I am so tired of a small group of Christian nationalists who demand the right to force their religious views and church doctrines on the rest of the country. They want and are working for a Christian theocracy in the US. I just posted about how Kanas pushed a law over the veto of the governor that bans trans markers on drivers licenses and makes all trans drivers licenses that don’t match birth sex of the person immediately void and illegal. All because of refusing to accept the facts and medical science. These attacks on drag are just a way to get at trans people. Drag has a long history in vaudeville, on TV from the beginning of comedy, anyone remembeer flip Wilson who was hallirise as a woman. Hugs.
And while the law doesn’t have language explicitly referencing drag performances, SB 12’s original version specifically included them. Republican leaders have also made it clear that drag shows are the target.
“Texas Governor Signs Law Banning Drag Performances in Public. That’s right,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a post on X in June 2023.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday reaffirmed a November ruling removing a block on Senate Bill 12 and denied a request by plaintiffs for a rehearing.
Drag Queen Brigitte Bandit performs during a Fight The Trump Takeover Rally at the south side steps of the Capitol on Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025. Ronaldo Bolaños for The Texas T
Texas can enforce a 2023 law that restricts some public drag shows, a federal appeals court reaffirmed in a new ruling on Wednesday.
Senate Bill 12 prohibits drag performers from dancing suggestively or wearing certain prosthetics on public property or in front of children. The law would fine business owners $10,000 for hosting such performances, while those who violate the law could be hit with a Class A misdemeanor.
In September 2023, U.S. District Judge David Hittner declared the law unconstitutional, saying that it “impermissibly infringes on the First Amendment” and that it is “not unreasonable” to think it could affect activities like live theater or dancing. More than two years later in November, a three-judge panel in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unblocked the law and returned the case to the district court.
On Wednesday, the appeals court withdrew its November opinion and reissued a largely identical ruling, denying the plaintiff’s request for a rehearing in the process. SB 12 will now take effect on March 18, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, who represented several of the plaintiffs.
As part of the ruling, the panel found that most of the plaintiffs — a drag performer, a drag production company and pride groups — failed to show that they intended to conduct a “sexually oriented performance,” and therefore, could not be harmed by the law. The ruling suggests that the federal judges don’t believe all drag shows are sexually explicit.
Critics of the ban have previously raised concerns that Republican lawmakers were portraying all drag performances as inherently sexual or obscene.
And while the law doesn’t have language explicitly referencing drag performances, SB 12’s original version specifically included them. Republican leaders have also made it clear that drag shows are the target.
“Texas Governor Signs Law Banning Drag Performances in Public. That’s right,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a post on X in June 2023.
SB 12 considers a performance to be sexually oriented if the performer is nude or engages in sexual conduct, which could include “actual contact or simulated contact” between one person and another person’s “buttocks, breast, or any part of the genitals.” It also has to “appeal to the prurient interest in sex” — and most didn’t meet this criteria, according to the appeals court’s ruling.
Transgender Kansans are being informed on the eve of a new state law going into effect that their driver’s licenses will be considered invalid as of Thursday.
“Please note that the Legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials. That means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credentials will be invalid immediately, and you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential,” read letters mailed by the Kansas Department of Revenue’s vehicles division.
“Pursuant to the new law, if the gender/sex indication on the face of your current credential does not match your sex assigned at birth, you are directed to surrender your current credential to the Kansas Division of Vehicles,” reads the letter, which The Star reviewed multiple copies of.
Reddit, Meta, and Google voluntarily “complied with some of the requests” for identifying details of users critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent as part of a recent wave of administrative subpoenas the Department of Homeland Security has been distributing to Big Tech the past few months, according to an anonymously sourced New York Times report.
Those three companies, plus Discord, have received “hundreds” of such requests that have come from DHS recently. Meta, it should be noted, is the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
Administrative subpoenas used for this purpose represent an escalation. This tool, which comes not from a judge but from DHS itself, was formerly reserved for situations like child abductions, according to the Times.
The users were targeted because their posts “criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents,” the Times says.
A Google spokesperson replied to the Times with a statement, saying “When we receive a subpoena, our review process is designed to protect user privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” and “We inform users when their accounts have been subpoenaed, unless under legal order not to or in an exceptional circumstance. We review every legal demand and push back against those that are overbroad.”
Gizmodo requested comment from Meta, Discord, and Reddit. We will update if we hear back.
According to the Times, one or multiple of the relevant companies have stated that they notify users of these requests from DHS, and give them a 14-day window to “fight the subpoena in court” before complying.
