve preventing this Administration’s disastrous border policies from devolving into an unmitigated chaos and catastrophe.” The case was assigned to Judge Robert Summerhays, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Louisiana, and Summerhays issued an order requiring the administration to continue the policy three days before Title 42 was supposed to end.
Summerhays’s decision is wrong. In it, he claims that the Biden administration was required to undergo a lengthy process known as “notice and comment,” which can take months or years to complete, before it could terminate the Title 42 program. But the whole point of the public health statute at issue in this case is that sometimes the government has to issue emergency immigration orders to mitigate a public health crisis.
If the government had to complete a months-long process every time it issues an order under this statute, then the statute serves no purpose. If a new disease were to emerge in, say, Switzerland tomorrow, it would be pointless for the government to close the border to Swiss people months from now. Such an emergency order must be issued as fast as possible.
Nor should a different process apply when the CDC decides to lift an emergency order. As the Supreme Court said in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association (2015), “agencies use the same procedures when they amend or repeal a rule as they used to issue the rule in the first instance.”
In any event, Summerhays’s decision is not currently before the Supreme Court — it’s currently on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. But the decision matters because his order is the specific thing that prevents the Biden administration from terminating the Title 42 program immediately.
The Arizona case — the one that is actually before the Supreme Court — involves a parallel lawsuit heard by Clinton-appointed Judge Emmet Sullivan, in a case called Huisha-Huisha v. Mayorkas. That decision determined that the Title 42 program is itself unlawful and must be terminated.
Frankly, there is nearly as much to criticize in Sullivan’s opinion as there is to criticize in Summerhays’s. Both decisions depart from the ordinary rule that public health policy should be set by officials who are accountable to an elected president, and not by unelected judges. They also depart from the text of the relevant public health statute, which provides that public health officials — and not judges like Robert Summerhays or Emmet Sullivan — should determine when emergency immigration restrictions should be implemented to control the spread of a communicable disease.
But Sullivan’s order would also have the practical effect of implementing the same policy that the Biden administration sought to put in place last May. While Summerhays attacked the CDC’s order terminating the Title 42 program, Sullivan concluded that the Title 42 program is itself illegal and must be terminated on his authority.
Except that the Supreme Court decided to halt Sullivan’s order, at least for now.
The Supreme Court’s Title 42 decision makes no sense
If you are confused by this convoluted tale of two competing lawsuits, I should warn you that things are about to get even more complicated.
The Biden administration did not seek a prolonged stay of Sullivan’s order, which means that this order should be in effect right now and the Title 42 program should be terminated. But the states behind the Louisiana lawsuit (the one heard by Summerhays), did ask a federal appeals court to stay Sullivan’s order — even though those states are not a party to the Huisha-Huisha lawsuit.
While it is sometimes possible for a non-party to a lawsuit to “intervene” in a case, and gain the power to act as if they were a party to the suit in the process, a bipartisan appeals court panel determined that the red states waited too long to intervene in the Huisha-Huisha case. That order — not the merits of Sullivan’s decision, but the appeals court order determining that the states waited too long — is what’s before the Supreme Court in the Arizona case.
The Court’s 5-4 decision in Arizona, meanwhile, effectively ruled that the Title 42 program must remain in effect while the justices consider whether the red states failed to intervene in the Huisha-Huisha case in a timely manner.
So, to summarize, one judge, a Republican, has determined that the Republican Party’s preferred immigration policy must remain in effect. His opinion is poorly reasoned and at odds both with a federal statute and with binding Supreme Court precedents. Meanwhile, a second judge, a Democratic appointee, has determined that the Republican Party’s preferred immigration policy is illegal.
The CDC — the only institution that actually has the statutory authority to determine when the Title 42 program should be terminated — decided that this program must end in May. But CDC’s April order has been trapped in limbo for months due to the Republican judge’s erroneous decision. And it is now likely to be trapped in limbo for much longer while the Supreme Court ponders a minor procedural question about when parties seeking to intervene in a lawsuit must do so.
All of this is happening, moreover, against the backdrop of a Supreme Court that took only days to determine that a Republican administration’s policies must be put into effect right away, but that often sits on cases blocking Democratic policies for months — even when the justices ultimately determine that the lower court’s order blocking the Democratic policy was wrong.
In 2021, Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett delivered a speech at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center (named for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell), in which she announced that her goal was “to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” But if that is truly her goal, she and her colleagues might want to consider applying the same scheduling rules to cases brought by Republicans that her Court applies to cases brought by Democrats.
