I still do not see the emergency need here as none is really stated. What is the security issue? I think the thing is tRump’s admin wants to erase anything that as any other administration’s branding on it. The object is to make DC tRump’s city bearing only his branding and everything named after him. He sees other tyrant authoritarian dictator has a city named after them, he wants DC to be his, the White House to be a palace like other royalty has so he must have, and his rule to be unquestioned. Hugs.
The Trump administration is extending its wrecking ball to yet more historic buildings in Washington as the president’s pet projects — including his golden ballroom and triumphal arch — press forward.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appears before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Capitol Hill on Dec. 11, 2025.Mark Schiefelbein / AP Photo
The Trump administration is looking to tear down more historic buildings in Washington as the president, nearly a year into his final term, looks for ways to leave his mark on the District of Columbia.
This includes the destruction of the East Wing of the White House to make way for the president’s grand ballroom, which he now says will cost some $400 million, as well as a massive so-called arc de Trump.
But a memo uncovered by The Washington Post on Tuesday shows the administration using a new justification (that is, other than Trump’s vanity) to explain its latest effort to raze a part of D.C.’s history: a so-called emergency.
The Post reports Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose agency has engaged in some rather lavish spending on her behalf this year, issued a memo earlier this month “seeking to fast-track the demolition of more than a dozen historic buildings at St. Elizabeths in Southeast Washington,” which officials have been converting into a sprawling headquarters for DHS over more than a decade in accordance with historic preservation of treasured landmarks.
Per The Post:
‘Demolition is the only permanent measure that resolves the emergency conditions,’ Noem wrote in the memo. A risk assessment report undertaken by her agency ‘supports immediate corrective action,’ she wrote. The assessment report, which Noem included with her memo, concludes the vacant buildings ‘may be accessed by unauthorized individuals seeking to cause harm to personnel.’ The structures ‘provide a tactical advantage for carrying out small arms or active shooter scenarios,’ the report states.
MS NOW has not independently confirmed the memo. A spokesperson for the General Services Administration, which is overseeing development of the St. Elizabeths campus, confirmed to The Post that the agency had been alerted by the DHS about “a present security risk to life and property” at the campus “that may require us to demolish buildings.”
The report notes the push is being opposed by multiple preservationist groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has also sought to thwart Trump’s ballroom project.
It’s yet to be seen whether there’s any true risk in need of being resolved by Trump’s demolition of yet more historic buildings. But if past is prologue, there’s certainly reason to doubt the administration’s “emergency” claims here: namely, the president’s obvious desire to remake the nation’s capital and his administration’s tendency to use claims of “emergencies” to impose a slew of radical policies.
This is an important story of growth and rejection of your core identity. The fact that those closest to you can not accept you and that which makes up who you are. I have not changed the text of the story in any way as I want the voice of the author and his agony of his childhood to shine clearly. This is the way the right wing Christian Nationalist bigots want every family member to be and all children raised. Remember this was only the 1990s. In the 30 years since great progress was made in acceptance, tolerance and education of / about LGBTQ+ kids and how to raise them in loving acceptance of how they feel inside themselves. The Christian hate groups that make their living trying to return the country to a much more regressive hateful time rolling back all rights gained by minorities. And in a very short time they have had a huge effect on how LGBTQ+ people especially LGBTQ+ kids are treated. They stated their goal of driving these kids back into hiding terrified of being outed for fear of being beaten, harassed, and ostracized. That is what they want. Several Christian lawmakers who are trying to make being an out LGBTQ+ kid illegal along with showing any media that represents the LGBTQ+ community have said that when they were kids in school they used to gang up and beat the shit out of LGBTQ+ kids. I know in the 1970s I was not out but targeted as a “faggot” and constantly harassed and attacked. How any adult would want to return to such a time, to having any kid or adult be treated that way is horrendous. Especially from those trying hard to force the country to follow their idea of a Christian lifestyle. Hugs
At 30, I’m finally living as myself. But the man whose acceptance I wanted most still can’t say the word gay.
Jan 10, 2026
Content warning: This story includes mentions of homophobia, childhood trauma and suicidal ideation.