Amazon has also been accused of at least some degree of participation with ICE’s ongoing mass deportation efforts. In October, Amazon-owned Ring announced a partnership with Flock that would loop the AI-powered network into the content coming from users’ doorbell cameras. According to a 404 Media investigation, that network feeds information to law enforcement agencies at the local and federal levels, allowing for reasonable concern that ICE has access to all that footage.
Protesters have launched an effort called “Resist and Unsubscribe” targeting ten tech companies they perceive as exceptionally supportive of ICE. That list includes Meta, Google, and Amazon, but not Reddit.
Donald Trump’s ICE is doing exactly what he wants. And now they are holding a political prisoner for nearly a year in an ICE detention camp simply because 33-year-old Leqaa Kordia dared to champion views the Trump regime opposes. This should concern all Americans especially given the recent warning from concentration camp expert Andrea Pitzer—who explained on my SiriusXM show that history tells the Trump regime building massive ICE detention camps will ultimately be used to imprison political prisoners.
That should not be a surprise to anyone who follows the history of fascist and other right wing regimes. Trump is following the fascist playbook, complete with his own secret police that has terrorized and even killed Americans who defy him. The most glaring example being the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—who were then smeared by Trump officials as “domestic terrorists.”
Shockingly, we just learned that Trump’s ICE shot and killed another US citizen, 23 year old Ruben Ray Martinez, almost a year ago in March of 2025. However, Trump’s secret police covered up their involvement until recent media reports broke the story open. The details surrounding the murder of Martinez–who worked at Amazon–are simply unbelievable with ICE claiming that for some unknown reason this young man with no criminal record suddenly used his car to attack ICE officers.
Beyond that ICE has terrorized American citizens who dared film them—which they are legally entitled to—assaulted protesters and engaged in conduct consistent with an occupying army, not federal agents.
But it’s not ICE acting as a rogue agency—Trump wants them to do this. Trump—like Putin– wants to silence dissent as we’ve seen with his regime targeting all who oppose him from comedians like Jimmy Kimmel to seeking to criminally charge and imprison six Democratic members of Congress for warning members of the military to not follow illegal orders. A grand jury blocked that–at least for now.
That is why the case Leqaa Kordia demands far more attention given it’s a sneak preview of what we can expect from Trump for not just immigrants–but also U.S. citizens. Leqaa is a 33-year-old Palestinian woman with family in Gaza and the United States. Her mother is a US citizen living in Paterson, New Jersey—which is where Leqaa was staying and working as a waitress until she taken by ICE.
Leqaa Kordia
Kordia—who came to the US in 2016 on a student visa and was in the process of seeking permanent residence status via her mother –has no criminal record. The diminutive woman poses no threat to anyone. But to the Trump regime she is dangerous because she participated in peaceful protests advocating for Palestinian humanity. In the case, of Leqaa this issue is very personal in that she has lost nearly 200 relatives in Gaza.
But Leqaa’s case is not about Palestine—nor it is about Israel. Rather, it’s about freedom of speech—and the Trump’s regime targeting those who dare defy them.
How this case began was that in March of 2025, ICE informed Leqaa they wanted to speak to her. In response, she voluntarily appeared at the ICE office in Newark, New Jersey–where she was quickly arrested, thrown into an unmarked van and sent 1,500 miles away to the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas far from her lawyer and family.
Since then, she has been detained in horrific conditions. As Leqaa detailed in a recent op-ed, the ICE facility she has been held in for nearly a year “is filthy, overcrowded and inhumane.” She slept in a plastic shell “surrounded by cockroaches and only a thin blanket.” And the food quality is so atrocious, it has caused her to vomit resulting in significant weight loss.
Worse, just a few weeks ago she experienced the first seizure of her life, collapsing to the floor. From there, ICE transported her to a hospital where her wrists and legs shackled to her bed for the three days. As she put it, “The entire time I was chained…I felt like an animal.” And simply to be cruel, ICE refused to tell her lawyers or family where she was or her medical condition.
None of this should be happening. As her lawyer Amal Thabateh explained to me, two different immigration judges ruled that Leqaa should be released on bond. But the Trump regime instead invoked a little used procedure to keep her in detention open ended.
To do that, serial liar DHS Secretary Kristi Noem smeared Leqaa as being a “terrorist” sympathizer for expressing concern for Palestinians in Gaza. They even claimed that releasing Leqaa—who again has no criminal record and was living with her US citizen mother in New Jersey–was somehow a threat to our nation. Of course, this is the same Noem who smeared with lies Renee Good and Alex Pretti as “terrorists” to justify their murders so we know she will say anything to defend the Trump regime’s crimes against humanity.