For those who had any doubts that this was not really the people rising up but actually a well funded well organized by right wing billionaires’ effort to stop society from progressing further from the bible views of how to live. This article points out how these groups get started and funded. It points out the ones driving these issues are the religious ones founded by Christian fundamentalist billionaires with the goal of creating a repressive society that will conform to a hierarchical theocracy with them at the top being the rulers. It is not so much about god as it is power to rule over others as god’s messengers. The interview is not long but really informative. Hugs
Imara Jones accepting the NABJ-NAHJ Journalist of Distinction AwardPhoto: Screenshot
Imara Jones is an award-winning journalist, thought leader, and content creator whose work focuses on trans people and the intersection of religious fundamentalism, the LGBTQ+ community, and civil rights. The sequel to her award-winning podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machinedrops in March.
Jones shared some time on a chilly afternoon in Brooklyn to describe the state of the far right’s campaign targeting trans kids, drag queens, and “groomers,” from a billionaire Christian cabal spreading nationalist gospel and unlimited cash to a new and made-to-order frontline hate group called Gays Against Groomers.
LGBTQ Nation:I imagine for your work it’s got to be a full-time job just keeping up with all the connections between attacks and protests and media fueling them, and the money fueling the organizations. Do you have a giant bulletin board in your office, like a detective, with pictures and pushpins and strings connecting everything?
IJ:Yes, we have. Generally, we create what we call sitemaps. And we kind of look for who’s where, and who are they connected to, and how they link back. And at a certain point it, you know, you don’t even have to do that as much anymore because you hear a name, or you see an organization, and you go, “Oh yeah, there are links to X.” In the right-wing space that fuels a lot of his hate, you see the usual suspects and don’t have to look that hard.
LGBTQ Nation:There’s been a recent focus on drag shows and story time hours by frontline groups and media outlets like Libs of TikTok and Project Veritas. Is that a shift away from casting young people as villains, like the ones playing girls’ sports and 10-year-olds testifying in state legislatures, and moving to adults as villains or what they’re calling groomers? Is that an easier sell for hate groups and far-right media than attacks on kids and parents?
IJ:I don’t see it as an either/or. I see it as an expansion of the battlespace rather than a conversion of it from one thing to the other. We have to understand from the perspective of the right that these distinctions about gender and gender identity, it’s like blurred into one thing. Drag is very threatening because it has wide acceptance. It’s about bending gender, right? And about the part of gender that’s an illusion. And so for them that fits very much in the space of trans people.
And when I look at conservative media, they haven’t let up at all on trans people and trans kids. You know, we have anti-trans bills that were passed this year in Georgia and in Florida, and as a centerpiece of the campaigns of [Republican Gov. of Texas] Greg Abbott and [Republican Gov. of Florida] Ron DeSantis, and on and on and on. There was a huge emphasis in Uvalde in an online campaign that moved to conservative media that then moved to a member of Congress to say that the shooter was trans. So, I don’t think that it’s a flip. It’s looking new to us because it’s greatly expanded, but it’s actually not.
LGBTQ Nation: Tell us about the Betsy DeVos/Prince clan, and why we don’t hear about their influence.
IJ:Can I take those questions in reverse? I would say why don’t we hear about it, one, because they’re powerful people and people are afraid of powerful people, including newspapers, and we know that. Secondly, I think it’s because they have a degree of mainstream credibility because she was a secretary of education, even in the midst of a controversial administration. And one of the reasons why they’re so effective is because their extremism is cloaked behind this air of comity and rectitude. There’s a certain way in which she composes herself, which I think doesn’t scream extremist.
LGBTQ Nation:And how about the DeVos/Prince clan itself?
IJ:When we say the DeVos family, we’re talking about the fusion of two billionaire families into one. Betsy DeVos was born Betsy Prince into the really wealthy Prince family. And then she married Richard DeVos. It’s actually a giant clan, a billionaire clan. And there is not a far-right organization, and in many cases designated hate groups, who exist without the largess of that family. Betsy DeVos, or Betsy Prince and her husband, Richard DeVos are the second generation in this billionaire kind of clan.
Richard DeVos’ father, for example, was extremely important to the founding of the Heritage Foundation. The Prince family, which is Betsy DeVos, helped to fund the headquarters of the Family Research Council, which is designated by the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] as a hate group. And they’ve been involved in so many far-right organizations throughout the decades. And so what you have here in this second generation is kind of a sophistication of their operation and particularly in Betsy Prince, this kind of fusion of strategy, of money and a whole host of other things.
LGBTQ Nation:How does that manifest itself?
IJ: So this family is kind of the royal family of the Christian nationalist movement. And they set the example for how to move money throughout the right wing for all of the other really wealthy families. They participated in an annual gathering of Christian nationalist billionaires called The Gathering, in which Betsy DeVos is on tape coaching them in terms of how, as a wealthy person in this far-right movement, you move money to other things, and encouraging them to do so. There is religious extremism in their views, which is what’s driving a lot of this.
As well, all of the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies came out of the DeVos Center for Family and Religion that’s housed in the Heritage Foundation. People were moved from that center into the Trump administration where they began to disseminate these policies. I think that we have to keep in mind that Betsy DeVos is just the most visible person of this large, far-right billionaire clan that has been active for over 40 years.
