https://crooksandliars.com/2024/09/trump-admits-he-lost-2020-election-little
Thank you Ten Bears for your link to this post. The link to Ten Bears post is below. Hugs. Scottie
Demented Donald threw cold water all over his supporters who were conned by him into believing massive voter fraud stole the election away from him.
https://crooksandliars.com/cltv/2024/09/clear-admission-loss
Instead of a rally, Trump spoke at a Charlotte-area warehouse in North Carolina. During his speech he rambled out of the blue about the 2020 election results, admitting he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump was bragging that he received more votes than any sitting president before him which is meaningless and ridiculous since he got trounced by almost 8 million votes. I guess his addled brain transitioned into the making an explosive statement to his MAGA cult.
TRUMP: We were getting ready to do it, and then a lot of bad things happened. We did much better, by the way, in the election of 2020 than we did in 2016.
Just remember that. Millions and millions of votes more. More votes than any sitting president in the history of our country.
But they beat us by a whisker. They beat us just by a little whisker.
He beat us from the basement.
If you’re a MAGAt, I hope you heard this and heard it good.
Trump played you all for fools.
He played you for fkn idiots.
Police were killed during the insurrection.
January 6th defendants, I hope you rot in jail.
And you all deserved it
Hey Donald Dump, Ashli Babbitt will still be alive if you admitted you lost on Nov 6th, 2020 instead of on Sept 25, 2024.
Trump didn’t lose ‘by a whisker.’ Biden received 306 electoral votes to Trump’s received 232 and Biden received the most votes in the history of the country with 81,283,501, dwarfing Trump’s meager 74 million.
Trump’s lies tore the country apart and are still doing it.
It’s a worthy read. Also, if you prefer to listen, click through to listen.
Snippets:
The recent crackdown on the social media platform Telegram has triggered waves of panic among the neo-Nazis who have made the app their headquarters for posting hate and planning violence.
“Shut It Down,” one person posted in a white supremacist chat on Tuesday, hours after Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced he would begin sharing some users’ identifying information with law enforcement.
With over 900 million users around the globe, Telegram has been both revered and reviled for its hands-off approach to moderating posted content. The platform made headlines this summer when French authorities arrested Durov, seeking to hold him responsible for illegal activity that has been conducted or facilitated on the platform — including organized drug trafficking, child pornography and fraud.
Durov has called the charges “misguided.” But he acknowledged that criminals have abused the platform and promised in a Telegram post to “significantly improve things in this regard.” Durov’s announcement marked a considerable policy shift: He said Telegram will now share the IP addresses and phone numbers of users who violate the platform’s rules with authorities “in response to valid legal requests.”
This was the second time in weeks that extremists had called on their brethren to abandon Telegram. The first flurry of panic followed indictments by the Justice Department of two alleged leaders of the Terrorgram Collective, a group of white supremacists accused of inciting others on the platform to commit racist killings. (snip)
An analysis by ProPublica and FRONTLINE, however, shows that despite the wave of early panic, users didn’t initially leave the platform. Instead there was a surge in activity on Terrorgram-aligned channels and chats, as allies of the group tried to rally support for their comrades in custody, railed against the government’s actions and sought to oust users they believed to be federal agents.
Federal prosecutors in the U.S. have charged Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison, two alleged leaders of the Terrorgram Collective, with a slew of felonies including soliciting the murder of government officials on Telegram.
Humber has pleaded (sic) not guilty. She made a brief appearance in federal court in Sacramento, California, on Sept. 13, during which she was denied bail. Humber, shackled and clad in orange-and-white jail garb, said nothing. Allison, who has not yet entered a plea, was arrested in Idaho but will face trial in California.
Attorneys for Humber and Allison did not respond to separate requests for comment.
The two are alleged Accelerationists, a subset of white supremacists intent on accelerating the collapse of today’s liberal democracies and replacing them with all-white ethno-states, according to the indictment.
Through a constellation of linked Telegram channels, the collective distributes books, audio recordings, videos, posters and calendars celebrating white supremacist mass murderers, such as Brenton Tarrant, who in early 2019 stormed two mosques in New Zealand and shot to death 51 Muslim worshippers.
The group explicitly aims to inspire similar attacks, offering would-be terrorists tips and tools for carrying out spectacular acts of violence and sabotage. A now-defunct channel allegedly run by Humber, for example, featured instructions on how to make a vast array of potent explosives. After their arrests, channels allegedly run by Humber and Allison went silent.
But within days of the indictments, an anonymous Telegram user had set up a new channel “dedicated to updates about their situation.” (snip)
Matthew Kriner, managing director of the Accelerationism Research Consortium, said the Terrorgram Collective had already been badly weakened by a string of arrests in the U.S., Europe and Canada over the past two years. “Overall, the arrests of Humber and Allison are likely the final blow to the Terrorgram Collective,” Kriner said.