The idea Leqaa is a political prisoner is not just my view. Amnesty International lists her on their website demanding that the US government “release detained protester.” Her case is in the same section on the Amnesty website where they are calling for the release of dissidents in Russia, Belarus and other authoritarian regimes. This is where our nation is now viewed by human rights organizations.
Deeply alarming is that these ICE dentition centers are increasingly become death camps. At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025—the highest number in two decades. And in the past six weeks, six people have died in ICE custody including one man killed by ICE agents as they were restraining him. Will anyone be held accountable for this man’s death? That is like asking will anyone be held accountable for the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny killed in a Russian prison two years ago. We know that no one will be prosecuted because Russia is an authoritarian nation. As disturbing as it sounds, so is the United States under Trump.
But for those who refuse to submit to Trump and want to stand up for freedom of speech, I hope you will sign the Amnesty International petition calling for the US government to release Leqaa. Other ways to help this young woman include calling on your members of Congress to demand her release. You can also consider making a donation to her online fundraising page to help her and her family. Finally, you can follow Leqaa’s campaign for freedom on Instagram and amplify the updates.
As Andrea Pitzer repeatedly warned in our conversation on concentration camps, it does not end with people like Leqaa. It begins with people like Leqaa being held with in a camp for as long as the regime wants to keep her–in horrific conditions–simply because they want to silence her political views. They then continue until they reach people like us. But as the famous poem goes, by then it’s too late because when “they came for me…there was no one left to speak out.”
——
Below is my recent interview about Leqaa’s wrongful detention with her lawyer Amal Thabateh, who is with Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) Project and Laila El-Haddad, an award-winning Palestinian author, social activist, policy analyst and journalist.
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It is always OK to ask to stop. Consent can be withdrawn at any time! You are not a sex toy or sex slave unless that is what turns you on. Even then you have the right to say stop. You are a person. Anyone who doesn’t stop when asked is an abuser that doesn’t deserve you. Hugs
“If you don’t help dig out the car, then I can’t take you to school, and if you don’t go to school I’m going to lose my friggin’ mind. You don’t want Mommy to lose her friggin’ mind, do you?”
“They’re also my staying-indoors-all-winter clothes.”
Hello Everyone. Scottie recently asked me why I’ve not posted in a while. How do I tell this man who has been fighting the good fight for so many years that I’m just so damned tired? I’m so tired of being lied to, of being called names because I don’t believe the lies, of being caught between morality and caring for people caught in the trumpian trap. I’ve written this post over and over, and each time it seems so damned obvious that I run into the exhausted question of “what’s the damned point”? How can people be so blind, so hateful, so abusive and willing to be robbed by this unrepentent conman thief, this criminal in cheap suit, this shit-stain on the satin sheets? I actually looked into asking an AI why politics in the trump era is so damned exhausting. This is what it said:
Politics, particularly in the Trump era, are exhausting due to constant, high-stakes news coverage, extreme polarization, and the erosion of traditional political norms. This creates a 24/7 cycle of outrage, fear-based media consumption, and personal fatigue, with 65% of Americans reporting feeling “worn out” by the political environment. NPR +4
Key reasons for this exhaustion include:
Constant Crisis and High Drama: The political climate is defined by perpetual drama, making it difficult to find calm or “normal” moments, leading to a state of constant, low-level stress.
Breaking Norms: The Trump administration frequently violated long-held political, social, and legal norms, which created a sense of instability and constant, shocking developments.
Extreme Polarization and Tribalism: Politics has become an “us vs. them” mentality, where individuals may view opposing views as existential threats rather than just policy disagreements.
Information Overload: Social media algorithms and a 24-hour news cycle create a constant stream of political content, making it difficult to escape or disengage.
Personalized Politics: Political opinions have become closely linked to personal identity, making political debates feel deeply personal and emotionally charged.
Financial Stress: Economic concerns, such as rising costs for necessities, are often part of the political narrative, adding to the feeling of personal strain. The Conversation +6
I rambled for paragraphs, deleted, rambled for paragraphs again. The simple thing, the direct thing is likely best here. Dammit, I’m tired of just how bad it all is and not having a way to repair it. My only choice is to pull in, withdraw, ignore it all.
Ok, I’ve got chicken frying. Sorry to be such a downer, but I guess I’ve run out of impotent rage. Hugs.
This next cartoon is seriously important. It is how every parent of a gay kid who accepts their child’s sexuality feels. Can you imagine a father who accepts his gay son talking to them about lube? And I don’t even want to discuss the parents who refuse to accept their child’s sexuality and instead try to force them to change. Hugs
NPR +4
The Conversation +6
Scottie's Playtime 