LGBTQ Nation:How did DeVos end up as education secretary in the Trump Administration?
IJ:They didn’t know who to appoint to anything because their win was a surprise, right? So they were like, “What in the world are we going to do?” So they turned to Erik Prince. It’s gonna sound familiar, younger brother of Betsy. And he’s like, okay, we’ll get you linked up with the right people. And one, he clued them into his sister and, two, they went to the Heritage Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation said, “Boy, you know, this is actually what we’ve wanted to do for a really long time.”
And so it flows that the Heritage Foundation would recommend Betsy DeVos because their family is a longtime founder at that center and they know that she’s been really active in education and educational circles. And then they basically started to populate the entire administration with people recommended by a combination of the Heritage Foundation and Erik Prince and that’s literally how she got in the mix.
LGBTQ Nation:The DeVos family are adherents of Dominionism. What is that?
In Ecclesiastes, there is the charge to basically create theocracies that are based on kind of a real religious caste system. And so how do you do that? The way you do that is something called Dominionism. And that is to say that you seize the seven mountains of society, you gain control of those things. And once you have control of them, you can then move society towards this theocratic vision. And so what are some of the seven mountains? They’re business and finance, they’re education, they’re the media, arts, etc. So the charge for Betsy DeVos at this epic gathering in the early 2000s was to charge really wealthy people and billionaires to pick their mountain, and then focus on it. As people who have been told over and over and over that their wealth flows from the fact that they are chosen and special, you can see how they gravitate towards something like Dominionism, and they have. Their whole family has.
LGBTQ Nation: I’d like to zero in on one particular group as an example of one at the bottom of this organizational hierarchy. What can you tell us about Gays Against Groomers? It appeared out of nowhere about six months ago, fully formed and led by a woman named Jaimee Michell. Do you think it’s organic?
IJ:There’s very little on the right that’s organic. It’s really funny, because I have to explain this a lot to mainstream and even the liberal funders, where, you know, on the left, a lot of things are organic, and people just form them and then they get funded. A lot of times, what happens on the right is, they’ll say, “Who’s gonna start an organization that will do X?” And then someone raises their hand.
This is one of the things we’re going to document next year on the podcast, but one of the things that they do on the right is that they go out and they shop for people from the communities that they’re targeting who are willing to essentially carry the message that they want them to carry if they give them a large enough check. And so they will go out and they’ll look for a Jaimee Michell — this is not uncommon — they’ll be actively looking for these people online or elsewhere. And once they find them, they will either engage them or platform them or say, “Can we introduce you to other people?” and that’s literally how it gets started.
A lot of the TERFs that you see platformed, and TERF organizations, it’s all because the Heritage Foundation went and found them and put them on a panel, and after that, all those people began to be kind of off to the races in terms of their public voice and platforming and a whole host of other things.
LGBTQ Nation:It says very prominently on the Gays Against Groomers website that they’re “a 100% independent, self-funded nonprofit organization.”
IJ: They’re not an official 501(c)(3). I think they claim that. I don’t think there are any 990’s on them. So, to self-assert that you’re self-funded, without in any way showing that you’re self-funded, and the fact that they have so many people — I can look at it right now and say they have a budget of close to a million dollars? Or over a million dollars? So where did that come from? There’s not a million dollars-worth of Gays Against Groomers money in the gay community, right? It’s not an organic conversation. Whereas like, okay, Gays Against Guns. Can they go out and do a GoFundMe campaign amongst people, raise money? Yeah. There’s support for that. But no, there’s nothing organic about this. It reads to me like a slick version of the ex-gay organizations that were funded and founded by Focus on the Family in the 1980’s.
LGBTQ Nation:What’s in store for Season 2 of Anti-Trans Hate Machine?
IJ: We are focusing on the way that the right has manufactured a cultural and media debate about the validity and worthiness of trans people and trans kids, and then has gone on to weaponize that to justify both political and actual violence.
LGBTQ Nation:What do you mean by weaponize, exactly?
IJ:So, you create a conversation. It’s like what happened in the 1930s — and there’s nothing analogous to the Holocaust — but there is an analogy to how you got there as a society. And one of the things that happened in the 1930s is that they just started a conversation about the bad people that needed to be separated from Germany. And that conversation was actually started by the Nazis. Once that conversation had reached a certain level, they use it as justification — they weaponized it — to then begin this campaign of physical separation and then targeting. You create the conversation, and then you recognize the conversation that you created, in order to take the action that you really want to take.
I wonder if the far right republican fascist hate drag because it is the opposite of what they are. Drag is about exploring boundaries, about expressing yourself, about color and fun. What is authoritarian fascism about? doing what you are told, stay in the line, don’t be an individual, don’t be colorful, always fit nicely in the boxes. Hugs
Over the past year, the sense of safety and joy experienced at drag performances has been punctured and replaced.