In the U.S., federal agents this year have arrested at least two individuals who were allegedly inspired by the group. The first was Alexander Lightner, a 26-year-old construction worker who was apprehended in January during a raid on his Florida home. In a series of Telegram posts, Lightner said he planned to commit a racially or ethnically motivated mass killing, according to prosecutors. Court records show that agents found a manual produced by the Terrorgram Collective and a copy of “Mein Kampf” in Lightner’s home.
Lightner has pleaded (sic) not guilty to charges of making online threats and possessing an illegal handgun silencer. His attorney declined to comment. (snip)
In extremist circles, there was more discussion about fleeing Telegram after Durov’s announcement this week. “Time is running out on this sinking ship,” wrote one user. “So we’re ditching Telegram?” asked another.
“Every time we have a success against one of them, they learn, they adapt, they modify,” said Don Robinson, who as an FBI agent conducted infiltration operations against white supremacists. “Extremists can simply pick up and move to a new platform once they are de-platformed for content abuses. This leaves law enforcement and intelligence agencies playing an endless game of Whac-a-Mole to identify where the next threat may be coming from.”
September 26, 1909 International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU Local 25) began a strike against the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. In November their strike would become part of the “Uprising of the 20,000,” during which 339 of 352 firms would be struck and reach agreements with the union over the following five months but Triangle was not one of them. The strike ended after thirteen weeks that saw over 700 striking workers arrested. More info Chronology =========================== September 26, 1945 OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA) officer Lieutenant Colonel A. Peter Dewey became the first American to die in Vietnam. During unrest in Saigon, he was killed by Viet Minh guerrillas who mistook him for a French officer. Before his death, Dewey had filed a report on the deepening crisis in Vietnam, stating his opinion that the U.S. “ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.” ==================== September 26, 1957  The Buffalo Nuclear Test, Maralinga Despite international protests, the United Kingdom began a series of atmospheric nuclear bomb tests beginning with Operation Buffalo on aboriginal land at Maralinga, South Australia. The series of tests included dropping a bomb from a height of 30,000 feet. This was the first launching of a British atomic weapon from an aircraft. ================= September 26, 1983 Five members of Puget Sound Women’s Peace Camp entered Boeing’s cruise missile production plant in Seattle, Washington, to leaflet the workers and were arrested. In November of 1980 and 1981 the Women’s Pentagon Actions, where hundreds of women came together to challenge patriarchy and militarism, took place.A movement grew that found ways to use direct action to put pressure on the military establishment and to show positive examples of life-affirming ways to live together. This movement spawned women’s peace camps at military bases around the world from Greenham Common, England, to the Puget Sound Peace Camp, as well as camps in Japan and Italy, among others.  ======================= September 26, 1988 President Ronald Reagan urged the United Nations General Assembly to call a conference about the use of chemical weapons. Though the U.S. and other nations had signed the Geneva Protocol banning chemical (as well as bacteriological) arms, such weapons had been used repeatedly by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its war against Iran. Background on the treaty and the issue |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september261909
Sep 23, 2024 Orion Rummler Originally published by The 19th
In 2020, the Supreme Court found that gay and transgender workers are protected from workplace discrimination in the landmark case Bostock v. Clayton County. Despite those federal protections, LGBTQ+ people across the country — especially transgender and nonbinary people — continue to face rampant discrimination at work and don’t feel safe being out, according to research from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
In a 2023 study of 1,902 LGBTQ+ adults in the workforce, released in August, 17 percent said they had experienced discrimination or harassment on the job in the past year. Trans and nonbinary employees were more than twice as likely as cisgender queer employees to face discrimination and harassment: Twenty-two percent of trans and nonbinary people experienced discrimination in the past year, and 26 percent experienced harassment.
“You would hope things have gotten better,” said Brad Sears, founding executive director of the Williams Institute and coauthor of the report.
Sears believes the high rate of recent discrimination is an indication that change has been slow after Bostock, even after the Biden administration implemented additional nondiscrimination policies. Shortly after Biden was inaugurated in 2021, he issued an executive order based on Bostock that mandated the protection of gay and transgender Americans in the workplace, as well as in schools and doctor’s offices. And as of this spring, extra protections were put in place to guard against employers who consistently misgender employees or deny them access to sex-segregated spaces.
Still, the study found that many LGBTQ+ Americans are not out in the workplace to avoid facing discrimination and harassment. Nearly half of LGBTQ+ employees said that they are not open about their identity to their current supervisor, and one-fifth are not out to any of their coworkers. Staying in the closet actually did protect them: LGBTQ+ employees who were out to at least a few coworkers, or just their supervisor, were three times as likely to report discrimination as employees who were not out.
“A lot of people, even if they are out, they’re kind of downplaying their identities in the workplace,” Sears said. “Maybe they use a different voice or different mannerisms at work, or they don’t dress exactly how they would otherwise dress when they’re not at work, or they use a bathroom that they would prefer not to be using at work.”