By CorBen Williams
The seventh time I came out to my father wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t happen at a kitchen table or in a parking lot or after he’d found one of my journals. It happened casually, slipped into a conversation like it was nothing:
“As a gay man—” I began.
“You’re not gay,” he interrupted.
“Dad,” I replied. “We’ve done this too many times before.”
Even now, at 30 years old, married to the man I love, fully myself in ways I once thought impossible, my dad still can’t say who I am out loud. It hangs there, suspended between us, as though acknowledging my homosexuality would unravel something he’s built his entire life around.
I’m not sure what exactly. Control? Image? Masculinity? Maybe he simply doesn’t have the language.
Photo courtesy of CorBen Williams.
I grew up in North Pole, Alaska, in a red-sided house at the end of a gravel turnaround. It was the kind of home where the winter light never quite reached the living room and silence carried through the walls like a second language.
North Pole felt like its own universe. A 2,500 person military town where there’s snow on the ground for up to 187 days a year and the Christmas lights never come down. About 70% of the town is white and roughly 30% of the voters are registered Republican, with almost half listed as “undeclared,” which in Alaska is usually just Republican without saying it out loud.
Most families were tied to the church or the base, so you learned fast what was considered normal and what was not. People knew your parents and your business.
Growing up Black and queer made me stand out without trying and forced me to learn early how to tuck parts of myself away.
My parents had both served in the military, and even though my mother had the warmth and softness to move past it, my father emulated parental rejection. Dad demanded respect and expected excellence in the way a man shaped by the military does: loud and without room for negotiation.
You could feel his energy before you heard his footsteps because there was always a tension that entered the room with him. He yelled more than he spoke, and as a kid I was told to listen to what he was saying, not how he was saying it, even when he was screaming in my face.
My father didn’t know what to do with a son who felt things deeply, and before I ever came out to him—the first of seven times—he had already shown me exactly which parts of myself were unsafe to reveal.
But that didn’t stop me from trying. The first time I came out, I was in first grade, sitting in the parking lot of a McDonald’s on Geist Road, right beside my future high school.
“Dad, I think I’m bisexual,” I said.
I knew my ass was gay. But I also knew enough about my father to try to ease him into it. He asked if I knew what that meant, and even though I did, I told him “no.”
“It means you like sucking penis,” he spat harshly.
I was six.
People think kids don’t understand things, but children clock everything. That moment didn’t confuse me about who I was. It clarified who he was. It showed me that there were parts of me he couldn’t handle and wouldn’t protect. I didn’t leave that day understanding my sexuality better. I left understanding the risk of telling the truth.
The second time, I was forced out when my father found my journal. I was 10 years old, and in those pages, I’d written unpolished thoughts about men, about how I felt around them, questions I didn’t yet know how to ask anyone.
He burst into my bedroom and tore the journal up in front of me, little pieces of paper flying around me as I sat in my bed. I tried not to cry.
“As long as you’re a kid in my house, you don’t get privacy,” I remember him barking. It showed me that I need to be wary about how much I trust people and what information I give them.
This rejection led me to the darkest part of my childhood.
“I am tired of living,” I remember muttering to my sixth grade teacher.
I was exhausted by my dad, exhausted from hiding, exhausted from feeling wrong in my own skin.
I should have stopped writing after that, but writing was how I survived. When you don’t have anyone to talk to, you talk to the page.
By 13, I had another journal. This one had drawings of a classmate and fantasies about kissing him. When my dad found it, he brought it up on the car ride home from school, saying “the correct way” to feel about other boys was “brotherly love” and nothing else.
But the third journal set off the biggest explosion.
It was filled with details, drawings and fantasies about my first hookup with a boy. The way I wrote about them, at 15, was more adult. The kind of writing he didn’t want to believe his son was capable of.
“I fucking told you about this shit,” he shouted, with the journal gripped tightly in his hand. “This isn’t appropriate. This isn’t what we do.”
My mom was sitting next to me, shocked, both of us caught off guard by how quickly he had gone from discovery to explosion. I almost cried, but I swallowed it down. My mom guided him into the other room to calm him down.
He didn’t speak to me for seven days. He couldn’t look at me. Each day felt like another nail in the coffin.
