Heather Cox Richardson’s history Substack is just a treasure of information and connections between history and current times. Here’s a copy today, because there are fine talking points in favor of the Dem candidate for US President.
Vice President Kamala Harris continues her momentum toward the 2024 presidential election since President Joe Biden’s surprise announcement on Sunday that he would not accept the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.
Today more than 350 national security leaders endorsed Harris for president, noting that if elected president, “she would enter that office with more significant national security experience than the four Presidents prior to President Biden.” As vice president, she “has met with more than 150 world leaders and traveled to 21 countries,” the authors wrote, and they called out her work across the globe from her work strengthening partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region to her historic trip to Africa and her efforts to expand U.S. relationships with nations in the Caribbean and North Central America. In contrast to Harris, the letter said, “Trump is a threat to America’s national security.”
Those signing the letter included former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, national security advisors Susan Rice and Thomas Donilon, former secretaries of defense Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, and former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.
In a New York Times op-ed today, former secretary of state Clinton praised Biden for his “decision to end his campaign,” which she called “as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime.” She went on to say that Vice President Harris “represents a fresh start for American politics,” offering a vision of an America with its best days ahead of it and, rather than “old grievances,” “new solutions.”
Clinton noted that her own political campaigns had seen her burned in effigy, but said, “It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible” and that Americans cannot overcome sexism and racism. After all, she pointed out, voters elected Black American Barack Obama in 2008, and she herself won the popular vote in 2016. “[A]bortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanizing women voters like never before,” Clinton wrote, and “[w]ith Ms. Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave.”
Today, Harris held her first campaign rally, speaking to supporters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Republicans held their national convention just last week. The energy from the 3000 people packed into the gym where she walked out to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” was palpable.
She began by thanking Biden and touting his record, then turned to noting that in her past as a prosecutor, California attorney general, U.S. senator from California, and vice president, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So,” she said, “hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” She went on to remind the audience that Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students, was found liable for committing sexual abuse, and “was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts.”
While Trump is relying on “billionaires and big corporations,” she said, “we are running a people-powered campaign” and “will be a people-first presidency.” The Democrats, she said, “believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead; a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every worker has the freedom to join a union; where every person has affordable health care, affordable childcare, and paid family leave. We believe in a future where every senior can retire with dignity.”
“[A]ll of this is to say,” she continued, “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. Because…when our middle class is strong, America is strong.”
In contrast, she said, Trump wants to take the country backward. She warned that he and his Project 2025 will “weaken the middle class,” cutting Social Security and Medicare and giving “tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations,” while “working families foot the bill.” “They intend to end the Affordable Care Act,” she said, “and take us back…to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions…. Remember what that was like? Children with asthma, women who survived breast cancer, grandparents with diabetes. America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back. We’re not going back.”
“[O]urs is a fight for the future,” she said “And it is a fight for freedom…. Generations of Americans before us led the fight for freedom. And now…the baton is in our hands.”
Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans are still scrambling for a plan of attack against Harris. One of their first angles has been the sexism and racism Clinton predicted, calling her “a DEI hire.” House Republican leaders have told fellow lawmakers to dial back the sexist and racist attacks.
MAGA Republican representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) has taken a different angle: he introduced an impeachment resolution against Harris, while others are demanding that the House should investigate Harris and demand the Cabinet remove President Biden under the 25th Amendment. The Republican National Committee has decided to make fun of Harris’s laugh.
But concern in the Trump camp showed today when Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio shared with reporters a “confidential memorandum” trying to get ahead of polls he says will show Harris leading Trump. He said he expects to see a “Harris Honeymoon” that will end quickly.
Trump has continued to post angrily on his social media feed but is otherwise sticking close to home. His lack of visibility highlights that the Republicans are now on the receiving end of the same age and coherence concerns they had used against Biden, and there might be more attention paid to Trump’s lapses now that Biden has stepped aside. CNN’s Kate Sullivan noted today, for example, that “Trump said he’d consider Jamie Dimon for Treasury secretary, but now says he doesn’t know who said that.”
As Tim Alberta noted Sunday in The Atlantic, the Trump campaign tapped J.D. Vance in an attempt to harden the Republican base, only to find now that he cannot bring to the ticket any of the new supporters they suddenly need.
According to Harry Enten of CNN, Vance is the first vice presidential pick since 1980 who has entered the race with a negative favorability rating: in his case, –6 points. Since 2000, the usual average is +19 points. Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 by +6 points in an election Republican governor Mike DeWine won by +25 points. Vance “was the worst performing Republican candidate in 2022 up and down the ballot in the state of Ohio,” Enten said. “The J.D. Vance pick makes no sense from a statistical polling perspective.”