To avoid discrimination, transgender and nonbinary people are significantly more likely to hide their identities than cisgender queer people. In a new breakout analysis of the Williams Institute’s survey, the experiences of nonbinary people are found to be especially fraught.
Nonbinary people in the study described being ostracized and subjected to violence, harassment or threatsat work due to their physical appearance either not being “feminine” enough or “masculine” enough. Their gender expression made them a target and was used as a justification for their treatment by their bosses, coworkers and customers. Frequently, nonbinary people said they were passed over for raises and promotions, called slurs, and forced to work alone.
The nonbinary people surveyed were largely young, urban, and racially and ethnically diverse. To the survey authors, such data is a call for employers to take action — especially If they want to retain young employees.
About 87 percent of nonbinary adults in the workforce are under 35 years old, compared with 71 percent of transgender adults and 51 percent of cisgender queer adults, according to the study. That research aligns with other findings from KFF that Americans under 35 are more likely to identify as nonbinary than older Americans, and research from the Pew Research Center that found adults under 30 are more likely than older adults to be out as trans or nonbinary.
About 3 in 5 nonbinary people have experienced discrimination or harassment at work at some point in their lives, like being fired, not hired, not promoted, or verbally, sexually or physically harassed.
About 1 in 5 nonbinary people reported physical harassment at work because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, with some survey respondents reporting being “assaulted,” “attacked” and “strangled.”
For some, unfair treatment looked like having their hours reduced, being isolated from other employees or customers, or being excluded from company events or socializing.
“Oftentimes, I was passed up for a promotion because I wasn’t ‘manly’ enough, and they doubted my ability to lead a team,” a Latinx nonbinary person from California said in the survey. A Latinx nonbinary participant from Colorado shared: “A co-worker strangled me at a counter and said he was trying to ‘give a girl a massage.’” In Connecticut, a Black nonbinary person said they heard their manager talking “disparagingly” about them to the rest of their bosses because of their gender expression.
One in 4 nonbinary employees said they are currently experiencing adverse treatment at their job because of their LGBTQ+ identity. For many nonbinary people, the worst experiences of discrimination and harassment that they face at work are linked to their multiple marginalized identities. In particular, they were targeted for their disability or being bisexual in addition to being nonbinary.
This research shows that company-level policies, as well as state and federal nondiscrimination regulations, need to be specific so that they protect nonbinary employees, Sears said.
The Williams Institute plans to release more breakout analyses from its survey, including reports on the experiences of transgender, Black, Latinx and Asian-American employees. Breaking down the unique experiences of each demographic is key to understanding and addressing the issues that they’re facing at work, Sears said — for example, nonbinary people face rigid and gendered expectations at work, while bisexual women face high rates of sexual harassment.
“LGBTQ+ people are not monolithic. They’re different, they have intersecting identities … and those are leading to differences that are important in the workplace,” he said.
This was a school damn it. Fuck Israel all to hell. I am done with the Israeli government and the nation. Look at the young kids trying to help, they should have been learning in that school, not picking up the pieces and looking for dead bodies of friends. But Israel doesn’t want schools in Gaza, at least not Palestinian schools. If the world has not figured out yet that this is an attempt at genocide, to kill or drive an entire people from the land so Israeli Jews can take it over. I have posted of people camped out ready to move it. There is no justification for this slaughter. Look they just managed to pull off a covert operation in Lebanon that was sneaky and also killed indiscriminately innocent by standers and killed at least two kids, but Israel doesn’t care as they are not Jewish kids or people. But the point was they did not need to drop missiles and 2000 pound bombs on the people who live there to do the job. In Gaza the people have no way to fight back, most are living in tents that Israel hits with large power bombs. Hugs. Scottie
An Israeli strike on a school in northern Gaza on Saturday killed at least 22 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, while the Israeli army said that it targeted a Hamas command center in what used to be a school. (Production by Wafaa Shurafa) Read more here: http://apne.ws/ClCkCeK
Thoughts on the stupid lies Donald Trump and Republicans are telling to demonize LGBTQ+ people with only 46 days until the election – by Evan Hurst
I’ve been thinking this week about some of the absolutely stupid garbage conservative, culture-war-obsessed MAGA people believe, or claim to believe, for the purposes of demonizing people and making people hate the same people they hate. The most glaring current example is obviously Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and their media mouthpieces attacking innocent Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, with lies about them stealing and eating family pets.
But there are a bunch more.
There are the abortion lies Trump and Republicans love to tell — which many of them truly believe — about how Democrats love to let babies be born, at which point they lay them on the table and decide whether or not they’re going to execute them. Trump is sure it’s happening, because he saw on TV that the previous governor of Virginia (or is it West Virginia? Trump is never sure) totally said that, and if it’s on TV, it’s true.