Photo courtesy of CorBen Williams.
I kept coming out to my dad anyway. At 17. At 22. At 24. Nothing changed.
Part of me used to think that I was an embarrassment to my family. I felt for so long that I needed to apologize for being the mistake. But in my late teens, I started to see it differently. I realized I just wanted his acceptance and his love in a way that I was never gonna get.
Because of this, I don’t think I ever really got to be a child. Even in first grade, when other kids were talking about Barbies and Legos, I felt like I was always bracing for impact, performing a version of boyhood that never fit. My childhood was spent preparing for adulthood and a career. People would always say to me, “You seem so much older. You seem so mature.”
I left North Pole for good and moved to New York City when I turned 19. I became a performer, a traveler, someone who learned to build softness and resilience, where my childhood had taught me to live in fight-or-flight mode. And then, almost when I wasn’t expecting it, I met Travis.
He was older. Wisconsin-born. A wildlife biologist. Patient in a way I didn’t even realize I needed. My mother said he softened me, brought grey into my black-and-white worldview. With him, I don’t brace for criticism. I don’t edit myself. I don’t shrink. I don’t hide my journals.
We’ve been together five years now, married for three. He’s met everyone in my life, except for my dad.
Photo courtesy of CorBen Williams.
Now, when I think about my upbringing in North Pole, I think about the path through the woods that led to my house, hoping someone on the other side would understand me. I think about how many times I tried to hand my father my truth, and how many times he handed it back to me with rage.
Even now, with the life I’ve built and the love I’ve chosen, acceptance is still complicated. I wish I could say that learning to love myself erased the sting of not being understood, but the truth is I still wrestle with where I fit—inside my family, inside Black spaces, inside queer spaces, inside the places that were never built with someone like me.
I’ve learned to be confident, to be gracious, to be the person who makes others feel seen, maybe because I know exactly what it feels like not to be. But some days, even as a grown man, I feel an instinct to shrink.
I’m learning that acceptance is a practice, one I have to return to again and again. I don’t have it all figured out. But I’m trying. And maybe that’s the real truth at the end of all this: I haven’t just been coming out to my father all these years—I’ve been slowly, steadily learning how to come home to myself.
Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES reached out to CorBen’s father for comment, but he did not respond.
Sam Donndelinger assisted with the writing and reporting in this story.
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Paul Eaton in Baghdad in June 2004. Eaton spent 37 years in active service. Photograph: Brent Stirton/Getty Images
Donald Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, are mounting an aggressive push to politicise the top ranks of the US military – a push that smacks of Stalinism and could take years to repair, the former infantry chief who trained troops to invade Iraq has warned.
Maj Gen Paul Eaton has sounded the alarm, saying in an interview with the Guardian that the effort to bend the higher echelons of the military to the US president’s will was unparalleled in recent history and could have long-term dire consequences. He warned that both the reputation and efficiency of the world’s most powerful fighting force was in the balance.
“There is an active effort to politicise the armed forces,” Eaton said. “Once you infect the body, the cure may be very difficult and painful for presidents downstream.”
He added that the actions of Trump and his chosen head of the Pentagon were putting the standing of the military as an independent entity, free from party politics, at risk. “As the phrase goes, reputation is built a drop at a time and emptied in buckets.”
Eaton, 75, has spent his entire life in military circles, including 37 years in active service. His father was an air force pilot whose B-57 bomber was shot down over Laos in 1969, when Eaton was 18.
Air force Col Norman Eaton’s remains were found and identified in 2006.
Eaton himself trained at West Point, the US military academy in New York that trains commissioned officers, graduating soon after the end of the Vietnam war. He rose through the ranks of the US army to infantry chief and then, after the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 was completed, was sent to that country to rebuild the Iraqi armed forces.
In recent years Eaton has been a sharp critic of Trump’s manipulation of military structures. In the summer of 2024 he participated in war games conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice thinktank, that sought to anticipate the then Republican nominee Trump’s most dangerous authoritarian moves were he to return to the White House.
Many of the actions predicted in those tabletop exercises – including politicisation of the military and other key government institutions, and deployment of the national guard into Democratic-controlled cities – have already come to pass under Trump’s second presidency.