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who specializes in focus groups, noted that swing voters groups “simply do not like” Vance. “Both his flip flopping on Trump and his extreme abortion position are what breaks through,” she wrote.
The 2024 election is not consuming all of the political oxygen, even in this astonishing week. Today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that eight large companies must turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices.
“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices,” FTC chair Lina M. Khan said. “Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”
The eight companies are: Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey & Co.
In the House, Republicans have been unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the 2025 U.S. budget, laced as they are with culture-wars poison pills the extremists demand. Today House members debated the appropriations bill for the Interior Department and the Environment which, among other things, bans the use of funds “to promote or advance critical race theory” or to require Covid-19 masks or vaccine mandates.
According to the European climate service Copernicus, last Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history. The MAGA Republicans’ appropriations bill for Interior and the Environment calls for more oil drilling, fewer regulations on pollutants, no new regulations on vehicles, rejecting Biden’s climate change executive orders, and reducing the funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 20%.
I did not post the full X / tweets about Kamal nor about Pete because they are exceedingly racist, bigoted and crude, a typical maga response to anything not straight cis white. I am sick of these people that tRump enabled and the sooner we beat tRump soundly and put his people back under their rocks they crawled out from for good the better for the US. But seriously if this racist bigotry is the best they can do, we already won. Hugs. Scottie
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For a lot of conservatives, all they can say about Kamala Harris are gross, sexist comments.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with D.L. Hughley highlighting how the Biden-Harris Administration has taken historic steps to advance economic opportunity by improving access to housing, creating jobs and investing in small businesses as part of her nationwide Economic Opportunity Tour on Thursday May 16, 2024 at Discovery World in Milwaukee, Wis.Photo: Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK / USA TODAY NETWORK via IMAGN
Republican Missouri secretary of state candidate Valentina Gomez just went on an unhinged rant attacking Vice President Kamala Harris on X, where she called her a “little wh*re,” as conservatives posted misogynist memes and jokes about Harris.
“Kamala Harris slept her way to the top, and Tulsi Gabbard already destroyed and exposed her in 2020. Kamala is just another DEI hire, and President Trump is going to eat her alive,” she said in a video.
She could become president. Here’s a closer look at her history on LGBTQ+ stances.
“Kamala Haris is a little wh*re,” Gomez wrote when posting her video. [Update: The X post was put on “limited” visibility by X on July 22, 2024, hours after this article was published.]
The comment regarding Harris allegedly having sex to advance her career, alongside the “little wh*re” comment, reflects recent bouts of misogyny against the vice president in an attempt to discredit her. Harris is the first woman to ever be vice president of the United States and could be the first woman president of the country.
The claim has also notably been spread by far-right figurehead Matt Walsh, who said on X, “Kamala Harris got her start in politics by sleeping with Willie Brown. She became Vice President because Biden needed a non-white female on the ticket… She’s made a career out of begging for hand outs from powerful men. A thoroughly unimpressive human being.”
These claims refer to a short relationship Harris had with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown 30 years ago, before he became mayor. There is no evidence that she only had a relationship with him to bolster her career. In a Reuters fact check, both Harris and Brown disputed that this relationship led anywhere and instead regarded it as largely irrelevant.
Other users attacked her as a “side chick” of Brown, referring to the fact that Brown was technically married during his time dating Harris. However, Brown was separated from his wife, making this claim misleading at best.
Other conservatives, though, just posted gross memes about Harris that sexualized her, showing both sexism and misogynoir, or the combination of sexism and racism directed at Black women.
This is seen with one post comparing Harris to the “Hawk Tuah” girl, someone known in a viral meme about engaging in fellatio.
One X user continued these claims, referring to her as “arm candy” for reality TV show host Montel Williams. The two briefly dated in 2001, however Williams has said since that he has “great respect for Sen. Harris.”
Right-wing commentator Konstantin Kisin referred to her as a “vagina of colour,” and another user referred to her and out Transportation Secretary – and possible running mate – Pete Buttigieg as the “blowjob ticket,” reflecting both misogyny and homophobia.
One political cartoonist made a comic of Harris giving fellatio to the Washington Monument, while another user made a post suggesting Harris wants to perform sexual acts on enough voters to get elected.
Another user documented multiple accounts making memes of Harris engaging in sexual acts to various different presidential logos.