“Baby, you’re a plaaaaaaastic bag,” sings the drag queen Per Sia, parodying Katy Perry’s “Firework” as reusable tote bags sail around a usually-silent library in San Francisco. The children around her delight in the chaos, hanging on to Sia’s every word. Between sermons on the importance of reducing plastic and loving yourself, the kids leap up, grab the floating tote bags, and begin to dance. Their bodies wiggle with glee as they experience the joy — costumes! music! dance! — of drag.
The scene would be familiar to any kindergarten teacher: “It’s the play and pleasure of reading time, but dialed up a few notches,” says Harper Keenan, a Professor of Education and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Keenan is referring to Drag Story Hour, events where drag performers read, sing, and make crafts with children in schools, libraries, and bookstores across the country.
Sia, who is an elementary school teacher, says that when she began performing for Drag Story Hours, “we would walk into schools and get treated like royalty.” Initially the opportunity to integrate her expertise in early childhood education with drag was a dream come true. It was a chance to embody her full humanity and show students that a world existed in which they could unapologetically be themselves, too.
Over the past year, however, that sense of safety and joy has been punctured and replaced with a miasma of fear and danger. A year ago, a sizeable backlash against the art form seemed an improbability, but this year, threats against drag performances across the country, including Drag Story Hours, have increased in number and hostility. In Oklahoma, a donut shop was fire-bombed for the second time this year after hosting a drag performance. In Nevada, a man identified as a member of the Proud Boys, a white nationalist group, interrupted a Drag Story Hour reading with a gun, forcing the children in attendance to flee for safety. And in California, a group of eight Proud Boys stormed into a library where drag performer Panda Dulce was reading to children. The men made white power hand gestures and hurtled homophobic and transphobic comments at Dulce, who was rushed out of the room, along with the children. According to several parents in attendance, the far-right protesters were traumatizing the children they claimed to want to protect.
These are just some specific examples of a worsening trend. This already-horrific year, which saw at least 124 significant threats and protests against drag performances, according to a November report from GLAAD, was punctuated by immense tragedy on November 19, when a shooter killed five people during a “Drag Divas” night at Club Q in Colorado Springs. An art form that has provided LGBTQ+ people a sense of community for decades has been weaponized against them, and has forced drag queens to question what safety means in a culture intent on causing them harm.
Per Sia, courtesy of the artist.
The current string of attacksagainst drag performers is part of a broader movement by the far-right to demonize LGBTQ+ people, including by claiming they are “groomers” and “pedophiles,” and therefore a threat to young children. Across the media landscape, from Fox News host Tucker Carlson to the far-right podcast InfoWars, conservative pundits are increasingly perpetuating the dangerous, harmful lie that proximity to drag queens and trans and nonbinary people increases the likelihood of child abuse.
Accounts like Libs of TikTok, a conservative social media account that has become notorious for anti-queer and anti-drag rhetoric, post videos making fun of LGBTQ+ people and drag performers without context or consent. The video has also been caught posting doctored videos that make it seem as if drag queens are performing sexually in front of children, even if the videos are blatantly false. Criminal investigators even believe that Libs of TikTok may have provoked the Proud Boys attack on Drag Story Hour in California. In a segment from October, Carlson, who has been a vocal supporter of the social media account, called on his three million nightly viewers to “arm” themselves against drag performers. This messaging has been dangerously effective: according to the Human Rights Campaign, there was a 406% increase in tweets using “groomer” or “pedophile” in the first six months of 2022. Tragically, there has been accompanying escalation of attacks on drag performers during the same period.
“The LGBTQ+ community is constantly at the whim of disinformation and misinformation,” activist Raquel Willis wrote on Instagram the day after the Colorado Springs shooting. “Hateful politicians craft dangerous narratives about us and encourage the general public to continue to do the same. Ignorance is disgusting AF and we need to be vigilant about confronting it.”
As Willis notes, these in-person acts of violence are often stoked — and, in some cases, engineered — by far-right politicians. Florida Governor Ron Desantis has stated that parents who bring children to drag shows should be investigated for child abuse. Florida Senator Marco Rubio even featured Lil Miss Hot Mess, a member of Drag Story Hour, in a reelection campaign video in which he claimed that the “radical left” seeks to “indoctrinate children and turn boys into girls.” These politicians foster a climate of fear in which hatred and misinformation proliferates.
However, as many drag performers are quick to point out, this rhetoric obscures the fact that gender identity and drag are distinct, though sometimes overlapping, categories. Both cisgender men and transgender women, for example, can do drag. Crucially, though, “drag generally refers to a kind of consciously artistic performance intended for an audience. In contrast, trans people do not seek primarily to entertain,” wrote Keenan and Lil’ Miss Hot Mess in a June 2021 academic article about Drag Story Hour.