Every election cycle lately, there’s a crop of the country’s stupidest Republican politicians babbling out loud that they have a friend whose pastor told them at the local elementary school there are children who identify as “furries” and demand to poop in litterboxes. It’s amazing watching them tell that one with a straight face.
Of course, Republican lies, blood libels and conspiracy theories often have a tiny element of 0.2 percent truth in them, something they can use to insist that the ridiculously stupid thing they say is happening really is happening. In the Virginia abortion story Trump tells, the nugget of truth was former Governor Ralph Northam talking about palliative care in grievously tragic situations where a newborn infant has no chance of surviving.
There actually have been litterboxes in classrooms. It’s so that if there’s a mass shooter in the school and classrooms are locked down for hours, poor little kids who can’t hold it might not have to be humiliated by wetting their pants.
(Did I ever mention that white conservative MAGA Republican politicians, pundits and influencers are extremely sick, evil liars?)
And then there’s the right-wing Christian Republican war on LGBTQ+ kids.
This week, Fox News tweeted a video featuring failed swimmer/anti-trans hatemonger Riley Gaines — remember her from my post about the Paris Olympics? — on “Fox & Friends,” spreading some the vile lies she so loves to tell. The clip caught my attention and pissed me the fuck off, and that’s why I’m talking about that this week instead of Mark Robinson. (I’ll get to him in due time, I’m sure.)
Here’s the video: (embedded on the page.)
Fox explained in its tweet that Gaines was “react[ing] to a California judge banning a school district from imposing a policy that would have required teachers and staff to notify parents if their student declares they want to change their name or pronouns.”
In the video Gaines bellyaches that such rulings are the government saying “they know your children better than you do. They don’t believe that these are your kids. They believe that these are the government’s kids.”
Elon Musk, who has apparently never met a conspiracy theory he wasn’t stupid enough to amplify — and who judging from all available evidence has a particular hate in his heart for transgender people, including his own trans child — retweeted Gaines’s video, saying simply, “The Dems want to take your kids.”
To which I reply, oh, go fuck yourself, Elon. Same message goes for Riley Gaines.
I want to talk about the California law in question and what it really does, and how that ties into how Donald Trump and Republicans are demonizing LGBTQ+ kids as part of their hate campaign against America, but I also want to tell y’all a story, so I’m going to try to do both.
Two nights before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, I was standing in line in the wee hours in the lobby of a prominent hotel in downtown Atlanta, with a bunch of fellow weary travelers. It was Friday, the first day of the CrowdStrike update that borked the entire global internet, and all our Delta flights had been canceled.
I struck up a conversation with the guy in front of me, a handsome young guy from El Paso. His wife and small children were somewhere in the expansive lobby, exhausted, while Dad tried to get hotel rooms sorted. They were coming from Disney. I was on my way back from the Republican convention in Milwaukee. We made small talk.
But we were in line for over an hour, so the conversation actually got surprisingly deep. He was a second-generation immigrant from Mexico, with parents who only speak Spanish. We talked about what life is really like along the border these days for people who actually literally live right on it. He described himself as a conservative, but not extreme, and not super-political. He freely offered that he couldn’t stand Donald Trump, but probably would vote for him, not that he was enthused about it.
But one thing that was bothering him, big time, was this law that had just been signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in California, to protect gay and trans kids from rogue school personnel who would out them to their parents without their consent. I was a bit surprised this Texas guy, who again didn’t seem that political, was so in tune with something California’s governor had done five days prior. But there we were.
He made extra-clear from the beginning that he doesn’t consider himself anti-gay or anti-trans. But it was immediately clear to me that this very kind-seeming guy was getting all his information on this issue filtered through the Christian nationalist bullshit machine of right-wing media.
The California law was passed directly in response to school districts in red areas of the state enacting policies forcing schools to notify parents if a child asked to be referred to with a different name or pronouns. The legislature acted to protect those kids.
But to this dad, it sounded like California was trying to put one over on parents, to usurp their parental role, stealing and indoctrinating their kids. (Hey, Riley Gaines! How did your shitty, vile hate get in this nice man’s brain?)
It was 1:00 a.m., so I wasn’t about to start bickering, and also y’all would be amazed how gentle and diplomatic I am in person. But I did try to get on this dad’s side and maybe help him see it from a different perspective. He had gathered that I was gay, or maybe I told him.
“You obviously love your kids,” I said, “and you wouldn’t reject them for any reason, no way, no how.” He agreed.
“That law isn’t about hiding things from good, loving parents like you,” I told him. “It’s about protecting kids who don’t have parents like you, kids who are frightened of what would happen if their parents knew who they were, kids who don’t feel safe, kids who come from of abusive homes.” It could be the religious kind of abuse, and/or the non-religious kind of abuse.
He understood what I was talking about and several times reiterated how very not-anti-gay and not-anti-trans he was.
There have been memes going around lately along the lines of, if your child is gay or trans and they don’t want you to know, there’s probably a good reason for that, and likely it’s you. The problem is you.