Once prominent and now largely forgotten alt-right icon and “ex-gay troll” Milo Yiannopoulos made a post encouraging people to rely on him for objectification of Harris.
The attacks against Harris have been reflected in merchandise made about her. One shirt being sold says “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Goe,” a slogan that’s parroted in other right-wing merchandise that, while not officially endorsed by the GOP, has nevertheless been prominent among the Republican voter base
Gomez’s claim about former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (I-HI) attacking Harris is rooted in an old political debate where Gabbard criticized Harris’s history as California’s attorney general, pointing out her thousands of convictions of people who used cannabis. Additionally, Gabbard criticized Harris’s handling of people on death row, alleging that Harris could have done much more to protect innocent individuals.
This claim reflects the widespread public concern about Harris’s history as a prosecutor with many likening the candidate to a corrupt police officer. This is further reflected in criticism about her denying a trans woman gender-affirming care while in prison. She has since walked back on this decision.
Nevertheless, the misogyny reflected among right-wing criticisms largely ignores any critiques of her policy positions and instead aims to reflect on her sexual and romantic history. This neglects her substance as a person and a candidate and swipes aside any debates about her merit as a candidate. Notably, these types of posts are rarely directed at male candidates.
Humanitarian groups are considering a mass vaccination campaign for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip after traces of variant poliovirus type 2 were found in water sources in the war-torn territory. The disease was detected in six locations in Gaza, the World Health Organization said.
Geneva-based WHO said it was working with partners – including UNICEF and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) – to conduct a risk assessment. Polio vaccination rates in Gaza before the war were “optimal,” according to the organization.
Israel on Sunday confirmed the resurgence of the virus, which can be spread by contaminated water and direct person-to-person contact, and said it would offer booster shots to its soldiers operating in and around the Gaza Strip.
Poliovirus has been detected in samples of sewage water in Gaza, placing “thousands” of Palestinians at risk of contracting the highly infectious disease that can cause paralysis https://t.co/foPyQihGcPpic.twitter.com/oWv6n9GPqc
This is what terrifies the fundamentalist and republicans. That is why the attacks on LGBTQ+ kids in schools, it is an attempt to stop this acceptance of people different, of people not straight or cis. This is what it is about. They are terrified their outdated unreasonable hates and moral superiority of straight people is going away. So like the people who hated equality for black people, they created Jim Crow laws for gay or trans people. Hopefully we can beat back this attack on liberty and rights. Hugs. Scottie
Madeline Monroe/iStock
Story at a glance
Roughly 1.6 percent of American adults are now transgender or nonbinary, according to a 2022 survey.
That number is higher still among young adults, with 5 percent of people under 30 now identifying their gender as different from the one assigned them at birth.
The growing visibility of transgender and nonbinary people comes amid rising societal acceptance and new efforts to count the populations.
One young adult in 20 is now nonbinary or transgender, communities that society barely recognized and seldom counted until a few years ago.
Those populations are not new. Only recently, though, have survey-takers thought to ask people about gender identity, invoking terminology that did not exist for prior generations. The word “nonbinary” did not appear in The New York Times until 2014.
The rising visibility of nonbinary and transgender people reflects the nation’s growing acceptance of gender fluidity, especially among the young. One landmark study found 1.2 million nonbinary people in the 18-60 age group. Of that total, three-quarters were under 30, which suggests Generation Z has explored gender identity to an extent that older Americans have not.
“We have a world in which we are finally counting these groups,” said Kay Simon, 28, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who studies the experiences of queer youth and their families. “You can’t identify as something if you don’t know what the word is.”
Simon grew up in Florida and Texas. “From a very young age, I kind of realized I was gay,” they said. “At the time, I probably could have told you that I felt different about my gender, but I didn’t have a word for it.”
The word was nonbinary, denoting a person who identifies with neither the male nor female gender.
Simon remembers when the academic community introduced he-she-they pronouns on faculty pages and email salutations, during their grad-school years. Even now, teaching about sexuality and gender identity in the presumptively safe space of a college campus, Simon must decide “kind of regularly” whether to correct someone who refers to them with the wrong pronoun.
“I’ve had students misgender me,” they said. “And it becomes this joke of, A, you’re referring to your professor wrong, and, B, you didn’t read the syllabus. So, we have two problems.”
The population of young nonbinary and transgender people is clearly large and probably growing.
A 2022 report from the Williams Institute, a research center at the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that 1.3 percent of adults ages 18-24 and 1.4 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds are transgender, with a gender identity different than the one assigned at birth. Teens and young adults are much more likely to be transgender than older adults.