According to Keenan, though, violence against drag queens is rooted in transmisogyny, or the intersection of transphobia and misogyny as experienced by trans women and transfeminine people. In videos such as Rubio’s, the phrase “turning boys into girls” exemplifies this trans and femme-phobic line of attack, and the underlying truth that the far-right’s goal is not simply to stop all-ages drag performances. It is to exploit transphobia for political points, no matter the cost to human life.
In a year in whichover 300 state bills have been introduced to curb LGBTQ+ student and teacher rights, what’s become clear is that a rising right-wing moral panic against LGBTQ+ people — including smearing drag performers as groomers, nonbinary children as mentally ill, and gender-affirming healthcare providers as pedophiles — has ensnared the drag community. Today, after Club Q, it’s become increasingly clear that this rhetoric has concrete, real-world ramifications.
Guy Smallman/Getty Images
“It’s the scariest it’s ever been. I fear for my safety, even when I’m not doing Story Hour,” said Sia. The attacks have left many drag performers feeling torn between doing what they love and subjecting themselves to the possibility of violence, leading some drag queens to pause or stop their performances altogether. Programmers at one San Antonio music venue, were forced to cancel an entire season of drag performances due to violent threats. In North Carolina, when the power went out during a drag performance, performers said their immediate instinct was to listen for gunfire.
Paradoxically, some experts believe that the far-right has taken such extreme steps against drag performances because drag has become so popular. The visibility of shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag brunches, and online drag personalities have enabled performers to share their unique vision of liberation—and millions of people have found that vision appealing.
Drag Story Hours and family brunches, in particular, have helped LGBTQ+ youth feel accepted and seen. Keenan notes the surprising number of straight parents among attendees of drag story hours and brunches nationwide. “They’re looking for resources,” he says, to provide their children with a LGBTQ+ affirming space that they may not know how to cultivate at home. It is a chance to move past the rigid expectations of gender they were raised with, and offer their children something new.
All of this visibility comes at a cost. It has drawn attention to some of the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQ+ community, such as the trans, queer, and femme people of color who pioneered the “iconic” dance moves and looks we now associate with drag, without protection. “If what you really want is to target queerness and transness, then drag is a huge part of that. It’s a visible celebration of culture,” said the attorney Chase Strangio in a recent interview with The Atlantic.
Boston Globe/Getty Images
Indeed, in the midst of escalating fear and violence, drag performances continue to offer a unique form of celebration as resistance. This impulse toward new worlds was on full display during a recent prom for LGBTQ+ youth in Birmingham, Alabama. During the drag portion of the night, performer Sharon Cocx unexpectedly stopped in the middle of her set.
“You can be anything you want to be. You can be president, you can change the world,” she told the crowd. After such a difficult year in the state — Alabama has passed some of the strictest anti-trans legislation in the country — it was a cathartic moment of release for the directly-impacted teens there. According to several people who attended the event, many were in tears by the end of the speech. This is drag’s unique power: to challenge the conditions of the present, and embody a longed-for future.
The day after the attack in San Lorenzo,Per Sia had a performance a few miles away in Piedmont, CA. When she arrived at the library, half a dozen police officers were outside with their sirens on, “which was triggering in and of itself,” she said. Since many performers, like Sia, are queer people of color, the presence of police at performances can feel like a compounding of the violence they face, not an alleviation of it. As a result, organizers across the country have created safety plans rooted in abolitionist frameworks. These plans seek to keep children and performers safe without involving the police.
As Sia entered the library, several staff members walked her through a hastily developed safety plan, which Sia had never experienced before. They walked up a claustrophobic flight of stairs. “If anything happens, I will bring you up here,” the librarian said, “Then go down this hall and hide under that desk. If anything happens, do not come out until you hear my voice.” In her decades of teaching children and performing drag, it was unlike anything Sia had experienced before. It was terrifying in a visceral, cruel way.
“It was a hard pill to swallow,” she said, “but queer folks are resilient. We have always had to fight for our basic needs to be met, and simply to exist.” The performance took place in the library’s parking lot during a cloudless, blue summer day. The sunlight streamed over Sia as she read to the jam-packed crowd, who hung on her every word. Many had come to support Drag Story Hour in response to the previous day’s violence. “It was beautiful,” she said. “It really, really was.”
On Christmas Eve, Radical Right Republican Texas Governor, Gregg Abbott, dropped off another 50 migrants in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence. Meidas Contributor Texas Paul reacts to the MAGA Republican Disgusting act.
“When I was doxxed, someone from Ron DeSantis’s team called me. She said, ‘The governor wanted me to give you a message. If you don’t feel safe, if you need a place to go, to hide, to stay, you can come to the governor’s mansion.’
“She said, ‘We have a guest house for you, and you can stay as long as you need. I was almost in tears. He took time out of his extremely busy schedule to send someone to call me to make sure I’m safe.
“It was incredible, I don’t even have the words for it.” – Chaya Raichik, creator of the Twitter account LibsOfTikTok.