I was trying to help this dad see, though, that he was not the problem. But he was still uncomfortable with it. He felt he would want the school to tell him. He grudgingly agreed that if one of his kids thought they were trans, he would absolutely want to make sure they had the best medical care and guidance they could get, that he would want to do whatever was best for his child.
But he wasn’t convinced this law wasn’t out to get people like him. You don’t fix the constant lava flow of conservative Christian right-wing fascist propaganda and lies in one sleepy night when all anybody wants to do is get a fucking hotel room and then fly the hell out of Atlanta the next day.
That dad is a good example of why Trump and Vance and Fox News and the rest of the Republican machinery are so committed to demonizing all LGBTQ+ people, but especially trans people, this election season.
This is a strategy, and it works on a whole bunch of people.
Donald Trump has been saying that on the campaign trail lately. He is absolutely full of shit. He repeated the lie at a Moms For Liberty circle jerk recently, and Moms For Liberty was nail-spitting furious that CNN deigned to factcheck Trump’s obvious lie.
(Trump also memorably screamed at the debate that Kamala Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison!” He gets confused about his conspiracy theories sometimes.)
Reality check: there is no school nurse in the country doling out top surgeries or bottom surgeries, either for trans-identifying kids, or for kids who come in after they skin their knees on the playground. (That would be real fucked up!)
Schools aren’t going gender-affirmation surgeries and kids aren’t demanding litterboxes because they say they’re “furries.” The baby isn’t being born so they can put it on the table and decide to execute it, and Haitians in Springfield aren’t eating Whiskers. Not even the best Obamacare money can buy has a plan where kids can walk in to the school nurse, without their parents’ consent, sign up for surgery, and then reappear at their parents’ house days later with a brand new set of genitals.
But Moms For Liberty got so mad at CNN for debunking Trump’s dementia lies. It was very important to them that Trump be out there demonizing transgender people, in general, regardless of whether Trump’s babbling about children getting on the school bus and coming back “a few days later with an operation” was literally true.
They angrily sent CNN a bunch of examples of lawsuits filed in various states, all focused on “parental rights” and, in particular, schools letting kids transition socially — as in, come out as trans or non-binary, etc. — without running off to tattle to their parents. Letting kids use different pronouns if that’s what they’re feeling is right for them. Etc.
Of course, because it’s Moms For Liberty, their missive to CNN — and the pissy PR email they sent to tell everybody about it — was full of hallucinatory conspiracy theory babblings about schools “secret[ly] social-transitioning … minor children” and, quoting one lawsuit from Massachusetts, “encourag[ing] minor children to hide key components of who they are from their parents, while actively encouraging children to disobey and ignore their parents’ wishes, and while actively deceiving parents and hiding information about their own children from them.” Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice even suggested that schools are “legally allowed to assign a new pronoun without parental knowledge.”
As if it’s the schools initiating these actions. As if schools are handing out pronouns with seating charts. (“Aw fuck, bro! Did you get she/her? Bro that sucks!” — common elementary school conversation now.)
They also straight up lied and said Minnesota allows gender-affirmation surgeries for minors without parental consent. It does not.
(Again I ask, on what fuckin’ insurance plan? Have I mentioned lately that these people are delusional weirdos?)
But as I said, pretty much everything Moms For Liberty was mad about, even when they were totally misrepresenting things, was social transitioning. Because that’s the slippery slope to hormones and surgery, and they’re not telling their parents, AIIIIYEEEEEEEE!
So they were fine with Donald Trump straight-up lying and saying schools are doing transgender surgeries on kids, because sometimes you have to make up really fucked up lies to con people into hating the same people you hate. Isn’t that right, Republicans?
What did J.D. Vance just say about his and Trump’s blood libel lies about Haitian immigrants? “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” And by “suffering of the American people,” he meant things he’s a total Nazi about.
Or as one white fascist Christian put it on Twitter this week:
Lying for Jesus! It’s been around a long time, yet it’s never done by people who actually reflect the character of Jesus in any way, shape or form.
(One of these days I’m going to write y’all a full Bible study on Matthew 7:23, AKA Jesus’s personal candygram to conservative white Christians.)
MAGA Republicans are absolutely counting on conning enough people with these absurd, demonizing lies and libels, about trans people and immigrants and abortion and anything else they can think of that deserves a good Two Minutes Hate. In Texas, it was reported this week that congressional Republicans are spending millions targeting Democrats with anti-transgender ads.
It’s literally all they have to run on. And they know it works, at least on some people.
Riley Gaines griped to “Fox & Friends” that “[t]hey don’t believe that these are your kids. They believe that these are the government’s kids.”
We’ve been over this before, how these MAGA Christian fascist creeps (and their ideological compatriots) think they literally own their children. They believe they own them until they transfer ownership of their daughters to their husbands, or in the case of their sons, when they become wife-owning patriarchs in their own right.
It offends them when it’s pointed out that actually, their kids are their own people, and they own themselves.