In Eaton’s analysis, Trump’s first step towards compromising military independence was the act of appointing Hegseth as secretary of defense. The former Fox & Friends host had been an adviser to Trump and had supported his first presidential run in 2016.
“Hegseth not only swears loyalty to Trump, he swears fealty to Trump – whereas the military swears an oath to the constitution,” Eaton said.
Soon after Hegseth was ensconced in the Pentagon the firings began. Within a week of Trump’s inauguration the military inspector general who acted as an independent watchdog was dismissed, followed by the top military lawyers (judge advocates general) who advise on the laws of armed conflict.
Out, too, went the top officers. Charles Brown, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, was ousted in February and replaced by Lt Gen Dan Caine who Trump claimed had express his love for the president and would “kill for him” (Caine denied ever saying such things). The top officers in the navy and air force were ditched in quick succession.
The Pentagon purge sent a clear and chilling message that reverberated throughout the military services, Eaton said. “Toe the line, or we will fire you. You’re in a different world now. This is Trump’s world, and by God, this is what we’re going to do.”
The dismissals also sowed doubt throughout the ranks. Would senior officers kowtow to Trump and his defense secretary? Or would they stand up for following the military rules of engagement?
Eaton said the effect reminded him of Joseph Stalin’s 1940s purges of the top officers in Soviet forces. “Stalin killed a lot of the best and brightest of the military leadership, and then inserted political commissars into the units. The doubt that swept the armed forces of the Soviet Union is reminiscent of today – they are not killing these men and women, but they are removing them from positions of authority with similar impact.”
The end result, Eaton said, was that “you’ve got a 1940s Stalin problem inside the American military right now”.
The furor over the lethal US military strikes on boats in Latin American waters is for Eaton a sign of the damage that is being wrought. The administration claims the strikes have been targeted on “narco-terrorists” who are in “armed conflict” with the US by bringing illegal drugs into the country.
The first of more than 20 strikes that have occurred took place on 2 September. It involved a controversial second strike that killed two survivors who had been clinging to the bombed wreck of the boat.
The Washington Post revealed that Hegseth had given an order to “kill everybody”. Under the Department of Defense manual on the laws of war, it is forbidden to order that every combatant must be killed irrespective of whether they pose a threat.
Eaton has no doubts about the illegality of the 2 September second strike. “It was either a war crime or a murder. So we have a real problem here. This decision looks a whole lot like a U-boat commander machine gunning victims in the water during world war two.”
Hegseth sought to drive home the new way of doing things in a bizarre summit in September in which he gathered military commanders to Quantico in Virginia. He berated them about so-called wokeness, liberal thinking, and the presence of “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon”.
For Eaton, the meeting was “disgusting” and “antithetical to the US military. The senior leadership of our armed forces are sober people who do not speak in terms of fatness or ‘kill them all’ or ‘the gloves are off’.”
Looking ahead to 2026, Eaton is profoundly concerned that the violations of rules of war that have arguably been committed by the Pentagon outside US territory might soon become a reality domestically. The Trump administration has federalised national guard troops and sent them into numerous cities against the wishes of Democratic mayors and state governors.
The presence of national guard soldiers in Los Angeles, Washington DC, the Chicago area and other locations has been challenged in federal courts, where cases continue to play out.
In October Eaton took part in a delegation that included the organisation Vote Vets, to which he acts as an adviser, to see the Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker. The retired two-star general said they counseled Pritzker to stand firm in countering troop deployment to Chicago.
“We told him: you have a requirement to protect your citizens from federal assault.”
Eaton’s biggest fear is at some point a dramatic clash of forces might take place, with the federalised national guard facing off against state and local police. He conjured up the imaginary scenario of the Texas national guard being federalised – ie ordered out of state control into national control – and imported into Baltimore, Maryland, contrary to the city and state’s wishes.
“What could go wrong?” Eaton said. “You can very easily see an escalation in which both sides think they are right, obeying orders that they believe were given legally.”