Raichik began posting content denigrating liberals on her personal social media accounts around April of 2020, but rebranded as Libs of TikTok a year later.
Raichik started by poking fun at Anthony Fauci, the country’s chief medical advisor at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then she started spouting hate toward Black victims of police violence before repeatedly depicting queer and trans people as predators who endangered children.
Yesterday Raichik described LGBTQ people as members of an “evil cult” dedicated to grooming children.
Her so-called doxxing was merely being named by the Washington Post as the person behind the account that has incited violent and often armed extremists to protest outside of LGBTQ events.
It’s likely that the DeSantis flack who reached out to her was the viciously anti-LGBTQ Christina Pushaw, who was his spokesperson at the time.
When you have a Supreme Court that has made it clear it’s okay to declare open season on LGBT people, this is the result.
In less then 5 hours after the Tucker interview they were able to identify Chaya Raichik's (LibsOfTikTok) face & attire while on the Capital Grounds on Jan 6th.pic.twitter.com/4o5sc4bpj9
I would add that the WaPo article identified her using publicly available information.
It’s really something, the way social media has helped make psychopaths and grifters more successful than they ever could have been in any previous era.
On WHAT does this evil bitch BASE anything she says but her own vile bigotry?! What gives her ANY authority or credibility to speak on ANY issue, let alone to slander, denounce, and DEMONIZE whole groups of people based on NOTHING but LIES and her malicious FEELINGS?! Why do the serious media refuse, in their role as the “Guardians of Democracy,” to call out and DENOUNCE the right-wing media for spreading hate propaganda, for indulging in stochastic terrorism?! Because that’s ALL this is, and it has NO PLACE in ANY forum that gives it wide exposure in a modern democratic society!
It belongs nowhere but the GUTTER PRESS, which all decent people and all true journalists regard with nothing but CONTEMPT! There is no difference between THIS and giving wide exposure to spokesmen from the KKK or the American Nazi Party! This is the same kind of rabid, dehumanizing defamation the Nazis engaged in against the Jews under Hitler. Those engaged in it and in enabling it, in helping it spread its POISON, should be DENOUNCED by every true journalist in this country, by everyone who holds the truth and the principles of genuine democracy dear! That it is NOT denounced, and roundly, is a clear sign of advanced decadence, of societal ROT!
I never thought after the gains we’ve made in civil rights that we would slide backward so fast and without anything being done to these thugs. Find the shit on this bitch and all the other ones who would give her a voice.
Then she started spouting hate toward Black victims of police violence before repeatedly depicting queer and trans people as predators who endangered children.
Yesterday Raichik described LGBTQ people as members of an “evil cult” dedicated to grooming children.
Did she complain about the fact that DeSantis’s state party is full of open neonazis? As in, not just fascists, but Holocaust deniers. No? Didn’t think so.
You know, I grew up never trusting authority figures… including anyone involved in politics. And throughout the years, I’ve tried to mellow my views on that. But, boy-o-boy, I never thought we’d see elected officials sink this fucking low. I mean, it was one thing when they just completely ignored the AIDS crisis, but now elected Republicans are openly, gleefully, and without any blowback, ginning up maniacs to go out and murder us. And the elected officials on the left just kinda go, “Man, this awful. I’ll write a strongly worded kumbaya tweet about this, and that’ll be my due diligence.”
The Fort Lauderdale show at the Broward Center was the first of four performances around the state.
The 2022 Florida debut of “A Drag Queen Christmas” in Fort Lauderdale has triggered a state investigation, according to a tweet from the account of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Press Secretary.
The show went on in Miami’s James L. Knight Center Tuesday night — with limited tickets still available — and was scheduled to hit the heights in Orlando and Clearwater for successive nights. But it might be coming to the attention of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, according to a statement from the state Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR).
DBPR “is aware of multiple complaints about a sexually explicit performance marketed to children held in Fort Lauderdale on December 26. The Department is actively investigating this matter, including video footage and photographs from the event,” said the statement that Bryan Griffin tweeted.
“Exposing children to sexually explicit activity is a crime in Florida, and such action violates the Department’s licensing standards for operating a business and holding a liquor license.”
According to the traveling production’s website, Dragfans.com, the show has been going on for eight years. And, on the site’s “Past Tours” page, the show has made stops in Florida for five different Christmases, according to the posters displayed there.
The production company says that “all ages” are welcome at its shows, as does the website advertising the Orlando show. But the site listing all the tour stops does say potential patrons might be barred depending on local regulations.
Miami’s show, for example, is advertised with the caveat, “Adult content. Recommended for audiences — 18+. Minors must be accompanied by an adult.” In Clearwater, it says that only those older than 18 will be admitted to Ruth Eckerd Hall for the performance.
Critics of the show tweeted videos showing a full house in the Broward Center for the Performing Arts Monday night. And the Dec. 22 event in Knoxville, Tennessee, was sold out, according to Tennessee state Rep. Gloria Johnson’s Twitter account.