Five years earlier, in a 2017 report, the Williams Institute had found roughly half as many young transgender people. But the earlier analysis used different methods and drew on comparatively sparse data, so it’s hard to know how much of the increase is real.
Is the transgender population exploding, or are researchers simply counting better? That is a common quandary, researchers say, in studies of the nonbinary and transgender communities.
“I would argue, actually, it is not an increase,” said Russ Toomey, a professor of family studies and human development at the University of Arizona. “We are seeing the numbers of people disclosing nonbinary and trans identity on a survey because we are asking people in more inclusive ways about their gender.”
Perhaps the most expansive tally to date of transgender and nonbinary people comes from the Pew Research Center. In a 2022 survey, Pew found that 1.6 percent of U.S. adults reported a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth.
Pew, too, found that the nonbinary and transgender populations skewed young. Three percent of adults ages 18-29 said they were nonbinary and 2 percent said they were transgender. In the 50-plus population, by contrast, only 0.3 percent of respondents identified themselves as transgender or nonbinary.
“I think that Gen-Z individuals are not alone in this, but they are kind of leading the charge,” said Rachel Farr, an associate professor of developmental psychology at the University of Kentucky.
Today’s young adults have grown up in a society that is gradually recognizing the rights of the LGBTQ community. In 2010, the Senate voted to repeal the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, allowing LGBTQ people to serve openly in the military. In 2015, the Supreme Court recognized a legal right for same-sex couples to marry.
“It’s not that there are more people. It’s that there are more people who are open and who are out,” said Shoshana Goldberg, director of public education and research at Human Rights Campaign, the LGBTQ rights group. “The reality is that when you talk to the average person on the street, they’re going to be more accepting and more affirming than they’ve ever been.”
Within Generation Z, polling suggests the LGBTQ population doubled in just four years, from 10.5 percent in 2017 to 20.8 percent in 2021.
Bisexuals, and especially bisexual women, populate the majority of the Gen-Z queer community, according to research from Gallup and others. Transgender and nonbinary people constitute a smaller but significant share.
Researchers say social media played a defining role in helping transgender and nonbinary young people define themselves.
Landon Richie, 20, grew up in Texas and came out as transgender at 11. “But since I was two,” he said, “really as early as I could think and express myself with some sort of agency, I understood that I did not fit into the role that I was assigned as a girl.”
Richie couldn’t fully process his identity until around age 10, when he “gained larger access to the internet and saw people who were transgender and who talked about their experiences,” he said. “And I was able to see myself reflected in their stories and their experiences.”
Now that the transgender and nonbinary communities have been identified and counted, researchers say, they need society’s support.
Both groups face a heightened risk of physical, emotional and sexual abuse in both childhood and adulthood, the UCLA study found. Depression and suicidal ideation are alarmingly common.
Transgender and nonbinary people often feel under attack, and with good reason. Research shows queer people face a heightened risk of being victims of violent crime. Transgender and nonbinary individuals also face higher rates of workplace harassment and discrimination.
The communities also face legislative attack. GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy group, tracked more than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills across the nation in 2022, many of them targeting transgender persons by seeking to bar them from equal access to sports, restrooms or health care.
“Almost for as long as I’ve been out, there’s been a target placed by the Texas legislature on my back,” said Richie, who has been politically active in his state for several years.
Some faith-based and socially conservative groups have argued that influential Instagram posters and overzealous educators seed gender confusion in young people.
Advocates for the queer community counter that social media and progressive curricula help transgender and nonbinary people discover their identities, rather than create them.
Friends and loved ones can play a crucial role, researchers say, simply by honoring the name and pronoun requested by a transgender or nonbinary person.
“I think the first thing is just to accept them and listen to them,” said Allison Eliscu, M.D., medical director of the adolescent LGBTQ* Care Program at Stony Brook Medicine in Stony Brook, N.Y.
“If you make a mistake, because we all do, apologize, say it correctly and then try to do better.”
When I first posted this it was from my phone in bed. I am sorry I did not check but no link or story posted. Thankfully wonderful Ali jumped to the rescue and added the link. Thank you Ali. Hugs. Scottie
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with D.L. Hughley highlighting how the Biden-Harris Administration has taken historic steps to advance economic opportunity by improving access to housing, creating jobs and investing in small businesses as part of her nationwide Economic Opportunity Tour on Thursday May 16, 2024 at Discovery World in Milwaukee, Wis.Photo: Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK / USA TODAY NETWORK via IMAGN
Scottie's Playtime 