Now, when the kids are minors, sure, their parents have custody and responsibility for them, and the schools have a part to play in that, both as partners with the parents and just in general, in preparing them to be respectable, functioning adults. Schools have a responsibility to let parents know when their kids’ grades are slipping; if they’re getting in fights, or getting bullied; if they’re acting out in school; if they’re doing something illegal, or dangerous, to themselves or others. And so forth.
This shouldn’t have to be said, but coming out of the closet — as gay, as bi, or as somewhere on the gender spectrum other than that which they were assigned at birth — DOES NOT FALL UNDER ANY REASONABLE CATEGORY OF “MISBEHAVIOR” FOR WHICH A SCHOOL WOULD NEED TO NOTIFY PARENTS.
Being LGBTQ+ is not dangerous, it’s not immoral, and it’s not “I found meth in your kid’s backpack.” It’s simply a thing. If a child is excelling and getting along well socially and in grade seven they decide to try on some new pronouns, that doesn’t warrant a phone call home.
It doesn’t warrant tattling.
But that’s what these evil fascist creeps want. They want schools to be their abusive morality Gestapo when they’re not around, to shame and punish their children in their absence, and to call a parent-teacher conference if they suspect a child has come down with the Woke Mind Virus.
By the way, schools do have another responsibility when it comes to kids, and that’s to spot abuse and neglect, and to intervene for the welfare of the child if they suspect the child is in danger at home.
And that — dearly beloved MAGA fascist assholes — is the category under which this falls.
If a kid comes out as gay, or starts socially transitioning, but they say “Hey, my parents don’t know, and I need them not to,” then there’s a reason that kid — the actual owner of their own body, mind and soul — is saying that. Maybe they’re just not ready! Maybe they’re getting their sea legs with their friends before they go home to their parents. Maybe they’ll tell them next year.
But it’s also possible that they don’t feel safe with their parents, and fear their reaction. It might be a reasonable fear. Fundamentalist Christian homes are notoriously abusive to LGBTQ+ children, oftentimes disowning them or kicking them out, oftentimes subjecting them to physical, psychological and religious abuse. There’s a reason states all over the country have been passing bans on fully discredited, fully ineffective and uniformly harmful “ex-gay” and “ex-trans” religious torture for minors for over a decade now. (Congratulations, Kentucky! You have a good governor.)
They might be scared their parents will ship them off to “pray away the gay” or “pray away the trans.”
Laws like the one in California protect those kids.
The parents bitching about this and filing lawsuits and publicly demonizing LGBTQ+ people — including their own children — they are demonstrating precisely why these laws need to exist.
That’s what this is about.
It’s not about hiding things from good and loving parents. It’s about protecting kids from parents who are monsters.
In the next 46 days, you might encounter people who say they can’t vote for Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump for truly stupid reasons. This is one of them. (And the abortion thing and the Haitian immgirants thing and the litterboxes and oh God, so many more.)
Tell them their reasons are stupid reasons.
How loving and diplomatic you decide to be about it, that’s up to your own best judgment.
The former president’s debunked comments that Haitian immigrants are eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio, is just the latest in a long history of smears against them, experts say.
Originally published by The 19th
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Call it a mother’s intuition. After former President Donald Trump repeated a vicious smear about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, during his September 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, many parents in that community instinctively kept their children home from school. They were right to be concerned. In the days following Trump remarking on national television that these immigrants are eating household pets — a debunked rumor that first spread on social media — the threats rolled in.
The bomb and mass shooting threats that started shortly after the debate and continued through the weekend forced evacuations and closures of government buildings, hospitals, a university and schools in Springfield. Although Trump’s words have imperiled Haitian immigrants, he has not withdrawn his claim; he has doubled down on it. On Thursday, while campaigning, he suggested Haitians had ruined “beautiful Springfield” and were not in the city legally, although Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said they are living and working there lawfully. Trump also insinuated the immigrants are involved in sexual violence against “young American girls,” continuing his pattern of linking immigration to the predation of White women and girls.
The targeting of Haitians in the smalltown Midwest has led to an outcry of support from the public, policymakers and immigration advocates. The National Parents Union, a woman-led organization made up of parent advocacy groups fighting for equity in education, criticized “the reckless and irresponsible comments” from Republican leaders and announced that it “stand[s] with the families of Springfield” in a statement on Friday.
But no one empathizes with Springfield’s Haitian community like Haitian Americans themselves, they say. The 19th spoke with scholars and immigrant advocates, mostly women of Haitian heritage, about the repercussions of Trump’s words. They contend that his claim — and the hate before and after it — are nothing new: Due to the unique ways race, religion and resistance have intersected in Haiti’s history, immigrants from the Caribbean nation have experienced a specific brand of xenophobia in the United States, even as Black immigrants in this country lack visibility.