The controversy is reminiscent of a July complaint about a drag queen brunch put on at R House Wynwood after a video surfaced showing a toddler dancing with a drag queen. Statements from Gov. Ron DeSantis indicated the venue’s liquor license was at risk for the same issue.
The current status of the investigation was unavailable Tuesday, but the restaurant’s website seems to indicate that the drag brunch is still happening Saturday and Sunday with four seatings.
In July, DeSantis said his criticism of the drag brunch’s entertainment is part of his fight for Florida to be “where kids can be kids.” That includes efforts to pass the Parental Rights in Education law, which more closely regulates schoolhouse discussions.
Starting its four-night Florida tour, 'A Drag Queen Christmas' triggers state investigation
These parents in Broward county while trying to be tolerant are actually guilty of child abuse. This tour is pedophile based. Florida Gov. DeSantis's office to investigate drag show event for exposing children to inappropriate contenthttps://t.co/TnJnqxTtXJ
you saw this drag show was happening you bought tickets for the day after christmas you sat through act one you sat through intermission you sat partway through act two just to get banned from ever attending the broward center again
Wow Nelson gets shamed by audience, loses his shit & runs out of the venue by a herd of cops – trespassed & threatened with jail what a spectacular FAIL!
He’s always breathing so hard it sounds like he’s about to stroke out from adderal abuse pic.twitter.com/4NVEKZfcWb
Not only was the out of control Chris Nelson trespassed from @browardcenter for screaming during the show – he was seen by police as the instigator for street violence as he attempted to grab peoples masks & cameras pic.twitter.com/rMzY4RmS60
Chris Nelson, the far-right nationalist who leads protests outside drag shows ranting about “grooming” & “sexualization of kids” is shown here at his wedding with anti-masker Nicole Struelens — head up her skirt while a child looks on in the background.
With these haters / bigots lying and making things up along with projection is the standard way they do stuff. They claim the other side is promoting violence while they get the Proud Boys to attack drag queen events. They claim the other side is full of hate while they call the LGBTQ+ evil. Another thing she claims unnamed studies that find parents find they are unable to stop their kids from being trans or non-binary, implying that laws and the left are blocking the wishes of good god loving parents to take care of their kids. The truth is parents cannot stop their kids from being born with a different gender than assigned at birth or being born non-binary but that is how they are when they are born! These people who push the idea that people can be converted to a gender are the same people who support the totally debunked idea of conversion therapy for sexual orientation. Hugs
LibsOfTikTok founder Chaya Raichik has regularly made false and misleading comments about teachers and children’s hospitals. (YouTube)
Libs Of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik has said LGBTQ+ people are “grooming children” and are “evil” in a disturbing Fox News interview.
Raichik, the figure behind the virulently anti-LGBTQ+ Twitter account known for encouraging pile-ons and spreading misinformation, elaborated on her belief that the LGBTQ+ community is a “cult” in an interview with host Tucker Carlson.
In the hour-long interview, Raichik and Carlson discussed her since-debunked claim that certain children’s hospitals were performing hysterectomies on trans teenagers.
Carlson asked Raichik if she had any “theories” about what was going on with “evil” people who offer affirming care to minors.
Raichik replied: “The LGBTQ community has become this cult and it’s so captivating, and it pulls people in so strongly, unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”
She went on to claim LGBTQ+ people “brainwash” others to “join” their movement and that it’s “really, really hard to get out of it”.
Raichik also referred to unnamed “studies” on parents who find they cannot stop their children from being trans or non-binary.
Libs of TikTok has over 1.5 million followers and received several temporary suspensions and a permanent suspension from TikTok. (@libsoftiktok/Twitter)
She said the situation is “unlike anything we’ve ever seen”, adding that it’s “extremely poisonous”.
Carlson asked Raichik if she sees a “spiritual component to any of this”, adding: “I don’t think this makes sense at all.”
“No, it doesn’t make any sense and I think – I think they’re evil,” Raichik replied.
Chaya Raichik went on Tucker Carlson and said the "LGBTQ community has become this cult… It's extremely poisonous." She later says "They're just evil people, and they're out to groom kids. They're recruiting."
“And sometimes we try to break it down a lot and we discuss why this is happening, what’s happening and whatever, and I think sometimes the simplest answer is, they’re just evil.
“They’re bad people. They’re just evil people, and they want to groom kids. They’re recruiting.”
Libs Of TikTok refers to LGBTQ+ people as ‘groomers’
This is far from the first time Raichik has shared anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric; through her Libs Of TikTok social media accounts, she has pushed false and misleading comments about teachers, medical providers and children’s hospitals.
Since the account first came to prominence, Raichik has described people who teach children about gender and sexuality as “groomers”. She has also used her platform to hit out at all-age drag shows.