Sooner or later, he warned, a “memorable event” was likely to take place. “There are going to be people getting hurt who really don’t need to get hurt.”
tRump has never purchased anything personally like normal people. He doesn’t go to stores and shop. He has always been a pampered rich boy even in bankruptcy. I don’t know about anyone else but Ron and I have to stretch our first half of the month income to be able to afford groceries and medications. We ended last month with $30 in the checking account. This month is always bad for us. So I want to know where this lowering of costs are. Ron wears me and the car outgoing from store to store to get the best deals. We suffer in too cold or too warm a house to keep the electric bill down. But yes Florida is a high cost of living state, would love to move, but … yup we can’t afford it. Hugs.
Donald Trump’s claims about bringing down prices comes just weeks after he told families to limit the number of presents that they buy for their children
tRump is using the people’s house, the house for the president while he is in office as if it was one of his own properties. Like he was always going to stay there. He is acting like the White House should be a palace like the Saudi royalty or the English kings / queens. He wants the place to be spectacle and pomp instead of what it really is for, a work place for the president to live and work. He also spends the public treasury paid for by the taxpayer as his own private checking account when the laws say that is illegal. Congress approves the budget not the president, but the republicans in congress are too afraid of him to even say anything. I bet you they find their voice if a democrat wins the presidency. Hugs.
President Donald Trump is continuing his renovations of the White House with potential new additions to the West Wing.
After demolishing the White House’s East Wing to make way for a new ballroom in 2025, Trump is now setting his sights on the colonnade linking the West Wing to the executive residence, where he wants to add a second level.
The administration unveiled the plan during a meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington this week.
Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment via email.
Why It Matters
The White House announced the East Wing ballroom project in late July, with demolition beginning in October, when workers were seen tearing it down.
The White House has said the project will be funded by private donations and no taxpayer burden, though the projected cost has increased from an estimate of $200 million to $400 million.
New Renovation Plans
In an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Trump said he was calling the project the “Upper West Wing.” He said it was still in the design phase and that the space could be used for additional West Wing offices or serve as “first ladies’ offices for future first ladies.” These were previously in the East Wing.
The project’s architect, Shalom Baranes, said the White House was weighing up the one-story addition to the West Wing to restore what he described as the complex’s “symmetry” once the East Wing ballroom was finished.
Architect Shalom Baranes shows elevation drawings for a new $400 million ballroom at the White House to members of the National Capital Planning Commi… | Chip Somodevilla/Getty
“I did mention the potential for a future addition, a one-story addition to the West Wing,” Baranes told the commission. “The reason to think about that is so that we would reinstate symmetry along the central pavilion of the White House.”
He made the remarks after unveiling plans for a two-story colonnade that would link the East Room to the new ballroom. The ballroom is set to be about 22,000 square feet and designed to accommodate 1,000 seated guests.
In a statement released in July, the White House said the “much-needed and exquisite addition” would add “approximately 90,000 total square feet of ornately designed and carefully crafted space, with a seated capacity of 650 people—a significant increase from the 200-person seated capacity in the East Room of the White House.”
Backlash
The overall renovation plans have been met with some backlash in recent months.
In December, the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit to stop the East Wing project, saying the administration had dodged a required review process for federal projects. During a hearing in the case, the administration told a federal judge it would submit the project’s plans to the appropriate federal oversight bodies. The judge said he would schedule a follow-up hearing in January to review the White House’s process and declined to halt construction in the meantime.
The trust said following the meeting on Thursday: “Today’s NCPC informational presentation about the White House ballroom was a good and necessary first step. The National Trust continues to urge the Administration to comply with all legally required review and approval processes before commencing construction, including the NCPC, the Commission of Fine Arts, compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, and approval by Congress.”
It added that it looked “forward to the American people having a voice in the process moving forward.”
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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I am not sure if I need to say this but this is a total fraud attack on a real US hero. This is fascism up close and clear. tRump and his people are scared of the truth and a drunken Christian Nazi nationalist is trying to demote a real US hero military man because he told the truth. The truth every military person learns in what ever basic training they went through and often during their time in service. Remember the Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam and the shit that followed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre . Hugs
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly is firing back after the Pentagon moved to censure him over last year’s video urging service members to refuse illegal orders.
Scottie's Playtime 