“This kind of narrative has been going on since at least the middle of the 19th century,” said Danielle N. Boaz, professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “We can connect all of this back to the thing that Haitians did that was unforgivable to people of European heritage, which is they had this . . . rebellion that started in the 1790s and culminated in what historians have sometimes called the only successful slave rebellion in history, where they were able to defeat not only the French but other foreign powers.”
The 1804 creation of Saint-Domingue, later Haiti, left slaveholding societies terrified that the human beings they held in bondage would also rebel. For securing their freedom, Haitians were demonized, with the Vodou religion often used to make wild claims against them, Boaz said.
“So, over the years, the narrative just kind of increases about how Haiti is this barbaric place,” she said. “It’s run only by Black people.”
Trump reinforced the barbarism messaging by implying Thursday that Haitians are “savage criminal aliens.”
Despite Springfield Police denying any “credible reports or specific claims” of Haitians abusing animals or committing other crimes, Trump’s allegations have reverberated nationally. Christopher Rufo, who has led the national push against critical race theory in schools and is a trustee for the New College of Florida, where hundreds of books on gender and diversity were discarded last month, offered a $5,000 “bounty” to anyone with evidence of Haitian immigrants in Springfield eating cats. In Florida and New York — the states with the largest Haitian-American communities — Haitian-American leaders condemned Trump’s remarks and similar statements by his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
The bomb and shooting threats targeting Haitians disproportionately place pressure on mothers, said Taisha Saintil, senior policy analyst for the UndocuBlack Network, which advocates for Black immigrants. Often children’s primary caregivers, women rearrange work schedules, stay home or make childcare plans when schools close, losing household income in the process.
“Women are often the ones managing the day-to-day fears, picking up and dropping off children, and trying to shield them from the psychological trauma of these threats,” Saintil said. “This gender dynamic adds another layer to the stress, as women feel pressure to keep things normal for their families while silently shouldering the weight of their own fear and frustration.”
Having immigrated to Florida from Haiti in 2006 at age 9, Saintil said that she feels for Springfield’s Haitian community. Before moving to diverse Fort Lauderdale, Florida, she briefly lived in a White community where she said her classmates taunted, spat on her and called her a cat-eater.
“I remember . . . the fear, waking up every single day knowing that I’m going to get bullied, nobody wanting to talk to me, sitting at the lunch table by myself,” Saintil said. “When I compare it to what is happening now to the newly arrived kids, I think about just how . . . the bullying will mark them for the rest of their lives.”
Lured by manufacturing jobs, an estimated 15,000 Haitian immigrants have settled in Springfield — a mostly White town of just under 60,000 people — starting in about 2017. Before then, Springfield experienced an economic downturn caused, in part, by population decline. Then, the immigrants arrived, giving the city an economic boost.
Valerie Lacarte, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, said that immigrants typically settle in areas because they know they can find reliable employment or their ethnic community already lives there. Springfield wasn’t previously home to a Haitian community, but state officials reportedly advertised the city’s livability and jobs, news that attracted migrants.
“You have employers who are hiring these people, so from the job market perspective, that’s a good thing. You have a match,” Lacarte said.
But this mutually beneficial development did not prevent tensions, which, last year, worsened after a Haitian immigrant crashed into a school bus, killing one child, Aiden Clark, and hurting nearly 30 others. Still, Nathan Clark, Aiden’s father, spoke out at a city commission meeting last week to denounce immigration foes for exploiting his son’s death. Anti-immigrant residents, meanwhile, have complained that Springfield lacks the infrastructure for population growth.
“It’s tempting to think the growth of immigrants, that’s what’s causing the problems,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, coauthor of “Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy” and a University of California, Berkeley, researcher. “It’s the politicization of immigrants, and especially in places that have significant Republican voting populations, the scapegoating of immigrants tends to be higher. This is an issue we’ve seen time and again in the American heartland, places that are depopulating, places that are short of workers, that actually benefit from immigrant workers, but you have people . . . tapping into these national dynamics, when it comes to race and xenophobia, to win elected office.”
Officials must “be intentional about social cohesion” to avoid conflict between the longtime residents and the Haitian transplants, said Lacarte, the daughter of Haitian immigrants. It’s important to make sure that both the U.S.-born and foreign-born community members get the attention and resources needed to grow together as a diverse community.
Longtime residents may misunderstand why people who look and sound different from them are moving in, Lacarte said. They witness the demographic shift, but they don’t realize these changes can be helpful. Then, bad actors deepen anxieties by spreading disinformation about immigrants.
“Immigrants have been not only filling these jobs and helping grow the economy. They have their own demand for goods and services,” Lacarte said. “They send their kids to school. They even, in some cases, create businesses . . . and that grows the economy.”
During the presidential debate, Trump did not portray foreign-born workers as a positive but as a threat to Americans, accusing immigrants of taking jobs from Black workers. This framing overlooks that immigrants fill jobs the native-born population doesn’t pursue, Lacarte said, and that more workers are needed as birth rates decline and the White population ages. It also belies the fact that Black immigrants exist.