Her most controversial moment came when she claimed Boston Children’s Hospital was performing hysterectomies on trans minors. In the weeks after she publicised her since-debunked claims, staff faced death threats and the hospital was targeted with two anonymous bomb threats.
Raichik originally tried to keep her identity a secret, but her real name was eventually revealed by the Washington Post.
I would like to point out a couple things from the article. Unsurprisingly, conservatives like the ways things looked in the 18th century a lot more than they do today, so originalism has been a handy way of bending the law rightward. Also there is this part, They include “respect for the authority of rule and of rulers,” “respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function,” and most frighteningly, “a candid willingness to ‘legislate morality’—indeed, a recognition that all legislation is necessarily founded on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is a core and legitimate function of authority.” It is a short informative article describing what the Christian right is willing to do to get to the point that they can tell everyone how to live. Hugs
For an increasingly fervent and authoritarian-minded group, originalism is no longer good enough.
The Federalist Society – the right-wing legal group that Donald Trump made the selection committee for his judicial appointees – has had a lot of success peeling back LGBTQ+ rights by promoting the doctrine of originalism. Originalism tests laws on the principle of whether the nation’s founders intended the Constitution to be interpreted in a particular way. Unsurprisingly, conservatives like the ways things looked in the 18th century a lot more than they do today, so originalism has been a handy way of bending the law rightward.
The apotheosis of originalism was the Supreme Court’s decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. The majority decision included a tour of legal theory about abortion dating back not just to the founding of this country but 13th century England.
However, for an increasingly fervent and authoritarian-minded group, originalism is no longer good enough. They want something more direct. That’s where a new legal theory, “common good constitutionalism,” comes in.
Common good constitutionalism is, in essence, the right wing deciding how to use the law to impose its view of the world on U.S. citizens. Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule, the most prominent advocate for the idea, describes it slightly differently, of course. In a 2020 essay in The Atlantic, he relies heavily upon the “substantive moral principles that conduce to the common good, principles that officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges) should read into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the written Constitution.”
However, that list of principles is, in many ways, antithetical to what many Americans think of as liberty. They include “respect for the authority of rule and of rulers,” “respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function,” and most frighteningly, “a candid willingness to ‘legislate morality’—indeed, a recognition that all legislation is necessarily founded on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is a core and legitimate function of authority.”
As Politico points out in a profile of the idea, the ramifications are radical: “the Constitution empowers the government to pursue conservative political ends, even when those ends conflict with individual rights as most Americans understand them.”
The theory would allow the right to achieve most of its goals through the courts without worrying about precedent. That includes banning marriage equality outright.
Common good constitutionalism is emerging as a hot idea because some right-wing legal eagles are worried that originalism won’t be good enough to destroy decades of advances enabled by more liberal courts. They want to jumpstart the revolution now, and they need a legal fig leaf to do it.
While the debate may seem academic, the implications are not. It’s especially worrisome that the philosophy is popular among a particular segment of young lawyers, particularly conservative Catholics.
“These are the things that people are talking about in FedSoc chapters all over the place,” one law student from Georgetown Universityt told Politico, using shorthand for the Federalist Society. “I think our generation is a lot more open to it than the older generation.”
What turbocharged the debate about common good constitutionalism was the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County. In that case, the majority ruled that an LGBTQ+ employee cannot be fired under federal civil rights law. That decision sent the right into orbit and provided momentum for a theory that would ensure them victory no matter what the law said.
Whether common good constitutionalism supplants originalism remains to be seen. But the idea that it can impose the society it wants through its own interpretation of “the common good” is a sign of just how far the right has moved toward authoritarianism. One thing is sure: They will never give up their attempt to eliminate LGBTQ+ rights. Marriage equality would just be the first step.
“There’s something so unique about — the LGBTQ community has become this cult and it’s so captivating and it pulls people in so strongly unlike anything we’ve ever seen and they brainwash people to join.
“And they convince them of all these things and it’s really, really hard to get out of it. It’s really difficult.
“I think they’re evil. And sometimes we try to break it down a lot and we discuss why this is happening, what’s happening, whatever, and I think sometimes the simplest answer is they’re just evil.
“They’re bad people. They’re evil people. And they want to groom kids. They’re recruiting.” – Chaya Raichik, owner of LibsOfTikTok, the Twitter account that has spawned violent and armed protests at LGBTQ events.
Chaya Raichik went on Tucker Carlson and said the "LGBTQ community has become this cult… It's extremely poisonous." She later says "They're just evil people, and they're out to groom kids. They're recruiting."
This is 1970's Anita Bryant level bigotry and it's getting promoted by Tucker "Dan White Society" Carlson. These bigots feel so emboldened to spew their hatred openly and incite violence against the LGBTQ community.
I did an in depth thread on the connections between Chaya's tweets and bomb threats. It's not just her but all anti LGBTQ moral panic stories invoke this response now. https://t.co/U4uUS3J5PM
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Scottie's Playtime 