About one in five Black people are immigrants or the children of Black immigrants, the Pew Research Center reported in 2022. Africans have driven Black immigrant growth; their population increased by 246 percent between 2000 and 2019. In 2005, The New York Times reported that more Africans were entering the United States than since the slave trade. Today, Africans make up 42 percent of the Black foreign-born population, while Caribbean immigrants make up 46 percent. Of the latter, most come from two countries: Jamaica and Haiti.
After footage of Border Patrol agents on horseback confronting Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas, went viral in 2021, Saintil said she received multiple messages disclosing, “I did not know there were Black immigrants. Where did they come from?” She assumed, due to her profession, that people knew the United States had Black immigrants.
“Most of my work now has been to raise visibility of Haitian and Black immigrants,” Saintil said. “We’re the most detained, the most placed in solitary confinement. Our bail bonds are higher. So, the same things that are happening to African Americans in the criminal justice system are happening to Black immigrants in the detention center. Our asylum claims are the most denied because immigration judges don’t trust our pain.”
Long before the debate, Trump disparaged Black immigrants. In 2017, he reportedly said that Nigerians lived in “huts” and Haitians “all have AIDS.” The following year, he labeled Haiti, African nations and El Salvador “shithole countries.” In Springfield, local Republicans have echoed Trump’s remarks. In addition to the pet-eating allegations, they’ve accused immigrants of being in gangs, spreading disease and practicing “voodoo” rituals, claims police have denied.
As Haiti became the yardstick for measuring whether Black people could participate in society equally, attacks on its character escalated. By the 1880s, stories spread about Haitians engaging in cannibalism and human sacrifice, especially of White children, Boaz said. Told repeatedly, these stories inform the rumors about Haitians in Springfield today, and they may jeopardize women.
“Historically, women in marginalized communities, whether immigrants, ethnic minorities, or refugees, have been specifically targeted for intimidation,” Saintil said. “This may be because some view them as ‘easier’ to attack or harass than men. . . . In this context, when Haitian women are being targeted for threats, harassment or even racial slurs in public spaces, the consequences are far-reaching. This not only creates an atmosphere of terror for women but can also ripple through the entire family.”
Haitian-American anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse, a professor of humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that she’s tired of defending her personhood and identity. Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Ulysse wrote a book called “Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle” because she found the dehumanizing remarks about Haitians then disturbing.
“We’re always having to refute as opposed to having an identity that is an affirmed one,” Ulysse said. “There is a profound disappointment that in 2024 that I am listening to someone who is running to be the president of the highest nation in the land say something this surreal, this absurd. But I’m also someone as a Black woman, as a social scientist, as someone who understands race and racial construction, what that is meant to do, and that is to paint Haitians as the ultimate ‘others,’ cannibalists and otherwise, so that it can keep fueling this narrative that’s necessary to strip people of their humanity.”
Ulysse said that the broader immigrant community faces xenophobia, too. One study concluded that the level of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the Republican Party today rivals anti-Chinese sentiment during the late 1800s, a period that restricted Chinese immigration. Chinese immigrants have also been accused of consuming dogs and cats, insults revived during the onset of COVID-19, which Trump called the “China virus.”
“He’s gone from talking about Mexican immigrants as predominantly being criminals and rapists to then talking about immigrants as vectors of disease and and now using similar kinds of dehumanizing language to talk about . . . not just what they eat, but the kind of the social threat they supposedly pose to American society,” Ramakrishnan said. “I think the kinds of emotions it’s supposed to evoke are emotions of disgust, of othering and reduced empathy, and also support for drastic measures like rounding up and deporting people who are not deemed to be American.”
If Harris becomes president, she would not only be the first woman in the Oval Office but also the first person of South Asian and Caribbean heritage. Might that change perceptions and policies related to Caribbean immigrants?
“No matter how well meaning one person may be, they’re part of a social structure and a system that makes decisions,” Ulysse said. “She’s not going to make decisions by herself, so what difference does it make that she’s from the Caribbean? She’s got advisors. She’s got to think about Congress. She’s got to think about the Senate. She’s got to think about geopolitics and history.”
When Trump took aim at Haitian immigrants during the debate, Harris laughed in apparent disbelief but did not rebuke him. Ulysse finds it disturbing that many people laughed at Trump’s claims because, as absurd as they are, they’re endangering Haitians.
On Friday, President Joe Biden called the attacks on Haitians “simply wrong,” noting that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is “a proud Haitian American.”
Along with being terrified and traumatized, Saintil said the Haitian children and parents impacted by the threats and smears likely feel betrayed.
“You’re getting it from a country that you thought you could be safe in,” she said. “You’re getting it in a country that you’ve been hoping to be in because you thought your life would be better, but now you’re being treated worse than dirt. You’re being called a savage . . . How do you go on from there?”
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